![]() ![]() Hilary Mantel TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT A riveting and chilling account of the frightening events that took place in 1692 in a small town in Massachusetts when an oppressive, claustrophobic community turned upon itself, superstition fusing with score-settling. ![]() You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian. Context is everything, and Schiff defines it she interrogates her sources, makes every detail count, and her style is intriguing - sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. But using the past as stand-in for the present often sells it short, and gives its complexities permission to elude us. Arthur Miller used the Salem story as a metaphor for the McCarthy era's paranoia. Was it like The Crucible? No, it was worse. Adolescent girls, denouncing their neighbours, began a fashion for denunciation it resulted in nineteen hangings, in torture, in the fracture of families and communities, and in the spectacle of a seven-year-old kept in miniature manacles. Stacy Schiff's The Witches deals with a horror we assume we know, but don't: the moral panic that tore apart the towns of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. ![]()
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