The Ideal Starting Point—Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft Review
This is another adaptation of an essay I wrote during my first year of graduate school, this time reviewing what I see as the best modern scholarly starting point for studying the Salem witchcraft crisis. What follows is a fair bit of historiographical analysis, as well as a summary of the arguments put forth by the authors Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum in their 1974 masterpiece, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.
If it’s not obvious, I think this book is truly amazing because it explores the horrors of Salem in 1692 from a social psychological perspective, which helps illuminate the continuity of human nature amid a constantly changing historical setting. It also helped inspire me to begin my research in earnest that Salem represented the beginning of the end of doctrinaire and truly collectivist American Protestantism as we pushed onward into our increasingly atomized self-conception of godliness, which has most recently manifested in what many people simply call “wokeness.”
Please enjoy and let me know if you have any thoughts (or especially recommendations of different books about Salem or the First Great Awakening, since those will be taking up most of my headspace next semester).
“To see such a one gashed and gored, though it were done by some other hand, will affect our hearts, if they be not harder than the stones, and more flinty than the rocks. But much more when our consciences tell us that we, our cruel hands, have made these wounds, and the bloody instruments by which our dearest friend was gored, were of our own forging.”
—Rev. Samuel Parris, Sermon Book, August 6th, 1693
It is difficult to question the notion that the witch trials that occurred in Salem, Massachussets throughout most of the year 1692 serve as an American cultural touchstone. They largely inform the very modern invocation of “witch hunts,” they acted as the setting for one of the most famous plays in the 20th century (that is, Arthur Miller's The Crucible), and they have inspired seemingly countless books exploring the history of the event and the identities of those involved in it, ranging from Salem minister Charles W. Upham's 1867 two-volume work, Salem Witchcraft, to more modern works like Marion L. Starkey's 1949 narrative, The Devil in Massachussets. However, in the early 1970s following the publication of their edited volume on Salem witchcraft, historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum decided that the time had come to try and address the shortcomings of the previously published scholarship; namely, Upham's “incomplete and ultimately unsatisfactory” analysis, and Starkey's “occasional imaginative embellishments” that were more derived from Upham's previous work than from a deep examination of primary sources.1 From this decision came their 1974 monograph, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, which takes a multi-variate approach to explain the witchcraft epidemic of 1692, by exploring the economic, geographic, political, and social contexts that previously helped inform fateful year and were evidenced by the years that followed, tying it all together in a neat social psychological profile. The greatest strength of the monograph is that it attempted to foreground these contexts in such a way that avoids being distracted by the lurid details of the accusations, the trials, and the executions that have dominated so much of the mental real estate most people possess about Salem, thus serving as the best starting point available for Salem witchcraft scholarship.
The approach taken by Boyer and Nissenbaum is indeed less one that is concerned with the in's and out's of the melodrama found in a Puritan courtroom and more about searching for causal links that led to the existence of that drama in the first place. As the authors show, there is plenty of drama to spare to be found within reams of documentation that have been preserved, including village, church, and tax records, as well as court transcripts and copies of various religious sermon books and other accounts. This provides what Boyer and Nissenbaum describe as “something like what [these men] really were” and thus reveals “how profoundly they were shaped by the times in which they lived.”2 The monograph explores what constituted “the times” by focusing on what, at its core, constituted the Salem community during this period of history: human conflict. This is seen through the organization of the chapters, which, following a summary prologue of the trials themselves, traces a path through this conflict by examining it from different, but always relevant angles constructed by the wealth of primary sources available.
Boyer and Nissenbaum first explore the conflict that occurred between Salem Town proper and the growing Salem Village on its outskirts, in which several villagers began to feel as if there was a “fundamental divergence of interest” between the two areas during the 1660s.3 A resolution to this divergence began to take shape in the form of increased ecclesastical representation, which aimed to resolve the problem that the villagers “had no church of their own,” since they were considered a mere “'parish' within the Town of Salem.”4 This led to what would become the next conflict, which, after running three previous ministers out of town, manifested in the factional dispute that formed around the ordination of the infamous Samuel Parris, the minister in charge during the witch trials. The pro-Parris faction felt more at odds with Salem Town and the anti-Parris faction feeling the opposite, thanks largely to the latter families having greater economic advantages thanks to their geographic proximity to the town.5 These ecclesiastical factions, in turn, helped further enflame familial rivalries, which make up the next dimension explored by Boyer and Nissenbaum. Placing two of the most influential and powerful families in Salem Village—the Putnams and the Porters—at the eventual center of this conflict, along with the internal division felt within the Putnam family thanks to an inheritance dispute, the authors give us further context for the witch trials that were to come. The authors demonstrate that the pro-trials Putnams and the anti-trials Porters had their own multi-variate reasons for taking the sides that they ultimately did, including economic isolation, personal affront, and political ambition.6 The arrival of Samuel Parris provided a nice vector for the families' “open rivalry in the period immediately prior to the witchcraft outbreak,”7 and it is with that arrival that the authors turn their analysis to Parris' role.
Though they never use such terminology, Boyer and Nissenbaum frame the arrival and ordination of Samuel Parris as Salem Village's minister as the arrival of an outsider that served as the worst kind of demagogue for a community already defined by human conflict. In working out his own personal demons borne from the failures of his past commercial endeavors, Parris is a figure who essentially gave the residents of Salem Village “permission” to escalate their division along excessively moral and even biblical dimensions. As Boyer and Nissenbaum write, “[The villagers] had thrown themselves into a cause with which no other earthly effort can compare: the creation of a church.”8 The creation of this church, the authors remind us, was the origin of the conflict that animated Salem to begin with. In his naïve belief “that the villagers would let bygones be bygones,” Parris and his increasingly sectarian rhetoric served as the proverbial match meeting the gasoline; as an outsider, he had no frame of reference for what the authors call the “endemic divisions” that had formed in Salem village along “economic, geographic, and social” lines.9 Upon finishing their extensive psychological profile of Samuel Parris, the authors have completed their social psychological profile of Salem itself during its most famous period.
Thanks to the monograph's age and some oversights made by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, the book has faced a number of challenges over the years. As Jane Kamensky writes, “Salem Possessed […] hardly closed the book on Salem,” and suggests that “quite the opposite” occurred, with many “resulting explanations [differing] often on points of emphasis and sometimes on points of fact.”10 Boyer and Nissenbaum attempt to broaden the scale of their economic analysis of the anti-Parris faction's economic position by pointing out that they had “a crucial edge” in accessing “the broader Atlantic market” of the time.11 However, they stop short of expanding the scope any further. Conversely, according to Kamensky, other Salem scholars like John Putman Demos and Carol F. Karlsen “took New England rather than Salem as their unit of study” and “looked across the vast and furious ocean to discern the intellectual inheritance of white New Englanders.”12 This falls in line with the widening of scope called for by Nicholas Canny, when he wrote that “Atlantic history certainly calls for comparitive investigations across colonies and for the study of problems that were common to more than one settlement.”13 However, it is worth noting, as Boyer and Nissenbaum do, that Salem did possess certain unique qualities, even compared to other New England towns, with the dynamics playing out within Salem Village standing out in particular. They point out that while “many communities were undergoing factional struggles in this period,” they also point out that with Salem, there was a “convergence of a specific and unlikely combination of historical circumstances at this particular time and place.”14 This included a uniqueness in Salem's “physical setting,” “lack of autonomy,” the presence of “a taste of independence,” the Village's “lack of power in Town politics,” and a lack of immediate impact in Boston, effectively addressing the criticism of specificity.15
However, there have been other criticisms to consider in the last 50 years of scholarship. Richard Latner provides a critique of Boyer and Nissenbaum's work that manages to complicate the economic picture the two authors presented in their original monograph, writing that “no one has challenged the economic data that Boyer and Nissenbaum supplied to support their claim.”16 In more thoroughly examining the tax records, Latner finds that the families more inclined toward the trials were in a less economically precarious position than Boyer and Nissenbaum seem to suggest. As Latner writes, “their reliance on the anomalous 1695 tax assessment exaggerated the village's class divisions and suggested a broader economic dynamic that is not supported by the evidence.”17 That being said, this seems to miss the forest painted by Boyer and Nissenbaum for the trees being frantically catalogued by Latner; true, a more accurate reading of the economic situation facing the families in question provides a clearer picture, but only in that particular context. As covered previously, the authors' concerns were always broader than simple economic conditions, since hinging their multi-variate thesis on a univariate concern would miss the point.
And indeed, Boyer and Nissenbaum admit their own shortcomings with their scholarship. In their concluding chapter, they note that the lack of reliable post-trial testimony from the accused themselves—thanks both to executions and departures—makes it “all the more difficult to establish a neat correlation between the witchcraft outbreak and the broader pattern of political conflict.”18 Nevertheless, this monograph can and still should be considered the gold standard for which to approach such an infamous colonial American tale. Refinements have been made over the following decades and all of which have welcomed by Boyer and Nissenbaum themselves, who wrote in 2008 that “we recognize it as central to the process of historical inquiry that, at its best, should be a stimulating conversation among mutually respectful participants.”19 This invites further scholarship on the issue, and asks us to try and tackle the questions that remain—Why did the girls act in the way they did? Why did they seem to act in unison? To what extent was their behavior indicative of what Laura Thatcher Ulrich referred to as the “religious role available to New England women” of this time?20 Perhaps these questions will be answered one day, but Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft will always serve as the golden springboard into further academic inquiry.
Bibliography:
Boyer, Paul, and Nissenbaum, Stephen. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Boyer, Paul, and Nissenbaum, Stephen. “'Salem Possessed' in Retrospect.” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no.3 (July 2008): 503-534. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096806.
Canny, Nicholas. “Writing Atlantic History: or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America.” The Journal of American History 86, no.3 (December 1999): 1093-1114. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2568607.
Kamensky, Jane. “Salem Obsessed; Or, 'Plus Ça Change': An Introduction.” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (July 2008): 391-400. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096804.
Latner, Richard. “Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem's Witch Hunters Modernization's Failures?” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no.3 (July 2008): 423-448. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096806.
Thatcher Ulrich, Laura. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
Citations:
1. Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum, preface to Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), x-xi.
2. Boyer & Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 179.
3. Ibid., 40.
4. Ibid., 42-43.
5. Ibid., 93-94.
6. Ibid., 121-129.
7. Ibid., 131.
8. Ibid., 154.
9. Ibid., 161.
10. Jane Kamensky, “Salem Obsessed; Or, 'Plus Ça Change': An Introduction,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (July 2008): 392-393, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096804.
11. Boyer & Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 94.
12. Kamensky, “Salem Obsessed,” 394.
13. Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History: or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” The Journal of American History 86, no.3 (December 1999): 1108, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2568607.
14. Boyer & Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 107.
15. Ibid., 107-108.
16. Richard Latner, “Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem's Witch Hunters Modernization's Failures?” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no.3 (July 2008), 428, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096806.
17. Ibid., 448.
18. Boyer & Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 187.
19. Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum, “'Salem Possessed' in Retrospect,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no.3 (July 2008): 515, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096806.
20. Laura Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 224.