Indian John and the Northern Tawnies
1996; The MIT Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/366555
ISSN1937-2213
Autores Tópico(s)Mormonism, Religion, and History
ResumoVEN for individuals far removed in time and space-say twentieth-century Europeans-Salem, Massachusetts, inevitably conjures a specific, still disgraceful association: trials. The word has, to be sure, drawn some historians back into British folklore and seventeenth-century British court practices or into Puritan concepts of divine and diabolic agency. In general, however, cluster of events labeled the of 1692 has been associated less with British empire, or with colonial America, or even with New England than with a specific location: individual community of itself. The common phrase Salem witch trials continues to focus our attention upon local conditions-economic, spiritual, and political-of town and village (Danvers). still lures summer tourist dollar by claims upon its presumably unique notoriety. Witchcraft belonged, first and last, to life of little community, John Demos has recently concluded in his Entertaining Satan. In Massachusetts' isolated communities, roles of accused, accuser, and victim initially evolved from intra-village conflict: Suspicion and gossip, charge and counter-charge, resort to private magic and/or formal proceedings in court; all were geared to local conditions.' As Demos's careful statistics and biographical narratives, as well as those of Carol Karlsen, have shown, accused witch in seventeenth-century New England was most likely to be a woman over forty years of age, without a secure social position or a male heir, but known to have a sharp tongue, skills at mid-
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