Salem: The Real Problem with the Show

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Janet Montgomery, Mary Sibley, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, WGN, Witchcraft

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been using WGN’s Salem as an entry point into the Salem Witch Trials. I’ve pointed out problems with the show’s treatment of its putative location, its inaccurate depiction of the people involved, its misrepresentation of torture, and its failure to address the community tensions that probably played a large role in the Trials, as well as its probably accidental identification of factors that might have led to Mercy Lewis and other young women making their accusations. But for all the serious errors the show makes, I think the real problem lies elsewhere, with the very concept of the show.

Women and Witchcraft Accusations

For anyone who studies witch trials, one of the first things they notice is how disproportionately the charges tended to target women. From the 1960s, when quality scholarship about witch trials first started, down through the 1980s, it was generally said that virtually all accused witches were women. Authors in that period, often feminists who were not actually scholars, asserted that witch trials were explicitly about misogyny, and that the witch trials were a women’s Holocaust.

By the 1990s, detailed statistical studies had modified that perception a little; across all of Europe in the 16^th through 18^th centuries, roughly 80% of defendants in witch trials were women. But there was some variation. In some regions nearly all defendants were women: Basel, Switzerland: 95%; Essex, England and Namur, Belgium, about 92%.But elsewhere numbers were somewhat lower; in parts of Scotland, Germany, and France, the figure is between 72 and 82%, and in Spain it was 71%.Even more strikingly, in Freiburg, Switzerland, it was 64% and in Waadtland, Switzerland, it was 58%. In Normandy, France, only one of four defendants was a woman, and in Iceland, all defendants were male. Assertions that witch hunting was about nothing more complex than male hatred of women can’t be supported in face of such statistics, but clearly gender was an extremely important factor in European beliefs about who witches were.

Not all women were equally vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. While there are always some outliers in the data, the typical accused witch was an older woman, between 50 and 70. She was also likely to be either a widow or an unmarried woman (termed a singlewoman by scholars). In one French trial 58% of all the accused were widows. Poverty was a third common characteristic, although to some extent that was a common quality that older widows and unmarried women tended to share. A less-commonly accused group were younger women with a reputation for sexual promiscuity. It is not uncommon to see an older unmarried woman and her younger illegitimate daughter both accused. Patterns mean something, and historians have devoted much energy to trying to make sense of these patterns around witchcraft accusations. What was it that made older, unmarried, poor, and sexually promiscuous women more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men or married women?

The literature on this is truly enormous, and if you really want to dig into it, take my class on witchcraft sometime. Some theories, such as the idea that witches were mostly female medical practitioners, have been exploded because there is little factual basis for them. Some scholars have theorized that accusations had a ‘social function’ of keeping women in line with community standards, but Social Function Theory sees social functions are being almost mechanical; to work it needs to happen regularly and constantly, the way that ‘fag jokes’ and student aggression against less masculine boys in high school serve to reinforce behavioral gender norms. But witchcraft accusations were neither constant not regular; communities could go decades without seeing a witch trial and then suddenly experience a surge of them, only to see the trials fade away a few months or a year later.

The late historian Christina Larner argued that witchcraft accusations were not sex-specific, but sex-related. In other words, witch-hunters were seeking out witches, not women, but their ideas about witches were so intimately tied into ideas about women that far more women than men were likely to be accused. That doesn’t explain places like Normandy and Iceland, where most accused were men, but it provides a helpful handle on the problem to explain at least some of the issues.

Going back at least as far as Classical Greece and Roman, there was a strong tendency to associate women with witchcraft, because the things that tended to be considered witchcraft were things that women were thought to use to circumvent male control. Love potions and love curses were seen as ways that women tried to control male desire, and poison was understood to be a woman’s weapon because they were not strong enough to physically confront their opponents. Abortifacients enabled a woman to cover up an illicit affair, and thereby evade male control over women’s bodies. The stereotype of the witch as an old hag was already deeply embedded in Western thought by the end of the Roman period. So notice how major elements of this begin to explain why some women were being accused in the 17^th century.

Both Classical and Medieval authors tended to assume that women were morally weaker than men, and therefore more liable to succumb to temptation. Early Christian theologians like Tertullian and St. Jerome strongly linked women to lust and vanity, two sins that Tertullian explicitly associated with witchcraft. Tertullian established the notion that all women were inheritors of the moral guilt of Eve, who had given in to Satan’s temptation (in fact, the Bible never claims that Satan was present at Eve’s fall, but Tertullian gave Latin theology a pretty strong shove in that direction, which is why people tend to read Genesis 3 as involving Satan). Medieval authors like Andreas Capellanus accused women of being inherently envious, given to slander, and rebellious against male authority. And in the 15^th century, we start to see ideas about witches engaged in sexual relationships with the Devil.

An early 16th century image of Adam and Eve. Note the focus on Eve’s sexuality.

So by the end of the 15^th century, a picture of witches had emerged as primarily being people who were envious of others, given to arguing and slander, insufficiently submissive to both divine and male authority, lustful, promiscuous, and manipulative. While all of these qualities could be applied to men, they were all most typically associated with women.

One consequence of this pattern is that women who tended to be quarrelsome or litigious toward their neighbors or family, instead of being properly submissive, might find eventually themselves eventually being accused of witchcraft, not by their opponents, but by other members of the community who saw their quarrels and lawsuits as the sort of behavior that witches typically engaged in. In other words, women who failed to fit the demure, submissive role expected of women in this period might open themselves up to accusations of witchcraft. Carol Karlsen found considerable evidence for this in New England; a sizeable number of those accused of witchcraft in colonial New England as a whole had at some point been involved in an inheritance dispute, for example.

So modern scholarship has emphasized that the women who were accused of witchcraft were not in fact guilty of any activity related to witchcraft, although some may have engaged in folk magic of various kinds. Instead, these women fell victim to deeply misogynistic ideas about women as naturally given to certain forms of evil and sinful behavior, such as lust; rebellion against husbandly, paternal, or religious authority; and envy. The only thing the accused women had done was fail to confirm to their society’s rules about proper female behavior.

A Moral Trainwreck in Slow-Motion

Unfortunately, Salem has serious problems with the way it navigates this issue. At the start of the show, it makes a big point of saying that the people getting executed for witchcraft are innocent. Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery) explicitly says that the witches’ plot requires the death of a number of innocent people. So when the pilot opens, three people have already been hung for witchcraft and Giles Quarry is pressed to death unjustly. In the next episode, the innocent Bridget Bishop is executed when Mary uses her magic to deform an already dead fetus that Bridget is trying to birth. Then Mercy Lewis and her posse orchestrate the accusation against the innocent but horrible father of one of the girls. Then Mary and Mercy orchestrate the execution of the innocent Barkers.

Janet Montgomery as Mary Sibley

So the show initially seemed to be aware of the problem of saying that the people executed at Salem were actually guilty. With the exception of the first three anonymous victims, all those executed were actual historical people, although historically the Barkers dodged execution by confessing to being witches.

But then the real witches start getting caught up in the search. The brothel-keeper Mab gets caught and commits suicide, and Mary’s evil mentor Rose gets caught, although it’s Mercy who finally kills her. Mercy’s gang of girls gets captured and tortured, and then Mercy accuses Tituba, who is tortured by Increase Mather. So by the end of the season, the show has forgotten to only orchestrate accusations against innocents. Although most of these women are fictional, other than Tituba, the show shows that some of those who were apprehended, tortured, and killed were actually guilty.

Tituba being tortured

Even worse, the actual witches in the series conform quite well to the 17^th century stereotypes of witches. With the exception of Magistrate Hale (Xander Berkeley), all the real witches are women. Rose is an old woman, and there is a group of elderly and hideously deformed witch women who live out in the forest. Mary Sibley is rebellion personified; she wishes to overthrow the Puritans of Salem, she has cast a magical spell on her husband to render him a total invalid, she commits adultery against him (as well as fornication and abortion during the pilot), and she has seized control of the Salem government. Mercy similarly craves power, knowingly accuses an innocent man, grows envious of Tituba, and by the end of the season is plotting some sort of rebellion of the disaffected youth of Salem. In other words, Salem actually affirms that Puritan fear that there were witches around, and it affirms that witches were exactly the way that the Puritans thought they were. If the women of Salem were all properly submissive, the show would literally have no plot.

Given that the Salem Witch Trials were one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history, the idea that the witch hunters were actually right about everything except who their targets were is incredibly offensive. Imagine, if you will, a TV show in which the Nazis were somehow right that there actually was an international conspiracy of Jews to destroy Germany, and that Hitler and his cronies were actually unwitting dupes of the sinister Jews who sent them after other, innocent Jews as part of some grand scheme for the Jews to seize power, and that those tragically misguided Nazi were sometimes killing evil Jews as well as innocent ones. That’s basically the plot of Salem. Put in those terms, it’s an appalling show. Pretty much the only thing that keeps the show for descending into total moral putridity is that it emphasizes that Bishop, Quarry, and the Barkers were actually innocent.

The show is trying to pursue too many shades of grey. It wants Mary Sibley, the main character of the show, to be both a villain and a good guy at the same time. It has her leading a plot that, if properly pulled off, will apparently kill an appalling number of people. It has her orchestrating the deaths of innocent men and women to advance that plot. And yet she’s conflicted because she truly loves John Alden and so she starts having second thoughts, causing the other witches to start turning against her in various ways.

Perhaps the most obvious place where the show can’t figure out how to handle Mary is the episode with Bridget Bishop. One of the town prostitutes is pregnant and in labor, and Mary wants to use this situation to ruin Bridget. So she casts a spell to horribly deform the fetus, which is already dead. So orchestrating an innocent woman’s death is acceptable, but aborting a live fetus or causing a stillbirth is too heinous an action for the show. She needs to be evil, but not that evil. It’s interesting that killing a live woman is ok, but killing an unborn child is beyond the pale. What’s particularly interesting is that at this point in the show, Mary and the viewers falsely think that she’s aborted her own illicit child. Right at the end of the season, that turns out to not be the case. I guess a villain can abort her child, but not someone else’s, but in order to redeem her, her baby has to get un-aborted.

Bridget Bishop

Similarly, Magistrate Hale is an evil man who’s actually sort of good. He’s a willing participant in this plot that will killed lots of people. But he’s also a loving family man whose primary motive is that he saw witch hunters kill his parents and now he wants to create a place where his people (that it, the witches) can live free and in the open. That’s all well and good, but the show has already established that his people are evil murderers. Again, it’s sort of as if his goal is to create a state in which the Nazis can murder Jews in peace. I’m not against moral nuance; I love well-written morally grey characters, because most human beings are morally grey in different ways. I love morally complex villains and heroes who have moral flaws. The problem is that the show isn’t doing morally grey characters; it’s trying to make explicitly evil people the good guys.

In other words, the show is actually a total mess morally. It can’t resist the temptation to lionize characters who are doing genuinely evil actions. It validates some of the worst misogynistic stereotypes of Western Civilization, and comes perilously close to suggesting that some of the people who died at Salem actually deserved their deaths. Pardon me while I sit over here in the corner and be quietly appalled.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

Carol Karlsen’s book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New Englandabsolutely dazzled me when I first read it. If you only read one book on New England Witch Trials, make it this book.

The late Christina Larner’s most important work is probably Enemies Of God: The Witch-Hunt In Scotland. 

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Salem: Who’s Real and Who’s Not

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Ashley Madekwe, Cotton Mather, Elise Eberle, Increase Mather, Janet Montgomery, John Alden, Mary Sibley, Mercy Lewis, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Seth Gabel, Shane West, Stephen Lang, Tituba, Witchcraft, Xander Berkeley

As I mentioned last time, WGN’s Salem show is based on historical reality a bit the way that surumi is based on crab legs. There’s so much wrong with the main characters that I decided they needed a whole post to themselves. The show’s central characters are Mary Sibley, Tituba, John Alden, Magistrate Hale and his daughter Anne, Cotton Mather, Mercy Lewis, and Isaac Walton. Of these, George Sibley, Anne Hale, and Isaac Walton are entirely fictitious. It’s a bit sad, because Iddo Goldberg’s Isaac is probably the best character on the show; he’s well (and consistently) written, wonderfully acted, and the only character in the whole damn lot I actually care about.

 

Mary Sibley

Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery) was a real person, but an extremely minor figure in the Witch Trials, and little is known about her. Her husband’s name was Samuel, not George, and her social status is unclear. She was the aunt of one of the first girls to be afflicted at Salem, and when her niece fell ill, Mary instructed the slave woman Tituba how to bake a “witch cake” that would reveal who had afflicted the girl. So Mary Sibley had at least a modicum of knowledge about folk magic; her action got her suspended from communion, but she was later restored when she confessed to the church that her purpose in advising Tituba was entirely innocent. So the character Montgomery plays is essentially an entirely fictitious one, apart from the name. Her Sibley is one of the dominant figures in town government, quite wealthy, a slave-owner (she is the owner of Tituba), and the most important witch in Salem. Of those details, the first and third are entirely false, the second pure conjecture, and the last bares only a faint resemblance to fact.

Janet Montgomery as Mary Sibley

Montgomery’s Sibley is one of the few interesting characters in the show. She’s the lead villain of the show, bent on leading an ominous Grand Rite that requires the death of a dozen innocent people before it can happen. But her motivations are remarkably complex. She’s in love with John Alden, but angry that he abandoned her. She feels angry and guilty that she had to dispose of her unborn child. She hates the Puritans of Salem and in particular her husband and wants to see them all ruined, but after she starts the witch panic, she begins to realize that it could turn against her. Her feelings for Alden lead her to begin reconsidering her plans. She has to deal with the fractious coven of witches, many of whom are beginning to lose faith in her and plot against her. Montgomery handles the character’s conflicting feelings, motives, and goals about as well as the rather inconsistent script allows.

 

Tituba

Tituba (Ashley Madekwe) was a slave owned by Samuel Parris, a key figure in the witch panic who is omitted from the series; I’ll talk about him in later posts. There is considerable debate about Tituba’s ethnicity. Popular imagination, spurred on by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, has tended to depict her as a black woman on the grounds that she was a slave, but all the contemporary sources describe her as an Indian, and her husband, John Indian, was clearly understood to be Indian. Her name, however, is Yoruba, so there is at least one firm piece of evidence pointing to African descent. Parris purchased both Tituba and John Indian in Barbados in the 1670s, and at least one scholar has argued that she was, in fact, an Arawak from modern Venezuela. Beyond that, most of what you’ll find on the internet about her is wild conjecture. Because she came from Barbados, she has often been associated with voodoo, but there’s no actual evidence that Tituba ever actually practiced any magic. She was the first person to be accused of being a witch during the Salem Witch Panic, and she was also the first to confess, probably because Parris physically beat her into confessing, but the details of her confession conform entirely to English notions of witchcraft and show no evidence of influence from either Yoruba or Arawak belief or practice.

Ashley Madekwe as Tituba

In the series, Tituba is the witch who recruited Mary Sibley into the coven, and throughout the first season, she works to keep Mary, her owner, true to the witches’ original plan. She only falls under suspicion fairly late in the season. The series is fairly canny about her ethnicity. Madakwe is half Nigerian, but fair-skinned, so she conforms visually to popular ideas about slaves from the Caribbean, but late in the season she says that she is an Arawak taken as a slave while a young girl. That’s pretty much the most accurate detail about her character; on this issue the show’s writers have at least been making an effort to fit current scholarly thinking.

 

John Alden

John Alden (Shane West) was the oldest son of John and Priscilla Alden (not Sarah Alden, as we see on her tombstone in one episode), two of the original Mayflower colonists. As this suggests, John Alden Jr was almost 70 years old at the time of the Witch Trials. He was a wealthy, powerful Puritan who had a distinguished record serving in the first French and Indian War; in 1690, he had served as a negotiator with the Native Americans. In 1692, he was living in Boston. After the trials had gotten underway, the girls who acted as the chief accusers, probably prompted by the magistrates overseeing the trial, named Alden as one of the attendees of the witch’s sabbat, as a result of which he was jailed. After the first executions, he escaped from jail, fled to Duxbury (a suburb of modern Boston), and remained there until after the panic had resolved itself. He wrote a narrative of his experiences that became one of the important sources for the Witch Trials.

Shane West as John Alden

Again, it’s clear that West’s version of Alden is essentially fictitious in almost every regard except for his military experience. He’s young, a resident of Salem and a selectman, a former lover of Mary Sibley, skeptical to the verge of agnosticism (he’s not sure if people have souls, and he initially doesn’t believe in witchcraft). He’s the main opponent of the Witch Trials and basically the hero of the series. He does get arrested, but his arrest leads to an abortive trial and a magical escape from prison. The show also claims that he lived with the Native Americans for several years and helped them slaughter at least one large group of colonial militiamen. There’s no evidence for this claim. (And can I just say that West’s John Alden looks like he would be more comfortable in a biker gang than old Salem?)

Magistrate Hale

Magistrate Hale (Xander Berkeley) is a rather distorted version of Rev. John Hale. Rev. Hale was the Puritan minister of Beverly (another former portion of Salem Town). Hale was one of the first men to support the accusations of the afflicted girls and played an important role in the trials until November, 1692, when his second wife, Sarah Noyes Hale, was accused of being a witch. This persuaded him that spectral evidence was unreliable, and he was one of many who by this time were beginning to doubt the validity of the trials. He died in 1700. The series’ version of Hale, however is not a minister, but rather one of the Salem selectmen and one of the witches. Like Sibley, he’s a somewhat ambivalent villain, being motivated chiefly by love of his daughter. One of the few facts that the series gets right about Hale is that he witnessed the execution of a witch when he was a child, Margaret Jones, the first person executed in Massachusetts as a witch (in 1648).

Xander Berkeley as Magistrate Hale

 

Mercy Lewis

Mercy Lewis (Elise Eberle) was an orphan, her parents dying in an attack by Native Americans on a settlement in Maine. She was eventually offered a position as a servant in the household of Thomas Putnam, the father of Ann Putnam. Ann and Mercy  were among the second group of girls to be afflicted and bring accusations of being a witch; other members of their household, including Ann’s mother, Ann Sr, and a cousin, Mary Walcott, were also afflicted, as were four other members of the household, though less so. This cluster of people from the Putnam household were probably the most important accusers during the Witch Panic, targeting a total of 46 people with charges of witchcraft. As typical of the afflicted girls, Mercy saw “spectral” (invisible) people plaguing her, reported various pains on her body, suffered periodic seizures, and sometimes lost the ability to speak. In the series’ pilot, Mercy is already afflicted by Mary Sibley, and three people have already been executed. The only conclusion for the viewers is that Mercy was the first girl to be afflicted and was responsible for the first three executions. That’s historically wrong, as I’ll explain in the next post; she was neither the first accuser, nor were the first people executed ones she identified. In the show, she sees a spectral hag and shows bite marks across her body, but she also attacks people, flies up the ceiling, and  on one occasion vomits a massive shower of blood onto someone. She’s put in chains and, bizarrely, hung on the wall of the Salem church like she’s being crucified. Cotton Mather puts her into bondage gear and leads her through town like a bloodhound when she can’t speak. All of that is invented. Later in the series, three girls approach Mercy and persuade her to start making accusations against an innocent man; she seems to enjoy the power this gives her. That’s possibly true; the motives for the accusations are unclear; we’ll look at that in a later post. By the end of the season, Mercy has become a witch under Mary Sibley’s guidance. That’s false, but, as I’ll explain, has at least a smidgen of scholarly value to it. Overall, the show’s Mercy bares little relationship to the person she’s based on.

Mercy literally hanging around in church

 

The Mathers The historical Cotton Mather (Seth Gabel) was the son of the well-known minister and president of Harvard Increase Mather. Cotton (named with his mother’s surname) was something of a prodigy, graduating from Harvard at 15 and soon assisting his father at Boston’s North Church, where he eventually became the pastor. He was an important intellectual and author, although his reputation at the time never lived up to his father’s. He wrote scientific, mathematical, and religious treatises, and after the Witch Trials became a prominent proponent of smallpox inoculation, a then-controversial practice. Despite being deeply interested in science, Mather also believed in the reality of witches.

Cotton Mather

As prominent ministers and intellectuals, the magistrates asked both Cotton and Increase to advise them about how to proceed after the trials began. A particular question of concern to them was how to handle ‘spectral evidence’. Spectral evidence was the term used for the mysterious visions that the girl accusers claimed to have; they insisted they could see witches tormenting them when no one else could. The magistrates were hesitant, unsure of how to regard such claims. In two letters, Cotton replied that such evidence should be used with extreme caution; he points out that it is entirely possible that the Devil could use images of innocent and virtuous people in order to ruin them. However, he also says that in such situations, God ordinarily provides a way to vindicate them. What the magistrates took from that letter was essentially a go-ahead to accept spectral evidence as proof of guilt. He played no direct role in the trials themselves, although he did attend and speak at several of the executions. Whereas Mather was skeptical of spectral evidence, he regarded confessions of guilt as solid proof that an accused witch was guilty. In this he followed the best thinking of early modern European legal experts, who were generally reluctant to convict accused witches without some form of solid evidence. A confession was ideal evidence, since the accused her- or himself was admitting the crime. While we can obviously see flaws in that line of thinking, the impulse to find actual evidence of the crime demonstrates that there was a degree of rational thinking about witch trials; they were conducted according to legal principles and not just free-for-alls as they are normally imagined to be. There was comparatively little fear of false confessions, since the crime of witchcraft seemed too horrible for one to confess falsely. There was also a sense that God would protect the innocent from the pressure to confess.

Seth Gabel as Cotton Mather

 

Gabel’s portrayal of Mather is a hot mess. At the start of the series, he’s portrayed as an expert on witchcraft who was brought into Salem by Mary Sibley to help root out witches, and he seems to have entirely taken over both as minister of the local church and as lead prosecutor in the Witch Trials. He’s entirely convinced that witches exist, and he shows no hesitation whatsoever to accept the spectral evidence offered by Mercy Lewis. Despite this, he’s sort of frenemies with John Alden, who used to beat him up when they were children together, and as the show progresses, Cotton teams up with Alden to investigate the witches.

The real problem with Mather in the series, however, is the fact that he regularly consorts with a whore named Gloriana at Salem’s public brothel. First, there certainly was prostitution in colonial America, but there weren’t open brothels where the prostitutes hung around outside to attract customers; it’s obvious in the show that they’re whores because they’re the only people in brightly-colored clothing. It’s unlikely that Salem was large enough to support such a business, and highly improbable that the more religious residents of the community would have tolerated the existence of such a place; colonists occasionally burned down brothels in major cities. Second, Mather openly frequents this place; Alden runs into him coming out of it in one episode, and in later episodes, his relationship with Gloriana seems widely known. A Puritan minister who was known to be committing adultery with prostitutes or other women (since Mather was a married man) would immediately have lost all moral credibility; even modern televangelists can’t pull that off, despite numerous attempts. And then, part way through the series he suddenly becomes a rationalist skeptic and starts defending people against charges of witchcraft, despite having personally interrogated one obvious witch and seen her perform explicitly supernatural feats. Gabel’s Mather represents several of the worst clichés of American culture all rolled together. He is ridiculed for being an educated intellectual; Alden once mockingly calls him “Harvard”. Despite being highly educated and sporadically interested in science (in one episode he wields a 19^th century hypodermic needle), he’s anti-intellectual and irrational; Alden serves as his rationalist foil. He’s also a venal clergyman whose external pieties mask a sexually corrupt personal life. He’s emotionally tormented by his unspecified sins, but fails to learn the lesson of mercy toward other sinners, and seems to be ok with the prospect of executing a few innocent people to purge the town of witches. Despite being a minister, none of his choices actually seem influenced by Christianity. In one episode he rapes Gloriana; in the next episode he offers to pay her to be his exclusive mistress. There’s literally nothing likable or admirable about him at all. He’s a religious fanatic who’s not actually religious.

Increase Mather

His father Increase Mather (Steven Lang) is played as a ruthless witch hunter who sometimes just executes people regardless of evidence or trial and on other occasions insists on a trial. That’s just made up. While he was a noted expert on witches, he was not a witch hunter. He didn’t track witches across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. He wasn’t a ruthless torturer. And he wasn’t murdered by his own son; he died of bladder failure at age 84. It’s a shame that the character is written so poorly, because Lang does a bang-up job with the crappy material the show gives him. I would have loved to see what Lang could do with actually good material.

Stephen Lang as Increase Mather

 

Want to Know More? SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon. If you want to know what actually happened during the Salem Witch Trials, Bryan Le Beau’s The Story of the Salem Witch Trials (2nd Edition)is a decent place to start. It’s a straight-forward narrative of events, with only minimal analysis (which means it gets a bit dry in places), but it does a good job of laying out the facts in chronological order. (When it was revised for the 2nd edition, apparently they didn’t revise the index, which makes it very hard to use.)