![]() ![]() ![]() Their celebrity (and leisure) did not go unnoticed. The girls were not seen as naughty but enchanted - and thus relieved of their chores. That such behavior might have been rebellion ("Instructed not to fidget, well-mannered, well-behaved Betty and Abigail writhed," Schiff writes) occurred to too few citizens. If dozens of innocents died along the way, well, who was to say they were innocent?īy clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. Men of ambition, notably the minister and pamphleteer Cotton Mather, employed the devil as a convenient tool with which to amass power. Why the girls' elders did not order them to behave - why instead the law saw the devil's work in even the most pious community members - can be explained by the persecution complex from which the Puritans suffered, the drab toil of their lives finding relief in the theater that was the witch trials. ![]() As Stacy Schiff amply shows in "The Witches," it was ever thus - at least since 1692, when two Puritan girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, via a series of thrashes and moans and accusations of witchcraft, incited a campaign of terror that led to the execution of 19 women and men. Is there a class of human more unsettling than the teenage girl? Her moods are unpredictable, her powers of attraction alarming. THE WITCHES: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff. ![]()
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