The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff
427 pages
Published 2015
Read from December 11 to December 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Throughout my read of The Witches, I could not extricate my sense of Schiff's exhaustive research and narrative dexterity from an increasingly fixed idea that the story of Salem's witch trials -- as told here with all its murky details of interpersonal discord, a culture of repression and its psychological toll, the politics of multiple nationalities and religions across two continents, and putative sorcery -- could be the basis of an excellent modern fantasy trilogy. No doubt dozens of fantasy novels of varying quality have been foisted upon the world with the 1692 panic as their inspiration, but the mix of politics with the personal in particular lodged itself in my brain as the sort of thing that would do well in a Game of Thrones vein.
This idée fixe interfered with any even-handed assessment of the merits of The Witches as a standalone work of history and scholarship. (Seriously, over the last week or so I've been coming up with any number of potential story kernels, all of them sprouting from the witch-loam of seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay.) Schiff's prose is brisk and dryly humorous, in what seems to be the current pop-history mode, and the multitude of participants (accusers, accused, judges, and assorted commentators) and lack of a thorough primary record (seemingly elided in the post-panic morning-after embarrassment) are to blame for whatever difficulty I had in keeping track of who was whom (or, rather, my year-long case of reduced attention span is to blame, and the foregoing factors merely exacerbated it). I appreciated Schiff's refusal to ascribe the panic to a single "cause" -- pop history, especially, could always stand to feature more ambiguity and complexity -- though her eventual case for adolescent "hysteria" brought on by an oppressive, repressive community and culture, while plausible, feels a bit vague, and certainly not as flashy as, say, others' hypotheses of ergot poisoning. Flash isn't necessarily a positive attribute of scholarship, however, so Schiff's advance of conversion disorder (while excessively Freudian in her description) is perhaps as plausible an explanation for the outbreak as we're ever going to get.
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