Purchase
The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials
Da Capo Press
September 2013
On Sale: September 3, 2013
445 pages ISBN: 0306821206 EAN: 9780306821202 Kindle: B00C4GRW2M Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction History
Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a
select number of representative women as a microcosm to
illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By
the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were executed
and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had
been accused, 74 had been “afflicted,” 32 had officially
accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had
been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous
vortex, and this doesn’t include the religious, judicial,
and governmental leaders. All this adds up to what the Rev.
Cotton Mather called “a desolation of names.” The individuals involved are too often reduced to stock
characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to
indignation. And although the flood of names and detail in
the history of an extraordinary event like the Salem witch
trials can swamp the individual lives involved, individuals
still deserve to be remembered and, in remembering specific
lives, modern readers can benefit from such historical
intimacy. By examining the lives of six specific women,
Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present
throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to
live through it unchanged.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|