EACH MONTH we will explore a different secondary source on the Salem Witch Trials. We are incredibly lucky that scholars have written so much on this event, but where do we begin? For me it seemed natural to start with Marilynne K. Roach’s The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege (first published in 2004) because this book is like the Bible for Salem Oracle. While I rely on a variety of primary and secondary sources for our daily journey into the past, Roach’s work provides perhaps the most detailed account of everything that happened before, during, and after the Salem Witch Trials in chronological format. 

According to Roach, a free-lance writer, illustrator, researcher, and speaker, it took her “twenty-seven years to research, write, re-write, and send [this book] out to publishers.” When you read this book, you will understand why this undertaking took so long. It is completely packed with information and insights.

Roach begins this chronological approach by providing a narrative history of what Salem was like prior to the trials, bringing the reader from 1661 to 1691. This part of the story is often forgotten when people talk about Salem because they want to get to the juicy, tantalizing parts about grevious afflictions and mass hysteria and stories of women consorting with the devil in the darkness of night. But this foundation is critical if we are truly to understand what happened during the trials because it provides us the larger historical context from which all of the events of 1692 arose…

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FOR OUR PRIMARY SOURCE this month, let’s take a look back at prominent Boston minister Cotton Mather’s 1689 best seller Memorable Providences, which had a great influence on the Salem Witch Trials just a few years later. 

The full title is a doozy: Memorable providences relating to witchcrafts and possessions a faithful account of many wonderful and surprising things that have befallen several bewitched and possesed person in New-England, particularly a narrative of the marvellous trouble and releef experienced by a pious family in Boston, very lately and sadly molested with evil spirits: whereunto is added a discourse delivered unto a congregation in Boston on the occasion of that illustrious providence: as also a discourse delivered unto the same congregation on the occasion of an horrible self-murder committed in the town: with an appendix in vindication of a chapter in a late book of remarkable providences from the calumnies of a Quaker at Pen-silvania.

Ok, Mather, let’s try to distill this down a little bit! One thing I can say about 17th-century New England is that they love long and rambling titles. 

This source is a good reminder that to the people of the 17th century, belief in witchcraft wasn’t some backwards delusion. It was very real and people took it seriously. Texts like this one “proved” its existence. It’s easy to look back and think people of the past were naive…

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OK, THAT’S ENOUGH slogging through a 17th-century text. Let’s have some fun with pop culture! I love exploring popular culture as a means to gain new perspectives on a past event. While pop culture interpretations often contain some historical inaccuracies, they also provide a unique window into the past with a gaze from the present. When we examine something like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, we learn just as much (if not more) about 1953 when it was first performed as we do about 1692, which it purports to bring to life. 

But let’s save Miller’s play for another day and instead celebrate Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s episode by the same name, which aired in 1997.

My love for Sabrina the Teenage Witch runs deep. This show was launched in September 1996. I had just started sixth grade, and like many middle-school girls, I thought witches were very cool. Sabrina Spellman, played by the wonderful Melissa Joan Hart, discovers on her sixteenth birthday that she is a witch. Well, she is part witch, part mortal, so she must navigate not only the realm of high school and adolescence but also her emerging supernatural powers. Sabrina lives in a female-dominated household with her aunts Hilda and Zelda. The only male presence in the home? A warlock who is sentenced to spend 100 years as a cat as punishment for trying to take over the world, aptly named Salem. 

In Season 1, Episode 23, Sabrina goes on a class trip to historic Salem, with instructions from their teacher to pack lightly as they will receive period clothes when they arrive. “The idea,” Mrs. Hecht tells the class, “is for us to fully immerse ourselves in the repressive culture of the time.”…

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