You'd think by now everything worth saying about the Salem witch trials would have been said, but apparently not. No doubt the article was drawn from the author's new book.
I haven't read it yet, though I probably will. But I'm continually baffled by how much U.S. culture's fascination the Salem witch trials so exceeds our interest in the witch persecutions in Europe. Those went on for hundreds of years and involved the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Yet, in this country at least, you hardly ever hear anyone mention them. I'd never heard of them at all until I was an adult!
(EuroBrokies, feel free to chime in here if you have a different perspective!)
Salem's trials were a weird crazy quirk that happened long after the European persecutions had dwindled away. And I suppose part of the mystery there is, what provoked the flash of craziness?
But the European persecutions raise the same question. What provoked them? Most of the victims were women, so clearly there was a misogynistic element. Another part was the Christian church wanting to quash pagan practices. Also perhaps the increasingly professionalized -- and male -- medical industry wanted to get rid of people offering traditional herbal cures. And in part it might just have been a way to seize people's property (a practice that continues here today, when most states allow law enforcement officers to use vague and often trumped-up charges as an excuse to seize cars and other property -- as we learned in the
New Yorker!).
I interviewed Mary Sharratt, an author from Minneapolis, (at first I was remembering her name as Mary Surratt, but of course that's someone completely different
https://www.google.com/search?q=mary+surratt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8). Sharrat lives in England and wrote a novel based on historical records of a woman who was tried and executed as a witch near where she (Mary) lives. The woman didn't have a lot of property to seize -- she was extremely poor; essentially supported herself by begging -- but she was disliked by some powerful people and got blamed for ordinary occurrences (another woman's death by disease, for example). A few friends and family members were thrown into prison with her, and died of either execution or the miserable conditions in the prison.
What I thought was so weird was that the woman herself suspected she might be a witch, that she might have been inadvertently responsible for the death. Huh?? I asked the author why the woman would think that. She explained that of course in a culture where everybody believes in witches, that wouldn't necessarily exclude the "witches" themselves.
Today, of course, few people in industrialized countries "believe" in witches. Yet the standard cultural images of witches that linger -- pointy black hats and black clothes, brooms, warty skin, cauldrons, cats -- those are all based on the accouterments of typical old pagan women of the time. We associate them with "witches" thanks to the anti-witch propaganda issued by the church. (The Disneyized version usually omits the orgies-with-the-devil part.)