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Diseases of astonishment
Sep. 13th, 2021 07:47 pmIt’s September, which means it is the beginning of spooky season, which means I figured I’d better get onto my spooky season reading before I accidentally found myself halfway through October desperately trying to fit in an appropriate couple of books around whatever else I’d found myself bogged down in. For my first spooky season read I decided to finally tackle Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692, as various circumstances have found me flitting in and out of Witch City on several occasions lately. Also, it’s been sitting on my shelf since 2018 and I am on a mission to knock out at least a certain number of books acquired before this year so they don’t just sit around forever while shiny new releases jump to the front of the line.
The contents of The Witches weren’t as new to me as they would have been had I read the book in a more timely fashion upon purchasing it, as it covers a good amount of the same ground as the first season of the podcast Unobscured; if I recall correctly, Schiff was interviewed fairly extensively for the podcast. However, given that I don’t always retain information super well when it’s delivered in audio, and that it was a couple of years ago, I found it quite worthwhile to revisit the same information in book form, especially the stuff that didn’t make it into the accounts of the witchcraft trials that I learned in my more formative years--the relationship between Massachusetts and the Maine frontier never made it into my high school discussions of The Crucible, neither did the fallout from the various Indian wars and the high number of refugees among the afflicted.
Looking at some of the other reviews of this book on Goodreads, I am in the somewhat peculiar position of not always having liked it, but coming from the opposite direction of everyone else about why. I loved the wealth of details, the digging into the minutiae of life in a stifling, hardscrabble New England Puritan settlement town, the squabbles and gossip of a small and ideologically fanatical community. I liked reading about everyone’s financial stakes and political ties that may have motivated various key figures’ reasoning; I even enjoyed the psychological speculation and found it fairly believable (it helps that I have some familiarity with gossipy and ideologically driven New England communities; I’m in one or two). In short, I already knew the basics, I’ve already seen the fictional dramatized versions, I was reading this specifically because I wished to be beaten over the head with court transcripts and whiny letters and ancient op-eds and other stuff documenting what happened and what people thought about it, and I was pleased when I got that.
What I did not enjoy was the attempts to make the book more exciting and readable for non-academic audiences, to live up to the promises of “an oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller” made on the front cover and “a work of riveting storytelling” on the back cover. The first chapter is a lot of atmospheric stage-setting that doesn’t tell you much in the way of actual historical context type of stage-setting, or at least not as much as I wanted. The end also winds up with more editorializing than I really cared about, although it does also contain some fun information about the sharply divergent legacies of Salem town and the town of Danvers, formerly Salem village. While I have more patience than a lot of modern readers for overwritten atmospherics in my fictional Gothics, I find I have less patience than a lot of other people for attempts to make nonfiction hip and spicy; I would like my nonfiction to be either straightforward quick reads, accessible and short on fluff, or I would like them to be as dense as they need to be to say the things they need to say to a serious, adult reader. I don’t really need footnotes with pop culture references to make an intermediate-level lay history book accessible; I am perfectly content reading about what a self-important douchebag Cotton Mather was.
The middle chapters were fascinating to me, however; they focused a lot more than much of my previous exposure to the witchcraft trials on the judges and magistrates, and on their political backgrounds and other conflicts of interest/possible sources of motivated reasoning, whereas I feel like I’m used to hearing mostly about either the bewitched girls or the hanged witches (and Giles Corey, of course).
So, overall: Glad I read it, learned a bit, mostly enjoyed it but not quite as much as I was expecting to. Definitely recommended if you’ve already been interested in the witch trials and want to delve a little deeper than whatever you covered in high school or on a walking tour in Salem, but if you prefer podcasts to reading you can get basically all the same information (with bonus Massachusetts accents) from Unobscured.
The contents of The Witches weren’t as new to me as they would have been had I read the book in a more timely fashion upon purchasing it, as it covers a good amount of the same ground as the first season of the podcast Unobscured; if I recall correctly, Schiff was interviewed fairly extensively for the podcast. However, given that I don’t always retain information super well when it’s delivered in audio, and that it was a couple of years ago, I found it quite worthwhile to revisit the same information in book form, especially the stuff that didn’t make it into the accounts of the witchcraft trials that I learned in my more formative years--the relationship between Massachusetts and the Maine frontier never made it into my high school discussions of The Crucible, neither did the fallout from the various Indian wars and the high number of refugees among the afflicted.
Looking at some of the other reviews of this book on Goodreads, I am in the somewhat peculiar position of not always having liked it, but coming from the opposite direction of everyone else about why. I loved the wealth of details, the digging into the minutiae of life in a stifling, hardscrabble New England Puritan settlement town, the squabbles and gossip of a small and ideologically fanatical community. I liked reading about everyone’s financial stakes and political ties that may have motivated various key figures’ reasoning; I even enjoyed the psychological speculation and found it fairly believable (it helps that I have some familiarity with gossipy and ideologically driven New England communities; I’m in one or two). In short, I already knew the basics, I’ve already seen the fictional dramatized versions, I was reading this specifically because I wished to be beaten over the head with court transcripts and whiny letters and ancient op-eds and other stuff documenting what happened and what people thought about it, and I was pleased when I got that.
What I did not enjoy was the attempts to make the book more exciting and readable for non-academic audiences, to live up to the promises of “an oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller” made on the front cover and “a work of riveting storytelling” on the back cover. The first chapter is a lot of atmospheric stage-setting that doesn’t tell you much in the way of actual historical context type of stage-setting, or at least not as much as I wanted. The end also winds up with more editorializing than I really cared about, although it does also contain some fun information about the sharply divergent legacies of Salem town and the town of Danvers, formerly Salem village. While I have more patience than a lot of modern readers for overwritten atmospherics in my fictional Gothics, I find I have less patience than a lot of other people for attempts to make nonfiction hip and spicy; I would like my nonfiction to be either straightforward quick reads, accessible and short on fluff, or I would like them to be as dense as they need to be to say the things they need to say to a serious, adult reader. I don’t really need footnotes with pop culture references to make an intermediate-level lay history book accessible; I am perfectly content reading about what a self-important douchebag Cotton Mather was.
The middle chapters were fascinating to me, however; they focused a lot more than much of my previous exposure to the witchcraft trials on the judges and magistrates, and on their political backgrounds and other conflicts of interest/possible sources of motivated reasoning, whereas I feel like I’m used to hearing mostly about either the bewitched girls or the hanged witches (and Giles Corey, of course).
So, overall: Glad I read it, learned a bit, mostly enjoyed it but not quite as much as I was expecting to. Definitely recommended if you’ve already been interested in the witch trials and want to delve a little deeper than whatever you covered in high school or on a walking tour in Salem, but if you prefer podcasts to reading you can get basically all the same information (with bonus Massachusetts accents) from Unobscured.