Salem witch trials podcast, episode 1: introduction | History Extra
"‘We often look for political significance as well. So we start thinking, Oh, well, this is all about persecution, isn't it? You can fit any model of persecution, any group of persecuted people onto witches and say, Oh, well, you know, persecution is a terrible thing. And of course, it is a terrible thing. But witchcraft is a strange phenomenon in that it doesn't exist in the same way that something like communism, or race or gender does. And those kinds of groups are often the ones that people align with witches.
So you know, in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible he says, all communists are just like witches, aren't they? They're being persecuted in America in the 1950s, I'm going to write a play about the Salem witches to show how the communists are being persecuted. But the analogy doesn't quite work. Because yeah, there really are communists, but as far as we know, there really aren't witches.
So I think thinking about Salem through contemporary preoccupations can be a bit less help than we'd hope really. If you if you look it up in in any public domain website, you'll find a myth about Salem. And I think it's really interesting. It seems like such a well known history, but actually, it's mostly mythic history. Lots of people don't know the truth as far as we know it about the Salem case.’"
Salem witch trials podcast, episode 3: A ‘new Jerusalem’ on the edge of a wilderness | History Extra
"‘They were right to be frightened of the Native Americans, and they transposed some of those fears onto witches.’...
‘We've spoken about how conflict between white settlers and indigenous Americans could spark paranoia, which in turn may have erupted as a fear of witches. But Owen explained that it wasn't just the Europeans that were triggered by this.’
‘There are a series of episodes of quite brutal witch hunts that take place amongst several indigenous American tribes in the early 19th century. And one of the explanations for that is because of the, in a sense breakdown, structural breakdown, tensions that arise through the contact with Europeans. In other words, the destabilizing effect of contact with Europeans in itself could potentially or did potentially spark off witch trials, and witch persecutions. And also you get the rise of in a sense, sort of Christian, Native American prophets as well. Who see the fear of witches in their communities as something which can be in a sense used as a cleansing of their society and groups. It’s really quite complex to unpick. But it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't through those cultural contacts. So it's not just about conflict. It's also about the ways in which the interactions with Europeans alters and changes the ways in which Native Americans look at themselves just as the people that Salem did.’"
Salem witch trials podcast, episode 5: Satanic sabbaths and supernatural sins | History Extra
"‘One of the key aspects to the history of witch hunting in the European world is that it’s most intense at the core of Europe, around Germany and Switzerland. But after it's burned itself out in those areas, and witch hunting has stopped there, because the witch hunts basically don't seem to have worked, haven't produced better climates, healthier children, better luck, it spreads out to the fringes. And so the biggest trials in British America, the American colonies occur in the late 17th century, after witch hunting has died out across most of Europe. But also the biggest trials in Sweden, in Poland, in Hungary, are all in the late 17th, early 18th centuries. So witch hunting flames up at the end, on the extremes, the opposite extremes of the European world. And one of those extremes is Salem.’
‘And Salem was far from the only witchcraft trial in North America. In fact, the Massachusetts legal code put down in 1641, had witchcraft listed as a second crime on its books, echoing the book of Exodus pretty explicitly when it proclaimed, If any man or woman be a witch that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit’...
‘We can actually trace a couple of quite specific supernatural ideas that raise their head in Salem, back to one man in particular, the young Boston minister, Cotton Mather’
‘In terms of the the actual narrative, he lends it its shape, in the sense that there had never before been in New England, had been witchcraft in England since its founding, but there had never been in New England witches who flew. There had never been a satanic Sabbath. And those elements are things that seem to have been imported into New England in the writing of Cotton Mather, because he takes them from a Swedish witchcraft case, which he writes about. So you suddenly have these, these other elements, elements from continental witchcraft, which have landed separately in Massachusetts, and which really contribute very much to this, to this invasion.’
‘And Salem was not Cotton Mather’s first encounter with supernatural afflictions. In 1688, four children of a Boston stonemason, had exhibited remarkably similar unexplainable symptoms to those of Salem's afflicted girls. Mather had visited the household, and in 1689, three years before things began to get strange in Salem, he published an account of the incident called Memorable Providences. It described the stonemasons’ children flying like geese and purring like cats. And it's highly likely that as another member of the Massachusetts ministry, Samuel Parris, Salem's own minister, would have been familiar with the account. And it seems a remarkable coincidence that his household witnessed such a similar outbreak’...
‘These beliefs weren't, quote, crazy, hysterical or irrational. They made total sense within the belief system of the time.’
‘Salem can sometimes be seen as a model of how an irrational set of beliefs leads to something horrific. That is an old sort of 18th, 19th century view of witchcraft and of, of magic and of popular belief. But when you put Salem in the context of the intellectual, social, cultural world, both elite, popular, however you want to put it, of the 17th century, then witchcraft made perfect sense. It was rational, I think this is really, a really important point. And the greatest minds and thinkers of the day believed in witches, and try to understand it scientifically how it happened. So when we look back on it, and the terminology has been problematic, it's a terminology of hysteria and craze, that’s weird. It's not weird at all. If you understand it, it isn't, witchcraft is not weird at all. We shouldn't think that we are more rational than the people in Salem, because we didn't live their lives.’"
Salem witch trials podcast, episode 6: Chaos in the courtroom | History Extra
"‘Just think about the most famous cultural representation of Salem, Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible, which isn't really about witchcraft at all, but a thinly veiled metaphor for attempts to root out communist sympathizers in 50s America. But the runaway legality at play in Salem provided a provocative parable. As Miller himself later put it, quote, the thought that the state had lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. So had the state, or more accurately the Salem justice system really lost its mind by allowing the trials to unfold as they did? Historian of witchcraft, Ronald Hutton drew some interesting comparisons between the Salem case and the ways that witchcraft prosecution played out in Europe.’
‘If you get a big, closely centralized state, like England, France, or the bigger German states or Spain, then their justice is centrally administered often by professional judges. And the processes of interrogation are long and careful usually don't involve torture. And so execution rates are low. In England, for most of the early modern period, we have the assize system, which is still around when I was young, of these county courts with professional crown judges, and juries and panel from across the county. And so the cases are heard carefully by people who don't know the accused, and are instructed by experts. And so in England in the 16th, 17th century, if you're accused of witchcraft, you have a 75 to 80% chance of being found not guilty. The thing about colonial America is it didn't really produce witch hunters. It produces people on the fringe of the European world, who've heard of witches, and have sometimes read of witches, but aren't exactly sure what to do about them. And one of the reasons that Salem is so messy, and so tear jerking is that it's an explosion of fear of witchcraft in a small community, and the people in charge, then try to work out what to do next. They take advice, they read things, and they botch all this stuff together to cop a witch hunt. So the thing about witch hunting America is it's done by amateurs, and people who aren't quite sure what they're doing, and often change their minds about it.’...
‘You can't necessarily defeat the Wabanaki at Casco Bay. But you could try all the witches and put them to death and take care of that problem and reassert a certain amount of authority.’...
‘They introduced this legal innovation, which to us now appears ridiculous and unjust, which is that if people confess, they will be let off. That wouldn’t happen in the English cases that they're used to. If you confess, you're executed. That’s the end of the matter. It maybe doesn't even come to court, you just fess up. And that's the end of them.’
‘This leads us on to one of the most confusing aspects of the Salem case, the high rate of confessions. Why on earth would anyone admit to flying on a pole or attending a satanic baptism? But as Marian suggested, there was a very clear incentive for confessing’
‘I you have a system where if you confess you're let off then yeah, you confess, don't you? So of course, that proves that you were a witch. But also, if there are other people who you've accused in your evidence that tends to prove that they're witches as well, you can absolutely see how this takes off. The usual checks and balances are missing. This is a very small pressurized community administering justice on its own citizens. And of course, it's a mess.’
‘So what was behind this contradictory system, in which if you admitted guilt, you avoided punishment? As Ronald Hutton highlights, in cases like this, confessions were by far the easiest way for Salem justices to pin down prosecutions.’
‘Because it's awfully hard to prove witchcraft, you don't have any physical evidence, you usually don't have any witnesses. So a confession is the optimal thing for accusers to obtain. On the continent very widely, torture was used to obtain a confession. And then of course, if you torture people proficiently, you will get your confession. And that's one of the horrors and problems of many big witch hunts. At Salem, it was most unusual in that if people were able to confess or willing to confess, they were regarded as having to some extent expiated their crime, and the court looked more favorably upon them. Whereas those who held resolutely to a not guilty plea, were much more likely to be hanged when they were found guilty. And that's very, very unusual, and very poignant situation, because it means that the most brave and honorable people are those who die.’"
Sounds like Cancel Culture
Salem witch trials podcast, episode 7: Quarrelsome neighbours & family tensions | History Extra
"‘Most of us have had to deal with a difficult neighbor at some point in our life. But in a town like Salem, where your daily survival was dependent on those you lived with, community tensions could run far deeper than noise complaints or the height of hedges. We spoke in an earlier episode about how Salem felt under threat from the wider world. Terror and paranoia generated by attacks from Native Americans, neighboring French Catholics and an unforgiving environment. But today, we'll be exploring how there were also tensions within Salem was made up of a dense web of social connections, not all of which were harmonious. In fact, it was a community Riven with fault lines that threatened to open up into great chasms of conflict. Could tensions between members of the community help explain who was accused of demonic activity? And by who?’...
'If the community comes down on somebody, it's not so much because they're magical, or because they're charismatic or they're intelligent. It's because they don't fit in. They're the neighbors from hell. They're the people who curse. They're the people who are ill tempered, or the people who seem malevolent. The roots of witch hunting ultimately, is interpersonal antagonism. It’s neighbors falling out with each other. It's people not fitting into communities because they scare the community. And given the fact that humans have real trouble across the world, in dealing with capricious fortune. In other words, very few humans like to believe that anything's just bad luck. There has to be a meaning for it. Blaming a neighbor is one of the standard human tactics for coping... Witch hunting is concentrated in the more small enclosed community, simply because those communities depend upon very intimate face to face relationships. They simply live closer together with fewer people. And they depend on each other. And so there's this kind of circuit system or web of relationships. And wherever they goes, right, the communities work. But when something goes wrong, the entire community is affected. That's why witch hunting, unless it's driven from above, by a ruler is very rare in towns and cities'...
‘In a number of cases, people are being accused because they're known to the community as people who are not living well in puritan terms, there's, there's something wrong in their lives. Maybe they stand out for those reasons. But in other cases, people seem to have been quite mainstream. Rebecca Nurse, for example. You know, she's, she's a church member. She's a godly woman. She's an older woman, she's in her 70s. By the time she's accused of witchcraft, nobody really has a bad word say about Rebecca Nurse. And it's not really clear why she gets accused so I think you have to look at a range of factors in each case’"
Salem witch trials podcast, episode 8: Willful, weak-minded women? | History Extra
"‘Something that we can't get away from when we're looking for explanations for the Salem case is gender. 14 of the 19 people who were hanged for witchcraft in 1692 were women. So could their gender or perhaps their transgression of what was expected from their gender, be part of the reason they were targeted? But as with everything in the Salem case, things are more complicated than they first appear. As I just said, 14 of the 19 people hanged for witchcraft were women. The other five, were men'...
‘According to Professor Ronald Hutton, historians have debated the gendered aspects of witch hunting for decades. And as it turns out, the idea of witch hunting being synonymous with woman hunting doesn't quite add up’
‘In the 1970s and 1980s, the hypothesis was put forward quite plausibly then that this was woman hunting. In other words, it was a mechanism used by a male dominated society to terrify and subdue women, and to take out more independent minded and to men more troubling women. This has bitten the dust in the 90s, in the 2000s, with better research,’
‘And despite what you might assume, if we look at a broader span of witch accusations beyond Salem, women haven't always been viewed as the primary creators of dark magic.’
‘It turns out that across the world, you find societies that fear what Europeans call witchcraft, but the gendering is pretty arbitrary. In some world societies witches are always women, in some they're always men. In some, they're always children, in some they're always elderly. In some, they're always the poor, in some they're always the rich. And in ancient Europe, there was a strong association in most places between women, and magic. In other words, most Europeans from ancient times onwards, have thought of women as the more magical sex, more talented in magic, and more able to deploy it spontaneously. But in bits of Europe that didn't have that belief, traditionally, when the Early Modern witch hunts arrived, the victims are predominantly men. So in Iceland, which has a vicious witch hunt, 93% of the victims are male, because in Iceland, magic was worked with runes, and they were largely the preserve of men. In Finland and the Baltic states, men were initially at least, before authorities from outside took over, the main victims, because those areas had a tradition of shamanism. Of experts who communicated and tranced with spirits to work magic, and they were mostly male. In Normandy, it was shepherds who were persecuted as witches because they were thought of as the magical people. In Austria it was vagrants. And again, they're mostly men. You put that lot together, it's quite a lot of Europe, in which men rather than women are persecuted as witches, but still across most of Europe, it's women. It's really a question of inherited tradition about who's the more magical sex rather than misogynism as such, because societies like Iceland and Finland had just the same kinds of religion, gender relations and political and social structures, as societies in Europe, which hunted women.’...
'Very often, if you look at the accused witch’s family tree, she comes from a family of witches, or accused witches... we do find a number of people among the accused who seemed to be the model of virtuous, older womanhood… if they're older, if they're past childbearing age, then they fit the typical accused, the profile of the accused in New England and that many of the women who are accused witches in New England are grandmothers. And remember, being a grandmother in New England would happen at a somewhat earlier age. But these are women who are no longer looking forward to lives as producers of children, that part of their life has passed'...
‘If you look at the testimony against Bridget Bishop, you notice something rather remarkable, which is that some of the men who will testify against her and one of them in particular says she visited him in his bed at night. And in a very classic way, you know, basically presses the breath out of his very lungs because she's lying on him so heavily. Those men tend to remember very clearly what she was wearing in church for the previous month, they've clearly been looking at Bridget Bishop a lot. And it's very difficult not to get the sense that this is a woman who on some level represents temptation to them, which points up another aspect of who gets accused, which is that it can be, I mean, Bridget Bishop’s case, no one ever comes out and says she was good looking or she was fair faced. There's no allusion to that whatsoever. But she has clearly somehow planted herself in these men's imaginations. And she is typical, or she points to a trend here, which is that if you are a woman who walked around with a book in your pocket, if you are a woman who came in from the rain and somehow didn't look bedraggled and wet, if you are a woman who made exceptionally good cheese, your chances of getting accused were greater. There's almost a bifurcation here where the powerless members of the community, like the first three women named are accused, and the women who are on some level, intelligent are also suspect.’...
‘I saw her in the street and I couldn't stop thinking about her all day. That's because she put a spell on me.’
‘You only need to think about how a beautiful woman might be called bewitching and you can see how ingrained this connection is. The link between witchcraft and women's sexuality is one that goes back a long way. Witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe were rife with sexual imagery, especially the recurring idea of witches copulating with the devil, but what's interesting is that the accusations at Salem don't seem to have been so explicitly sexual in nature.’...
‘You don't get the kind of stories that are told of witches on the European continent about casting an eye on some godly man and forcing him to leave his wife or even, they’re even accused of penis theft in early modern Germany and Austria… It is quite interesting the the parts of witchcraft belief from Europe that travel across the Atlantic and those that don't. And the sexual aspect isn't nearly so important to the Puritans, they seem a lot more buttoned up about sexuality generally.’...
‘Thinking about Salem through the preoccupations that we have now can be quite misleading. So we think about gender a lot in contemporary society’ "
Salem witch trials podcast, episode 9: conclusion | History Extra
"‘Because people have found events that Salem so hard to understand, they've often rooted around for an easy solution, a quick fix explanation for people having fits or experiencing visions. Let me give you an example of one of these quick fix ideas - that the villagers were suffering from ergot poisoning… The historians I spoke to were quick to caution against investing too much in simple solutions like this.’...
‘Problem is that it really can't explain why it takes the forms that it does. You know, why would you accuse people of witchcraft? In that setting? You wouldn't necessarily unless you already had a culture, which expected to find witches, or religious explanations seems a lot more likely there. I don't really believe that ergot poisoning is the source of all of these problems. I think it's more to do with cultural expectations. With people imagining the devil is trying to get into the community rather than hallucinogenic substances.’...
‘I'm very wary of any attempts at retrospective diagnoses. One because it's predicated on the idea that there must be something wrong with those people. Terms like hysteria and crazy, you know, explicitly say, they're mad, almost, you know, to believe in that. And why would, why would they be mad? You know, that's the wrong starting point. They weren't mad at all, everything they talked about made sense to them, and the culture that they lived in. But the idea that you talked about the whole episode, and say, that could only have happened because people had ingested ergot, you know, poisoning or caught lime disease, or whatever. That's to be honest, lacking in understanding of the nature of witchcraft belief.’...
‘As Marion Gibson explained, there's no one size fits all approach to this.’
‘So I think you have to look at a range of factors in each case. There isn't a lovely one size fits all for witches, you know. This person was a witch because they're difficult. Yeah, some of them are. But then on the other hand, this person is a witch because they're lovely? How does that work? And the thing is about these, these witchcraft stories, no one theory ever explains everything. There's always an exception. So yeah, it's about women, but some men were accused. Yes, maybe it's about ergot poisoning. But surely the religious context is important, too. I don't think you can ever have a simple explanation for why people are accused of witchcraft.’…
‘I think that it's very hard for us to figure out who's telling, who's recycling an old grudge. Who's trying to explain why he can't find the kitchen scissors. Who's trying to wreak revenge on his neighbor for a long held, in several cases, generations long controversy. And who actually has just basically been a victim of the power of suggestibility.’...
‘While all of these factors were undoubtedly significant in triggering the trials and helping them to escalate, I don't think that any of them adequately answer one key question. Why a witch trial? Why, rather than just straightforward community infighting, did Salem believe itself to be afflicted by a supernatural evil? If there was one factor that all the experts I spoke to reiterated again and again, it was the strength and power of belief in witchcraft. And I think that's something that really lies at the heart of why the Salem Witch Trials happened. Tied into the Puritan mindset, these beliefs offered an outlet for community pressure, and shaped the nature of accusations. Stories of unspeakable acts, a malign force working to destroy the community from within. And the looming threat of eternal damnation generated a raw fear that fueled the crisis forward. This allows us to see how apparently unexplainable events could make sense.’...
‘Salem can sometimes be seen as a model of how a irrational set of beliefs leads to something horrific. And that is an old sort of 18th, 19th century view of witchcraft… But when you put Salem in the context of the intellectual, social, cultural world, both elite, popular, however you want to put it, of the 17th century, then witchcraft made perfect sense. It was rational, I think this is really a really important point. Although it's, you know, often described as hysteria, very problematic term in its own right. You know, or craze, also problematic, it's not madness. This isn't insanity, at all. It makes absolute cold, clear sense.’...
‘When that many people are executed. And on top of that the amount of bitterness, the nastiness, the anger, the insinuations, the accusations, how does a community recover from that, and I find that in one sense more fascinating than the trial themselves. That's where actually less research gets done in witchcraft studies, and that's not just a matter of Salem, that’s elsewhere.’...
‘Everyone's willing to believe that they have, indeed, condemned innocents, that they have indeed hanged innocents. But no one's willing entirely to let go of the idea of witchcraft for some time still. So the feeling is, there was witchcraft at work, maybe we just overreacted. Maybe we just, you know, hanged the wrong people. But the fundamental belief will endure.’
‘And according to Owen Davies, witchcraft, beliefs didn't disappear in America after Salem, in fact, far from it.’...
‘The floodgates open when you get into the second half of the 19th century in particular. Hundreds of 1000s, millions of people from across Europe from across the globe, all bringing their cultures, their beliefs with them. So in one sense, you actually get a reinvigoration, if anything of witchcraft… multicultural set of beliefs as well, of course, because Native Americans believe in witches as well, and Native Americans have their own purges of suspected witches in their society into the 19th century as well. And then obviously, you have the the African American population as well.’"
