Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Dark Eve
- 2 The girls of Salem
- 3 Boys and girls together
- 4 June 10, 1692
- 5 July 19, 1692
- 6 August 19, 1692
- 7 George Burroughs and the Mathers
- 8 September 22, 1692
- 9 Assessing an inextricable storm
- 10 Salem story
- Appendix Letter of William Phips to George Corwin, April 26, 1693
- Notes
- Index
- Titles in the series
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Dark Eve
- 2 The girls of Salem
- 3 Boys and girls together
- 4 June 10, 1692
- 5 July 19, 1692
- 6 August 19, 1692
- 7 George Burroughs and the Mathers
- 8 September 22, 1692
- 9 Assessing an inextricable storm
- 10 Salem story
- Appendix Letter of William Phips to George Corwin, April 26, 1693
- Notes
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
[Elizabeth Parris, wife of the Reverend Samuel Parris,] emerges as a good-hearted woman, simple and ineffectual, who saw her job in Salem Village as a continuing round of errands to and for the wives in the parish. But in her busy effort to bolster her husband's acceptance in the village, she absented herself more and more from home. Into this void, necessarily, moved Tituba, and from Tituba came the tales that excited Abigail and frightened Betty.
–James F. Droney, “The Witches of Salem”In the beginning there was Tituba: a woman who, according to the politics of the early 1960s, gained power because a working mother paid insufficient attention to her family. Although chroniclers of Salem's story vary in their explanations of her presence, Tituba appears in the overwhelming number of narrations as the central figure in the genesis of the witch trials. Her entrance onto the historical stage, in her precipitating role of beginning the witchcraft, receives its modern codification in the account by Charles W. Upham, whose Salem Witchcraft, published in 1867, has served as the most influential work in shaping subsequent myth and history related to the Salem witch trials.
Upham offers a speculation that Tituba and her husband John, slaves of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village, brought with them “the wild and strange superstitions prevalent among their native tribes, materials which, added to the commonly received notions on such subjects, heightened the infatuation of the times, and inflamed still more the imaginations of the credulous.” He suggests that they brought with them “systems of demonology” consistent “with ideas and practices developed here.”
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- Chapter
- Information
- Salem StoryReading the Witch Trials of 1692, pp. 10 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993