Overall, I haven’t really found many books that focus on JUST the Salem witch trials, and this was a great book to start with. This book does a great job at demonstrating how religion can be used to control and shape social hierarchy. It seems like a lot of the book was speculation, but Hill is articulate in what evidence she is using to speculate upon and what that means within the social context of seventeenth century Puritans. She tends to focus on factional conflict between families as an explanation of who were victims and who were accusers. The uncertainty of daily life, health, and safety? The perfect environment for a panic.Īccording to author, Frances Hill the community of Salem and nearby towns was a “characteristically New England Puritan mix of smugness and fear.” Only a small (white, propertied, male) portion of the community having any power. Second of all, I am sure that America of the seventeenth century was pretty frightening – especially with the fire and brimstone taught every Sunday and the hostile native peoples ( can you blame them?). Salem witch trialsįirst of all, I would never have been one of the crazy ones to sail across the Atlantic to settle in America.

I found it well-researched and well-written. It’s just heart-breaking.Īnd absolutely made me excited to learn about our 20th-century ‘witch hunt’ – the McCarthy hearings. Frances Hill is an accomplished journalist and novelist whose previous book on the Salem witch trials, A Delusion of Satan, was called 'carefully researched and compelling' by Karen Armstrong, the author of A History of God. If we accept the idea that no one was REALLY a witch and that the accusers were suffering from some sort of vindictive hysteria or delusion, then a lot of people’s lives were ruined for no reason at all. I didn’t know much about the Salem Witch Trials until I read A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials by Frances Hill. By placing the distant period of the Salem witch trials in the larger context of more contemporary eruptions of mass hysteria and intolerance, the author has created a work as thought-provoking as it is emotionally powerful. I want to visit all of New England, but this small little town with it’s heavily religious – and dark – history seems fascinating to me.

A Delusion of Satan by Frances Hill