Salem Bewitched Sermons, Histories, and Essays on Witchcraft, Evidence, Fanaticism, and Justice in New England

Salem Bewitched gathers a striking archive of interpretation around the Salem witchcraft crisis, bringing together theological polemic, eyewitness-inflected recollection, local history, antiquarian inquiry, and later popular or psychological speculation. The volume traces how a single episode became a durable American cultural text: a site of contested evidence, religious anxiety, communal memory, and moral judgment. Early ministerial writings stand beside nineteenth-century historical reassessments, allowing the reader to observe not only the events' representation but also the changing methods used to explain them. Its contributors span generations of New England religious and literary culture. Cotton Mather and Increase Mather represent the Puritan intellectual world in which providence, invisible agency, confession, and legal testimony carried urgent significance. Charles Wentworth Upham, M. V. B. Perley, James Thacher, William P. Upham, and Samuel Roberts Wells reflect later efforts to recover documents, narrate local pasts, and reinterpret the crisis through historical, rationalist, and emerging scientific frameworks. Their juxtaposition illuminates the passage from colonial theology to modern historiography. Recommended for students of American literature, religion, history, and folklore, Salem Bewitched offers an exceptional opportunity to read competing explanations in direct dialogue. Its breadth makes it valuable both as a sourcebook and as a study in how cultures repeatedly revise their most troubling inheritances.