The Invisible World

About This Book

In the frozen winter of 1692, in a farming parish in Massachusetts, two children began to convulse. The village doctor could find no cause and pronounced them bewitched. Within weeks the accusations were spreading faster than anyone could count; within months a hastily improvised court was hanging respected churchgoers on the testimony of invisible specters only the accusers could see. Before it burned out, more than two hundred people had been accused, nineteen had been hanged, one old man had been pressed to death beneath a pile of stones, and a colony that believed itself a model of godly order had discovered how little stood between it and madness.

E.B Cohen tells the whole story of the Salem witch trials — not only the warrants and the verdicts, but the world that made the fear possible: the Puritan universe crowded with devils, the political vacuum of a colony without a charter, the frontier war whose refugees carried their terror into the courtroom, and the village feud that turned neighbors into witnesses. Here is the confession that transformed a household's private trouble into a colony-wide conspiracy; the perverse logic that spared those who lied and hanged those who would not; the reason and courage that finally broke the spell; and the astonishing three-hundred-year reckoning that ended only in 2022.

Rigorous, humane, and honest about the gulf between myth and fact, this is the definitive single-volume account of America's most infamous witch-hunt — and of why we have never stopped seeing our own face in it.