She leans most heavily on the monumental “Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt” (2009), a thousand-page collaborative editing project led by Bernard Rosenthal. Schiff also shows a reporter’s instinct, referring to interviews and email exchanges with leading scholars. Schiff has read these works, and much more her endnotes show that she and her team of researchers - she credits eight of them in her acknowledgments - have mined the literature voraciously. More recently, Mary Beth Norton’s “In the Devil’s Snare” (2002) advanced an electrifying analysis of the witch crisis as a reaction to the Indian wars that consumed northern New England in the 1680s and 1690s. In “Salem Possessed” (1974), Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum revolutionized the field of social history with their patient mapping of the domestic and economic tensions that, they argued, explained the outbreak. Still, scholars have offered astonishingly fresh interpretations from sources long since chewed over. Historians, like terriers, are diggers, but Salem offers stony soil for discovery. But a crowded canvas does not a probing history make, as “The Witches” powerfully demonstrates. An acclaimed biographer of subjects as diverse as Cleopatra and Véra Nabokov, Schiff here broadens her lens, like an artist turning from portraits to teeming allegories: Rembrandt taking up the work of Bosch. “The Witches,” Schiff’s glib, compendious and often maddening account of the events of that fateful year, does a great deal to punch up the story, but little to explore and still less to understand its significance.

And yet the plague of witches that besieged Salem and its environs that year has spawned more than 500 books, nearly 1,000 dissertations and twice as many scholarly articles (written in at least 10 languages, including Korean, Turkish and Mandarin), to say nothing of the novels, plays, ballets and movies based more or less loosely on that more or less true story.īy almost any measure, Salem’s crisis is more gripping than it was important. “The population of New England in 1692 would fit into Yankee Stadium today,” Stacy Schiff writes. Fourteen women and five men, convicted of witchcraft, were hanged, and one more, a man who refused to plead, was crushed to death, a day’s ride from Boston, in a lesser county of a marginal British colony - the periphery of the periphery, from the perspective of London, let alone of Paris or Canton. Salem, 1692: The dateline is as recognizable as any in American history.

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