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Review: Stacy Schiff’s ‘The Witches,’ a Reign of Terror in 17th-Century Salem

By Michiko Kakutani

• Nov. 12, 2015
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The feverish Salem witch hunts of 1692 have become a metaphor not just for anti-Communist mania in the 1950s but for the larger strain of what the historian Richard Hofstadter has described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” and for all manner of conspiratorial hate-and-fear mongering, inquisitional madness and communal hysteria.

With her new book, “The Witches,” Stacy Schiff seems to have wanted to strip away the metaphors and go back to the original story of Salem. She gives us a minutely detailed chronicle of nine harrowing months in 1692, which began with the baffling afflictions of two girls (who complained of bites and pinches, and whose bodies “shuddered and spun”) and which led, in the midst of frenzied accusations of sorcery, to the killing of 20 people.

Before this epidemic in the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed, Ms. Schiff writes, “somewhere between 144 and 185 witches and wizards were named in 25 villages and towns”; 55 people confessed to witchcraft; 19 people, including a minister, were hanged; and another man was tortured to death by having rocks piled on top of his prone body.

It’s clear that “The Witches” entailed voluminous research, and Ms. Schiff does a sure-handed job of conjuring the strict, religion-centered world of late-17th-century Salem, using the same descriptive gifts she brought to her compelling last book, “ Cleopatra .” Although the sumptuous, gilded universe of ancient Egypt would appear antipodal to that of Puritan New England, the stories of Cleopatra and the Salem witches both share an operatic quality — and the challenge of capturing the daily realities of cultures seemingly light-years removed from our own.

But whereas “Cleopatra” and Ms. Schiff’s 1999 biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra (which drew a fascinating and nuanced portrait of a literary marriage), featured magnetic central characters, “The Witches” has a blurrily defined ensemble cast. “We know little about most” of the suspects, Ms. Schiff writes, “except that they were accused of witchcraft or confessed to it. They are like fairy-tale figures too in that we recognize them by a sole detail — a quirk of dress, a turn of phrase, an inner tremor.”

More perplexingly, Ms. Schiff has decided not to really address the social, cultural and psychological reasons behind Salem’s witch hysteria (much the same way she curiously declined to grapple with Nabokov’s literary achievement in “Véra”). She mentions various factors in passing — adolescent hysteria, score-settling among neighbors and family members, strict views on appropriate behavior for women, frontier fears of being ambushed or captured by Indians. But she never investigates such dynamics in any depth. As a result, her book lacks the depth-of-field of earlier works like John Demos’s “ Entertaining Satan ” and “ The Enemy Within, ” and Carol F. Karlsen’s thoughtful feminist take on the subject, “ The Devil in the Shape of a Woman .”

Instead, Ms. Schiff has written a straight-ahead narrative of the goings-on in Salem. Some of the visions and tribulations chronicled here still make us marvel at the energetic imaginations of the accusers and afflicted. The slave Tituba described being visited by a tall, white-haired man in a dark serge coat — accompanied by a yellow bird — who threatened to kill her if she did not torture children; the man would appear to her, variously, as “two red cats, an oversize black one, a black dog, a hog.”

Susannah Martin, a blacksmith’s widow, was accused of transforming herself into a ball of fire, turning a dog into a keg, and leaping through a window (disguised as a cat) to strangle a man in his bed. A minister is accused of biting people, and a swarm of witches (numbering, by different accounts, from 25 to 100) is said to have alighted in a meadow.

Of the accused, Ms. Schiff writes, “the youngest of the witches was 5, the eldest nearly 80. A daughter accused her mother, who in turn accused her mother, who accused a neighbor and a minister. A wife and daughter denounced their husband and father. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; sons-in-laws their mothers-in-law; siblings each other.”

Over several hundred pages, the depressing litany of charges starts to sound tediously repetitious — especially since few of the characters, aside from the imaginative Tituba, emerge as memorable individuals, and pale next to the characters that Arthur Miller fashioned in his play “The Crucible.” Readers of earlier books on the subject will also find much of the narrative of “The Witches” dully familiar. After all, as Ms. Schiff herself points out in a Smithsonian magazine essay: “Few corners of American history have been as exhaustively or insistently explored as the nine months during which the Massachusetts Bay Colony grappled with our deadliest witchcraft epidemic.”

The parts of this book dealing with the terrible miscarriage of justice are freshest and most resonant. Prosecutions were based on wild, irrational and unsubstantiated accusations. Guilt was often presumed, and confessions, coerced. As the contagion spread, Ms. Schiff writes, “it became less dangerous to accuse than to object.”

A 5-year-old girl — whose mother was to be hanged as a witch — was shackled, while other children were orphaned and left to fend for themselves. Suspects were thrown into fetid, lice-infested prison cells, and households of the accused were ransacked by a county sheriff and his men.

“The irony that they had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority,” Ms. Schiff writes, “was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials. So was the fact that the embrace of faith, meant to buttress the church, would tear it irrevocably apart.”

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

The Witches

Salem, 1692

By Stacy Schiff

Illustrated. 498 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $32.

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THE WITCHES

Salem, 1692.

by Stacy Schiff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2015

As history, The Witches is intelligent and reliable; as a story, it’s a trudge over very well-trod ground.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer provides an account of a foundational American tragedy of mass hysteria and injustice.

At its best, the latest work from Schiff ( Cleopatra: A Life , 2010, etc.) ably weaves together all the assorted facts and many personalities from the 1692 Salem witch trials and provides genuine insight into a 17th-century culture that was barely a few steps away from the Dark Ages. Religious belief and superstition passed for reality, science had no foothold whatsoever, and both common folk and their educated ministers could believe that local women rode broomsticks, turned into cats, and had the power to be in two places at once. Furthermore, it was a world in which an accusation was as good as a conviction, where seemingly possessed girls flailed and contorted themselves in court, while judges bore down upon helpless defendants with loaded questions. The accused, under the spell of their own culture, could likewise turn on themselves—and not just to save their skin. “Confession came naturally to a people who believed it the route to salvation, who submitted spiritual biographies when they entered into church membership, who did not entirely differentiate sin from crime,” writes the author. “By the craggy logic of the day, if you had been named, you must have been named for a reason. Little soul-searching was required to locate a kernel of guilt.” While Schiff has marshaled the facts in neat sequential order, the book lacks either a sense of relevance or compelling narrative drive. The author writes in a sharp-eyed yet conversational tone, but she doesn't have anything new to say or at least nothing that would come as a revelation to even general readers, until the final pages. This is the type of book that yearns from the beginning for a fresh approach or a new angle.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-20060-8

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

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Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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A Suburb of Hell

Stacy schiff’s history of the salem witch trials..

Illustration by Andrew DeGraff

“Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and the lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former precedents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.” So wrote a minister affiliated with the Salem witch trials of 1692. He could be speaking as well for anyone who’s ever attempted a book-length nonfiction treatment of the tragedy. Novelists and playwrights—most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne (great-grandson of one of the trials’ magistrates) and Arthur Miller —have fared better. They have the license to invent, but more important in this case, also the license to trim. They can whittle down the nightmare of Salem into an indictment of Puritan rigidity or a parable of the paranoid groupthink that intermittently seizes American politics.

The popular historian of the witch trials has a much tougher job. The latest to attempt it is Stacy Schiff, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a purveyor of the sort of sleek, high-end narrative histories about celebrated individuals that make such excellent gifts for older relatives; her most recent book, Cleopatra: A Life , was a No. 1 best-seller. The appeal of applying Schiff’s talents to the witch trials is obvious. A former editor at Simon & Schuster, Schiff is a publishing industry veteran rather than a historian. She, surely, can be trusted to focus on the crowd-pleasing elements of the Salem crisis, rather than getting bogged down in the pettifoggery of historical accuracy.

Yet the result, The Witches: Salem, 1692 , is a disappointment. While by the end Schiff’s book pulls itself into a reasonably cohesive shape, offering some credible (if not wholly original) interpretations of the madness that gripped Essex County between February and October of that year, it begins—like most Salem histories—in a bewildering tangle. The only writers ever able to wrestle this stuff into a shapely chain of cause and effect have been cranks and obsessives peddling theories that promise to trace the madness to a single origin. (The most persistent of these is the ergotism scenario , first proposed in the late 1970s, in which the convulsions and hallucinations of Salem’s “bewitched” accusers are attributed to a fungus that infests grain stores. Although few historians take this theory seriously, it commands a following among indefatigable Internet commenters, some of whom are surely already typing at the bottom of this story.)

The witch trials are fascinating. They offer scary Puritan fanatics, gruesome death, and a supernatural reputation that persists despite the fact that no actual witches were involved . Today, the city of Salem milks this mystique for all it’s worth in tourism dollars, emblazoning its police cars with witch silhouettes and holding extensive Halloween festivities. Teenagers in particular seem drawn to the subject; not only are they often intrigued by the occult and subject to persecution complexes themselves, but children and adolescents stood at the center of the drama in Salem. Perhaps that explains why each of the dozens of books on the subject seems to have collected a string of Amazon reader reviews complaining that it’s “confusing.”

To be fair, it’s hard to keep track of all the players. By the end of the craze, as many as 185 people had been named as witches or wizards in 25 villages and towns. Some were arrested, released and arrested again. Fifty-five people confessed, spinning demented but repetitive yarns about infernal hoedowns where the devil served up red bread and red wine. Nineteen people were hanged, and one man, a stubborn holdout who refused to register a plea in a hearing he regarded as illegitimate, was pressed to death under a gradually increased weight of stones by authorities trying to force him to comply. At least one accused witch died as the result of being imprisoned, with dozens of others, in a deplorable jail whose conditions caused one observer to liken it to “a suburb of Hell.” It’s difficult to keep all these people straight. Most lived lives of routine Puritan rectitude. Their names are vexingly similar—the record is a wilderness of Anns and Sarahs—and each is situated in a mind-boggling web of interrelationship, connected to all the others by blood, marriage, remarriage, church membership, business ties, property boundaries, trauma in the recent Indian wars, the Puritan custom of sending one’s children to live and work in other families’ households, or, in the case of the officials and ministers, Harvard.

The vast majority of the colonists caught up in the craze left no record of their thoughts and experiences during the trials, so there’s very little to distinguish them as characters. The court records themselves are spotty and strongly biased against the defendants. Some diaries and letters from the period were destroyed later, when the witch hunt became a source of shame. Furthermore, on the rare occasions when one of the accused’s statements was taken down, the meaning isn’t always clear. Giles Corey, the man who was eventually pressed to death, was accused by Hawthorne’s great-grandfather of performing sorcery even as he stood before the magistrates. His response—“I am a poor creature, and cannot help it”—seems weirdly out of character with what proved to be his (literally) die-hard defiance. Accounts written after the crisis come from parties who are far from disinterested, particularly big-shot minister Cotton Mather, depicted by Schiff as the consummate ass-coverer. (That said, Mather, who never actually attended the trials, did argue for caution in evaluating the evidence and leniency in sentencing.)

Perhaps organizing all of this into a unified, lucid narrative that makes sense to a contemporary audience is impossible, but step one might be to adopt a straightforward, meticulous style designed to help the reader stay oriented. That’s not Schiff’s game. She owes her success in part to her highly colored, dramatic, often elliptical style. “The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black,” she rhapsodizes at one point, and while I recently spotted a bunch of academic historians ridiculing this bit of poesy on Facebook, I rather liked it myself. Schiff wants to help her reader understand how her subjects felt hemmed in by their vast, dark, unknowable new world. But given that they didn’t understand what was going on, immersing us in their mindset isn’t going to help us understand it either. Schiff also has a habit of putting information in the opposite order in which you want it, presumably to drum up a bit of suspense. For example, she’ll introduce a new character with several sentences of description and only later reveal the person’s name, like a waiter whipping the lid off a platter. This technique works well enough when the character is, say, Julius Caesar, but when she’s just another Martha or Abigail amid a metastasizing list of Puritans, such flourishes only compound the muddle.

Photo by Elena Siebert

The Witches does redeem itself toward the end, with Schiff’s handling of what few seem to realize was the most remarkable aspect of the Salem witch trials: not how the crisis started but how it ended, and how quickly. Since the 1970s, an explosion in primary-source research into local archives has overturned historians’ understanding of European witch hunts. In that context, Salem’s trials were far from extraordinary; in fact, they were a rather typical case. Most witch hunts, and certainly the bloodiest ones, occurred not in the Middle Ages but in the early modern period, when traditional ways of life felt the encroachment of social change. Most were conducted by civil rather than religious authorities; church leaders (Protestant and Catholic) often tried in vain to moderate the carnage. The preferred targets were older women—not healers and midwives, as some wishful feminist historians would have it, but quarrelsome, disagreeable neighbors whom nobody liked and who served as convenient scapegoats when a baby sickened or a hog died. (Still, a good 20 percent of those executed were men.) Once kindled, a classic witch hunt fed on the tinder of grudges and feuds, the long-harbored animosity of people who lived in close quarters with little to spare.

Salem’s witch panic followed most of these patterns. It took place against a backdrop of political instability and uncertainty in a colony whose borders were harried by terrifying clashes with Native Americans. Like a notorious 1675 Swedish witch hunt (much referred to by Mather), it began with fabricating and possibly hysterical children: the 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old niece of the parson of a village on the outskirts of Salem. By the time the crisis reached its greatest frenzy, the most prolific accusers were teenage maids, some of them clearly being fed names of the enemies of their vindictive employers. The Puritans of Salem were extraordinarily fractious even by the usual small-town standards. None of this, however, would have led to such a high body count if it weren’t for William Stoughton, chief magistrate of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, a hanging judge if there ever was one. Stoughton never repented his brutal role in the witch trials. (One judge, Samuel Sewall, would issue a public apology five years later.) The first of the hangings took place in June 1692 and the last in September.

By October, the tide had turned. Critics became more vocal, a courageous act because anyone who objected to the witch hunt was liable to end up accused and imprisoned. Increase Mather, Cotton’s father, published a treatise that tactfully undermined the legitimacy of “spectral evidence” based on apparitions that were only visible to the accusers. The citizenry grew troubled and doubtful when some of the executed victims pled their cases and behaved in ways that seemed incompatible with having sold their souls to the devil. Someone accused the governor’s wife. A privately circulated letter by an Enlightenment-minded Boston merchant, Thomas Brattle, described by Schiff at length, demolished the cases assembled against the accused. “In many ways,” Schiff writes of Brattle, “he seemed to have parachuted into 1692 from another century altogether.”

He did seem so, but the sorry truth is that witch hunts in one form or another can happen in any century. Schiff makes a passing reference to the ritual satanic abuse panic of the 1980s. Several adults, many of them daycare and preschool workers, were convicted of horrific crimes solely on the basis of fantastical testimony coaxed out of small children by therapists and other officials using leading questions. No other evidence supported claims that a vast secret network of devil worshippers lay behind these alleged crimes and perpetrated similar atrocities nationwide. It all sounded very much like the conspiracy to overthrow the Massachusetts Bay Colony and claim America for the Prince of Darkness said to be behind the infestation of witches in Essex County in 1692. The inclination to turn against and purge our neighbors seems to be ever-present in human nature, a devil worth learning to recognize and battle the next time he raises his head.

The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff. Little, Brown.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff’s “The Witches” tells the spine-chilling tale of bloodthirsty spirits that still haunt American soil today: righteous ignorance and casuistic self-interest.

These are the twin forces that propelled the Salem witch trials of 1692 to catastrophic proportions, leading to the jailing of hundreds of New Englanders for supernatural crimes, and, before the fever passed, the public execution of 14 women, five men and two dogs. Many more died of poor treatment in jail or after their release, or from having been orphaned or abandoned by imprisoned parents; the effect on the regional economy is incalculable.

For those modern-day Puritans in search of original sin, American history presents no shortage of candidates — the transcontinental slave trade and Native American genocide have far higher body counts. Yet Schiff makes a strong case for the Salem trials as foundational, a “national nightmare” in which superstitious dogma and contentious colonial politics came together to turn a xenophobic community against itself.

Since winning a Pulitzer Prize for her 2000 biography “Vera (Mrs. Vera Nabokov),” Schiff has tackled an impressive range of subjects: Benjamin Franklin, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and, most recently, Cleopatra. With “The Witches,” however, she ventures into her first history without a clear protagonist. It’s a messy topic, as evidenced by the sprawling cast of characters listed in the front of the book, but her attraction to the subject is clear: “History is not rich in unruly young women,” she writes, adding, “it would be difficult to name another historical moment so dominated by teenage virgins, traditionally a vulnerable, mute, and disenfranchised cohort.”

Most readers have a passing familiarity with those “unruly young women” from Arthur Miller’s McCarthy-era fictionalization of the witch trials, “The Crucible.” Nine-year-old Betty Parris and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams began twitching uncontrollably in February 1692. Soon the symptoms of what is now thought to be “conversion disorder” or hysteria spread to a core group of wailing, thrashing teenagers ready to swear they could see certain villagers invisibly choking them, pricking them with pins, flying in spectral form, assuming the shape of cats and dogs and suckling ghostly canaries and other familiars from “witches’ teats” in between their fingers.

In the rush to root out the Satanic scourge, neighbor turned against neighbor, husband accused wife, child accused parent, and eventually, through some combination of Puritan guilt and expediency, individuals accused themselves — and were by and large spared the gallows, particularly if they were willing to point the finger. The youngest confessed witch was 5 years old; she spent eight months in shackles and later went insane.

Schiff goes to great lengths to help modern-day readers understand how and why the accusations were taken so seriously. In 1692, she notes, the practice of medicine was often indistinguishable from witchcraft; a case of hysteria, for example, had been treated by a Salem physician “with a brew of breast milk and the blood from an amputated tomcat ear.”

Religion, too, was riddled with superstition. Influential Boston ministers Increase and Cotton Mather agreed with the learned men of their time that witchcraft was real, even if they didn’t always agree on how it worked; for literal-minded Puritans, the only real difference between a prayer and a spell was to whom you directed it.

Schiff conveys something of the force of this credulity in passages that narrate supernatural events without setting them off as reported speech: “Skimming groves of oak, mossy bogs, and a tangle of streams, Ann Foster sailed above the treetops, over fields and fences, on a pole,” she opens one chapter. “It was mid-May 1692; after a wet spring, a chill hung in the air.”

Schiff has a knack for such juicy details, but proves equally skilled at depicting the network of authority figures who converted a seven-days’ wonder into a full-scale disaster. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, its population thinned by the climate and Indian wars, was struggling for independence in the wake of the dissolution of its charter and the appointment of pro-Anglican Dominion governor Edmund Andros. A 1689 coup ousted Andros, but left a vacuum of power in which opportunism dressed up as righteousness had ample room to play. When a new charter was finally issued, the governor that came with it, semi-literate treasure-hunter William Phips, landed in the middle of a giant mess he was ill-equipped to deal with.

In a story full of blunderers, gulls and scoundrels, the closest thing to a true villain is William Stoughton, chief justice of the witchcraft court. Stoughton seems to represent the spirit of his unsavory times for Schiff: “In the course of six convulsive years, Stoughton had served in four different regimes,” she writes. “He resigned, recused himself, sidestepped and turned coat more than anyone else of his time.”

Ever the shape-shifter, Stoughton doggedly stood his ground as an anti-witch hardliner, overriding a reprieve from Gov. Phips in at least one instance. After the witch craze had brought the region almost to ruin, others examined their consciences and even publicly apologized. Stoughton alone never expressed a whiff of doubt, serving as governor for six years and dying full of pious remembrances, including a huge endowment for Harvard, where a building still bears his name. Now that’s scary.

Amy Gentry is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas.

“The Witches: Salem 1692”

By Stacy Schiff, Little, Brown, 498 pages, $32

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Book Review: The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.

It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, THE WITCHES is Stacy Schiff’s account of this fantastical story-the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historian

I know non-fiction books can be dryer then fiction but this one is just something else. The author is acclaimed and many people loved her Cleopatra book but this is just way to dry. I hate that because the Salem Witch trials are a fantastic time to write about. This book was a slog from page one to page end. It had a fair amount of good details but everything was just so flat and dry history does not have to be that way.

The worst part of it for me I think was that while she gave good facts but everything was just left not connected and details that would have been interesting were cut. It feels like the author just cut all the good juicy meat off the bone and left the leanest most boring cut to be read. Not the worst book ever but it is a massive slog. You have to really be dedicated to make it through.

My Gemstone Rating:

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The Witches: Salem 1692. A history by Stacy Schiff, book review

Mass hysteria surrounding the notorious witch-trials at salem is vividly re-created but the question of 'why' still lingers, article bookmarked.

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Arthur Miller described it as the "coming madness" in the overture of his 1953 play, The Crucible, which dramatised the moment in late-17th-century America when paranoia intersected with persecution to cause the perfect storm in the small town of Salem. Where, amid a God-fearing colonial community in Massachusetts, 20 men, women, children – and two dogs – were sentenced to death for witchcraft. The eldest was almost 80, the youngest, five. Some issued last pleas of innocence before being tripped off the scaffold. Between 144 and 185 witches were named in 25 villages and towns. Spectral visions of women flying through the air, or turning into cats and birds, were used as evidence. Girls, believed to be "bewitched" victims, provided a ghastly sideshow of fits and contortions to the gallery to corroborate the workings of sorcery.

Whether this was madness or mass hysteria, it was short-lived; a feverish delirium arriving in February 1692 and abating in May 1693. It is not the duration nor the death toll that makes this historical moment such a dark one, but the question of why a small, insular community of New Englanders ended up turning on one another with such fear and ferocity. Schiff provides reasons, though none particularly new: the alien threat lurking in the "wilderness" (Miller wrote of the fear of "Indian tribes marauding from time to time"); the Puritan's New World piety that inspired moral surveillance; the settling of old scores among neighbours who began informing on each other (Miller, again, wrote of "long held hatreds of neighbours [that] could now be openly expressed...").

The storm began when two girls, Betty and Abigail (the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris respectively) began having fits. Their stories of being bitten and tortured by spectres were taken as court evidence by ministers and prosecutors (few of whom were formally trained in the law); a special court was set up and it brought on the domino effect of more bewitched girls, more accused women (and a few men), and more defendants strong-armed into confessing to witchcraft in hope of escaping a death sentence.

The freshness that Schiff brings to these cases is in the colour and detail of the courtroom, the dungeon-like prison in Boston where the accused waited trial, and the gallows too. She points out that "no trace of a single session of the witchcraft court survives". The court reporting that remains is woefully inaccurate, with judgements being made and written into proceedings, the defendants' words mangled or omitted. So Schiff's is a feat of historical excavation and also of colourful reconstruction of the defendants, the husbands (never wives) who informed on them, the prosecutors and their grudges and the few rare folk who evaded the hangman's noose. We are given these people's family contexts, their appearances and court dialogue is vividly captured. Much of it is moving: the story of the six-year-old who confessed to being a witch; the case of pious Martha Corey who questioned the mental health of the "bewitched" girls on whose ravings she was sent to hang; the deviant outlier women like Sarah Osborne, Bridget Bishop and Sarah Good, the latter of whom was a semi-itinerant beggar who "constituted something of a local menace" and who seemed like pests to their neighbours sooner than broomstick demons. There was no way out for the accused: if they were church-goers, the court was reminded that witches had long infiltrated congregations; if they accused the "bewitched" girls of possession, they were demonic to think such a thing; once they got to court, their fate was met by these catch-22s.

Where there is ample colour, the triggers as to exactly why the witch-hunt began, and exactly why it stopped, remain misty. The final chapters are more analytical, and the most interesting as a result, when individual motives are examined – those of the men who dominated the trial, the bewitched girls whose fits fed it – most of the latter were fatherless and Schiff wonders whether their fits brought them the attention they badly craved. She tells us what came of the prosecutors, the claims of incompetence ("the ground shifted… the witches gradually became martyrs") and what happened to the bewitched girls as adults – some turned to prostitution, some married and some simply disappeared from historical record.

A discussion on "hysteria" in relation to the bewitched girls is all too brief, perhaps because of the lack of historical evidence. Schiff mentions the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, the neurologist who worked with hysterics in 19th-century Paris, and conjectures that these girls might have suffered from a similar malady. She makes a feminist case for these girls who "made themselves heard". This is disputable if, at the same time, she tells us that they were manipulated; confessions from some of the girls in adult life told of being groomed by prosecutors, and fed their words. Given more material, they would make a riveting book in its own right. Much has been written on the historical misogyny behind witchcraft accusations. Maverick, sexually-assertive women had, long before Salem, been classed as "witches", which feminism puts down to patriarchy's fear of femaleness. Schiff touches on the gender paradoxes of the Salem cases. On the one hand, there was a sense of rounding up vagabond women who defied New England's strict gender conventions that forbid them even to shake a fist in public. On the other, it was not just women at society's bottom rung who were persecuted (though the wealthy did get special privileges). Rich women and also men such as the well-bred former minister, George Burroughs, were not saved. He was, in fact, seen as the ringleader, his name barely uttered for fear of invoking the devil, like Salem's own Voltemort.

There is, in Schiff's final argument, the idea that Salem left a taint on national character. A certain "paranoid style" persists in American politics – "that apocalyptic, absolutist strain still bleeds into our thinking", she writes. There is perhaps a danger in extrapolating thus from one appalling act of historical delusion – where would that leave post-Holocaust Germany's national character? The more enduring lesson here is that the fear of terror can unleash its own terror, though frustratingly in the case of this book, one is still left wondering why.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20. Order at the discounted price of £17 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop

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‘The Witches: Salem, 1692’ by Stacy Schiff

The “average New England churchgoer absorbed some fifteen thousand hours of sermons” in a lifetime, Stacy Schiff reveals in her meticulous and disturbing history of “America’s tiny reign of terror”: “The Witches: Salem, 1692.’’

“On intimate terms with the supernatural,” Puritans were repeatedly reminded by their ministers that the devil was “watching, wishing, snatching, to devour us.” In their zeal for religious vigilance, the godly people of Salem “stripped the calendar of every festival and holiday,” which only made the risk of bewitchment worse. After all, Schiff writes, possession “rarely occurs in the absence of intense piety.”

With “The Witches,’’ Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author, most recently, of “Cleopatra,’’ draws on a huge body of scholarship as well as primary sources to synthesize her own erudite chronicle of a community in crisis, weeding through centuries of accreted mythologies to tell, from its strange start to its wretched finish, what actually took place in several localities north of Boston at the end of the 17th century. She tells us what happened there. But the bigger question, of course, is why?

While acknowledging the established frames of interpretation — adolescent psychology, the politics of gender, issues of class, and a dozen more — one of Schiff’s strongest contributions to this American horror story is her constant reminder that while we may never be able to definitively explain exactly why 19 people (and two dogs) were executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts (owing in part to a concerted effort to expunge any public records), we can still learn something from it. “The Witches’’ is not merely the story of the Salem witch trials — it is a cautionary account of our human tendency “to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous [and] drown our private guilts in a public well.”

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The horror began in January 1692 in the Salem home of minister Samuel Parris. His 11-year-old niece Abigail Williams and his 9-year-old daughter Betty complained of “prickling sensations . . . bites and pinches by ‘invisible agents.’ They barked and yelped. They fell dumb. Their bodies shuddered and spun.” The list of strange, spasmodic symptoms went on and on.

A lone physician in town, William Griggs, is believed to have diagnosed the cause to be supernatural. And it was contagious: The number of accusers and accused grew until the plague had spread to 25 nearby villages and towns; in Andover, one out of every 15 people would be accused of witchcraft.

What was behind the panic? Schiff argues that conditions “favored such an outbreak. The talk around Betty and Abigail was fraught, angry, apocalyptic.”

These were a people so vulnerable to what Cotton Mather called “diseases of astonishment” that they postponed Harvard College’s graduation on account of an inauspicious eclipse. In this community, “[n]ot to believe in witchcraft [was] the greatest of heresies.”

The witch hunts lasted nine months, during which as many as 185 people were imprisoned and brought to Salem’s newly-formed court of oyer and terminer for criminal trial. By the end of 1692 14 women and five men had been executed, all publicly hanged except 81-year-old Giles Corey, who over two long days was slowly crushed to death by planks and stones as spectators urged him to confess his collusion with the devil. He never did.

As the paranoia spread it soon became evident that “it was safer to be afflicted” by witchcraft “than accused,” and naturally the number of accusations escalated. “A wife and daughter denounced their husband and father. Husbands implicated wives . . . siblings each other . . . A woman who traveled to Salem to clear her name wound up shackled before the afternoon was out.” Attempting to clear one’s name was in fact the worst possible strategy: Every single defendant who actually confessed to witchcraft was spared; only those claiming innocence were executed. For it was not the accused’s place to determine innocence or guilt; in this highly structured society, “[j]ustices and ministers alone unriddled witchcraft.”

The fact that many more women than men were accused and convicted fits with the contradictory role women held at the time. Women had no political rights in New England and were regarded as the weaker sex. Yet female religious leaders, such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, were considered potential threats to the very foundations of society. Further, women were constantly appearing as the strong, daring, wily heroines of the Indian captivity and escape narratives that became, as Schiff suggests, templates for stories of witchcraft.

The series of show trials and gruesome executions finally wore down the psyches of the public and officials. By late 1692 those in charge, who were some of Massachusetts’s most esteemed public figures with names that still resonate in the state — the ministers Increase and Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall (a street in Brookline is named for him), William Stoughton (the town of Stoughton is named for him, as is a residence hall at Harvard), and John Hathorne (ancestor of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who added a letter to his name to obscure the relationship) among them — began to cover their tracks.

Salem was a community of “[m]aniacal record-keepers,” Schiff writes, but they “made an exception for 1692.” Thomas Putnam, Salem’s official court recorder, rewrote the village record, deleting any events that were, in his words, “grievous to any of us in time past or that may be unprofitable for time to come.” Schiff states with stunned bluntness: “No trace of a single session of the witchcraft court survives.” What we have instead are the personal notes of community members, some of whom heard the stories second hand.

Over the past three centuries, however, historians have resurrected much of the world Putnam tried to erase. Schiff balances an elegant, almost imperial narrative style befitting the scale of the tragedy with a sensitivity to the individual lives that were destroyed. Five-year-old Dorothy Good, for example, who “spent eight and a half months in miniature manacles. Her infant sister died before her eyes. She had watched her mother, against whom she had testified, head defiantly off to the gallows.” Little Dorothy “went insane;” Schiff writes: “she would require care for the rest of her life.”

Horrifying as it was, Schiff never distances herself or the reader from the human experience she has recounted. “We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs,” she reminds us. “[W]e just don’t know yet which ones they are.”

THE WITCHES: Salem, 1692

By Stacy Schiff

Little, Brown, 498 pp., illustrated, $32

Buzzy Jackson is a historian and the author of “The Inspirational Atheist: Wise Words on the Wonder and Meaning of Life.’’ Email: [email protected]

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that there were no physicians in Salem at the time.

Book review: “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” by…

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Review: 'the witches: salem, 1692,' by stacy schiff.

While settling New England in the 17th century, the Puritans brought an eccentric panoply of customs and beliefs, including an unshakable faith in the menace of Satan and his agents on Earth — witches, both female and male.

As Stacy Schiff meticulously chronicles in her sumptuous new work, "The Witches," the Salem scare of 1692 began in the austere residence of the village minister but then rapidly engulfed the Massachusetts countryside.

In her retelling we hear a kind of colonial primal scream, a uniquely American blend of religion and paranoia, "a little story that becomes a big one, much more than our national campfire story, the gothic, genie-releasing crack-up on the way to the Constitution."

Early in the year, the Rev. Samuel Parris' young daughter and niece showed signs of supernatural affliction, moaning and thrashing about one moment, silent and still the next.

Soon other girls were complaining of similar symptoms and accusing fellow villagers of ghostly visitations, ceaseless torments. The colony elders — among them William Stoughton, chief magistrate and Schiff's chief villain — convened hearings to figure out what the hell was going on.

By summer the Salem jail had filled with witches of both genders and all ages, from a toddler to a grandmother. The hysteria radiated outward, snaring other communities, such as Andover and Ipswich.

As Schiff moves into the trials and convictions, her narrative slows down, its language tightening beneath a surfeit of detail: Cotton Mather's self-serving observations, Stoughton's cruel reversal of Rebecca Nurse's acquittal.

Ultimately 13 women and six men were hanged, with another hapless victim, Giles Corey, pressed to death under stones. They proclaimed their innocence to the end, while virtually all confessed witches were spared, including Tituba, who disappeared from the historical record shortly afterward.

Schiff regains her stride in the book's conclusion, where she analyzes the trials' aftermath, tickling a later witch-centric myth, "The Wizard of Oz" (both the L. Frank Baum and film versions): "Past the window flew warped versions of the girls' fears … the detritus of dreams and nightmares, scraps of gossip and political darts, a veritable Chagall of cats in the doorway and neighbors in the orchard."

A few girls atoned as adults but without disclosing their motivation.

Schiff nimbly connects Salem's fatal mania to subsequent witch-hunts, such as McCarthyism and the rise of Movement conservatism, revealing how close we remain to the specters and demons that stalked the Bay Colony more than three centuries ago.

Hamilton Cain is the author of "This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing." He lives in Brooklyn.

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The Witches, by Stacy Schiff

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Review by Brit McGinnis

The narrative pushed by history buffs about the Salem Witch Trials is that the victims of this hysterical part of American history were wise women who had rare knowledge. But the truth is much more complicated.

In her book, The Witches , author Stacy Schiff challenges us to think past our own biases and see to the true historical heart of the Salem Witch Trials . Through incredibly detailed and research-informed writing (that allegedly required eight research assistants), Schiff paints a portrait of an incredibly complicated time in history full of extreme stress. In learning about this time period, we can think more critically about our own society and how it reacts to extreme turmoil.

But we can only guess. Fourteen women, five men, and two dogs were killed for the offense of witchcraft. We still don’t know why it happened. Modern attitudes about history may paint the Puritans as crazy. But Schiff is here to challenge everything we know about the people who accused – and died being known as – witches.

A Fuller Picture

As Schiff points out, modern people have a certain view of the past that does not reflect what actually happened. Yes, the people who underwent the Salem Witch Trials were straight-laced Puritans who thought the devil could be found everywhere. But they also insisted that their children learn to read, to the point of socially shaming their neighbors who didn’t teach their children.

As Schiff explains in a chronological telling of this period in history, the accusations of witchcraft also didn’t come out of nowhere. Both the town and the village called Salem were broke, barely surviving but feeling pressure to care for increasing numbers of settlers (especially war widows). England-appointed governors were overthrown by local officials who cared little more for the people. With all the historical content she gives, it’s easier to see how an entire community snapped.

The Meaning of the Witch

In this period of history, people saw witches as people of any gender that could perform wondrous feats of magic due to a pact with the devil. With New England witches in particular, this ranged from flying through the air to coming out dry from walking on a wet road. Schiff suggests that more than anything, a witch was someone perceived as knowing more than everyone else around her. Witches admitted when they were tired or unsatisfied, taboo in a Puritan culture where idle hands were the tool of evil. Witches allegedly “sold their souls” for time to help with chores, travel, and nice shoes.

Schiff’s writing style can definitely be described as dense. The Witches is not an easy read, and all the names and concepts can at times become confusing. But it’s in these overarching concepts that her research-based writing shines. She widens our view of the world and humanizes the highly religious Puritans to people existing in a society as relatable as our own.

Complicated Victims (and Villains)

Schiff doesn’t paint the accused witches or the accusers as helpless. Her work to portray the people involved in this story as complicated reveals just how much more relatable the Puritans are than they have been portrayed in film and art. The accused slave Tituba was not a wicked voodoo sorceress in reality, but a cornered Indian woman who knew how to play the game in a devout society. One executed witch was a known thief. More than a few were objectively shady individuals who were disliked in the community for valid reasons. Parents likely nudged their daughters into accusing family enemies.

Schiff injects personality and human elements into a story, from a previous century, which truly makes this book worth reading. The themes of societal stress and how people express it continue to be relevant today. The book shines brightest when we understand the Puritans, stirring their porridge, looking over their shoulders and hoping they won’t see a man with a black hat and a book of names written in blood.

Brit McGinnis is an author and editor from Portland, OR. She writes on Medium , The Salve, and covers weird news for The Stacker. She was named a Hero of Haddonfield by the filmmakers behind Tales of Halloween in 2014.

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A community that “snapped” is an idea that resonates in a post-Jan. 6th world. Also, seeing how a highly-religious group (in Salem, the Puritans) finds a way to lay blame is an idea that relates to today, as science is shoved aside, and blame is put on women for seeking healthcare in this post-Roe generation. Just typing the words, “post-Roe,” brings visions of suffering, blame, heartache.

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History Book Reviews

The witches: suspicion, betrayal, and hysteria in 1692 salem by stacy schiff.

• Author: Stacy Schiff
• Published: 2016

We have all heard of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, when fourteen women and five men (as well as two dogs) were executed for witchcraft. But how many of us can say that we have been there, squinting in the smoky dark meeting house where the trials were held, smelling the wet ash and the acidity of fresh pressed cider, and seeing the fear of the accused as they are taken to the gallows? Miraculously, after reading Schiff's The Witches I think I can say that I have.

Honestly this book was so magical that if we lived in 1692 I think Stacy Schiff would be hanged as a witch. It was utterly unlike any other history book I have ever read, to my great surprise and delight. It felt like Schiff was writing directly to me--it was raw, honest, conversational history that was written in a way that made me feel like I was living it. Consequently, throughout the whole book I was filled with an impotent rage and frustration that actually made me curse out loud, and harass all my friends and family with the details, trying to figure out why ON EARTH this tragedy happened and what the f*** was wrong with the people of Salem.

The Salem witch trials are universally known, the events of 1692 historically famous, yet the details are little known by the general public. The things I read in The Witches actually blew my mind, and I cannot believe I never knew them before. One of the more shocking facts...the entire ordeal was created and perpetuated by teenage girls! They thrashed around and acted strangely, complained of being bitten by spectral figures, and then named names. This appeared to be contagious, as people by the dozen began falling prey to the same affliction, most of them pre-teen or teenage girls as well. As the trials and even executions got underway, these girls would stand in the court and look the woman (or man) they accused in the eye, and swear they were witches. Knowingly sending them to their deaths for something they must have known wasn't true. But that wasn't even the most mind-boggling thing: Many of the accused actually confessed willingly. Many confessed to things that had happened after they were put in prison, so it obviously wasn't genuine. But why????

There is honestly WAY too much amazing content and detail in this book to even begin to summarize. Schiff explores the whole phenomenon from beginning to end in brilliant detail, painting a remarkably vivid picture of Salem in 1692 and the forces that overcame the town. Fascinatingly, most of the book is written in the perspective of people from that time, and reading it made me feel like I was living in 1692, experiencing the whole thing myself. There was very little analysis or removed historical perspective, which was very unique. On one hand it was frustrating because I desperately wanted to know the modern explanation and scientific theories for what happened, but on the other it was quite wonderful to be placed so intimately inside the history that I could almost feel it. That is something that is incredibly difficult to achieve, and Schiff did this beyond my wildest dreams.

Frankly, it's hard to believe that anyone in Salem really believed in what was happening. I think they really did believe in the idea of witches, but their perception of what characterized a witch was very bizarre. Here are the basics of what I learned: Witches love to perch on exposed ceiling beams, tip hay out of wagons, enchant bags of corn and pails of beer, bake witch-cakes, turn into blue boars and scurry mischievously under horse hooves, and conjure glow-in-the-dark jellyfish. You can always tell someone is a witch if they walk soundlessly over loose floorboards, spin suspiciously fine linen, culture uncommonly good cheese, and, my personal favorite, smell figs in other people's pockets. Let's be honest, there MUST be better uses for magical powers than this. Sure, it's all in good fun to bewitch skillets and food products and keep cats disguised as toads, but I'm just saying, I would sure be disappointed if I sold my soul to the Devil and those powers were my only reward.

The sad and truly baffling fact is that people accepted this literally based on the stories told by 11-year old girls, and sent people to their deaths based on imaginary crimes. Husbands accused wives, daughters accused mothers and grandmothers, brothers and sisters accused each other. The oldest to be accused was a woman of nearly 80, the youngest a girl only five years old, who was chained in prison for nine months. This was a world where confessed witches were spared but people who claimed innocence were put to death. It was a world where it was as sure sign of witching if you couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer blunder-free--but also if you could. This was hysteria, panic, chaos, absolute bedlam. It was maddening to read about, but completely addictive. There is good reason to call Salem our "national nightmare," and this book proves it.

This book was masterful and special, and I loved it more than I can say. In the end Schiff did offer some historical analysis of what happened, but I was still left desperately trying to seek a rational explanation that made sense. The Witches is compelling, infuriating, and powerful, brilliantly recounting the history of the Salem witch trials in intimate and personal detail, perhaps more than we might be comfortable remembering. It is a work of art, and a good lesson to always keep your best linen and cheese for yourself. And for heaven's sake, if you smell a fig in someone's pocket, just don't bring it up.

About The Author

Stacy schiff.

Stacy Schiff is an American Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian, as well as a guest columnist for the New York Times. Schiff was born in Massachusetts, and worked for many years as a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. She has since published five historical books to great acclaim, and has been awarded fellowships and the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of... Read more...

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The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem Paperback – September 20, 2016

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• Print length 512 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Back Bay Books
• Publication date September 20, 2016
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.38 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 031620059X
• ISBN-13 978-0316200592
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (September 20, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 031620059X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316200592
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.38 x 8.25 inches
• #29 in Historical British Biographies
• #39 in U.S. Colonial Period History
• #362 in U.S. State & Local History

About the author

Stacy schiff.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Stacy Schiff is the author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Her previous book, Cleopatra: A Life, appeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. Cleopatra was translated into 30 languages. Schiff’s other work includes Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. Schiff is a Guggenheim and NEH Fellow and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She received the 2019 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

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The Witches : Book summary and reviews of The Witches by Stacy Schiff

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The Witches

Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

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Readers' rating:

Published Oct 2015 512 pages Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra , the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.

It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story-the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.

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"Starred Review. Compulsively readable... The best-selling Schiff never disappoints, and her eagerly anticipated account of the Salem witchcraft tragedy lives up to expectations, providing a fascinating account of one of the most infamous years in American history." - Booklist "This retelling succeeds as a work of gripping popular nonfiction, but for those already familiar with the subject, it will serve only as light reading." - Publishers Weekly "This fully documented narrative, if a bit exhausting and disorganized, will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories as well as Schiff's legion of fans." - Library Journal "As history, The Witches is intelligent and reliable; as a story, it's a trudge over very well-trod ground." - Kirkus

Author Information

Stacy schiff.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry , Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America , winner of the George Washington Book Prize; and i>Cleopatra : A Life . Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.

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Stacy Schiff

• 2015 (Hardcover)
• Little, Brown & Co.
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The Witches: Salem, 1692

The pulitzer prize-winning author of cleopatra , the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the salem witch trials..

It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an 75-year-old man crushed to death.

The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is the enduring American mystery unveiled fully by one of our most acclaimed historians.

Audio Sample

Listen to a sample from the audio edition of The Witches , as read by Eliza Foss.

Reviews and Praise

"An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller: J. K. Rowling meets Antony Beevor, Stephen King, and Marina Warner... Schiff's writing is to die for." The Times (London)

"Schiff brings to bear a sensibility as different from the Puritans' as can be imagined: gentle, ironic, broadly empathetic, with a keen eye for humor and nuance. Thanks to this, and to Schiff's narrative gifts, the present-day reader flits above New England's smoky chimneys and thatched rooftops... it is wizardry of a sort—in a flash of brimstone, a whole world made wondrously visible." The Atlantic

"Her research is impeccable; no previous writer has scoured the documentary record to such great depth. Moreover, she has mastered the entire history of early New England—from long before to well after the year of the witch-hunt. At relevant points she reaches across the Atlantic to include European witchcraft as well. This enables her to provide deep, richly textured background for specific moments and situations. Indeed, readers may experience her narrative as a virtual tour of the time and place. Her recreation of courtroom scenes is especially convincing; one feels, almost palpably, their pulsating mix of words, actions, and—above all—emotion... Schiff's skills as a writer extend to such formal matters as structure, pacing, and point of view. The various parts of the narrative unfold in apparently seamless succession. At some points they speed up, at others slow don; however, a reader feels no bumps or jarring turns along the way. She moves in for close-ups and draws back for overviews. Now and again she inhabits her characters, yet she maintains throughout the authority of an omniscient narrator who is firmly in charge." John Demos, The New York Review of Books

"As in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Cleopatra , Schiff excels at finding fresh angles on familiar stories, carries out massive research and then weaves it into a dazzling social panorama. In Henry James's phrase from The Art of Fiction , she is a writer on whom nothing is lost....a superb account of the Terror of Salem. Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post

"Every page of The Witches is almost scandalously pleasurable, the phrases rising, cresting and falling like all the best incantations. [Schiff] casts a spell on you." (4 Stars) USA Today

"The hottest biographer on the block...She returns to give her dazzling IRL treatment to the Salem witch trials, and unlike the blatantly allegorical The Crucible , passing H. P. Lovecraft references, and Hocus Pocus, or any other pop-culture reference to Salem, Schiff's book is actually about the people who lived through the trials. Schiff is at her best, infusing a historical event with as much life, mystery, and tragedy of any novelist. The scariest book on the list, because everything in here actually happened." Vanity Fair

"I fell in love with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff within the first few pages of Cleopatra —not just for her gifts as a researcher, which are prodigious, but for her prose style, which is almost fantastically elegant. (What other author of popular history do you read for the sentences? I can't think of one.) Now Schiff is back with The Witches , a gripping, meticulously researched, sumptuously written history of the Salem witch trials and their historical context, and I'm falling in love with her all over again. It's always easier, of course, the second time around." Chicago Tribune

"She writes with such spirit and agility that to read her books is something like watching a great dancer. To say that her latest book is fascinating and insightful is hardly sufficient. It's brilliant from start to finish." David McCullough, Favorite Reads of 2015

"Eerie and engrossing. As a popular historical writer, Schiff is a proven spellbinder. Schiff may not lead us out of the dark, but she makes it an inviting place to linger a while and listen to fresh details of a familiar story all over again." Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"In this beautiful retelling of one of our ugliest tales, Schiff describes the sheer strangeness of the trials and the society from which they spring." Boston Globe , Best Nonfiction Books of 2015

"Riveting and thrilling...Schiff's account of these terrors reads like a nerve-shredding psychological thriller." The Mail on Sunday (London)

"Haunting...the first major commercial nonfiction book on the subject in decades...Ms. Schiff instead delivers an almost novelistic, thrillerlike narrative of those manic nine months. By sidestepping most of the popular theories, The Witches ...stands out from much of the existing literature." The New York Times

"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... Context is everything, and Schiff defines it; she interrogates her sources, makes every detail count, and her style is intriguing—sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian." Hilary Mantel

"Though the Salem story has been told many times, Schiff's splendidly written account brings it thrillingly to life... Her intelligence, pithy prose, and storytelling flair carry the day, sweeping the reader along to a realm at once forbiddingly foreign and frighteningly familiar." San Francisco Chronicle

"She provides a trial narrative unsurpassed for detail and impressive for her mastery of fragmentary and frustrating sources." The Wall Street Journal

"Masterful...Schiff painstakingly reconstructs not just the events of 1692 but the world that birthed them." The Los Angeles Times

"Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Schiff ( Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov , Cleopatra ) chronicles the surrounding events [of the Salem witch trials], painting a vivid portrait of a homogenous, close-knit network of communities rapidly devolving into irrational paranoia....Discarding false legends and lore while expertly capturing and communicating the social climate of this particular time and place, she provides a compulsively readable slice of Americana that will appeal to both book clubs and a wide variety of individual readers....The best-selling Schiff never disappoints, and her eagerly anticipated account of the Salem witchcraft tragedy lives up to expectations, providing a fascinating account of one of the most infamous years in American history." Booklist , starred review

"Riveting nonfiction." Entertainment Weekly Fall Books Preview

"[Schiff] provides exciting digressions into the nature of continental and New World witchcraft, local political and social disputes, religious instruction, and Puritan life....The last 50 pages are the strongest as they pose possible explanations for why the craze occurred and the various motivations of the afflicted, the inquisitors, and confessors....This fully documented narrative...will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories as well as Schiff's legion of fans. Library Journal

"Pulitzer-winner Schiff ( Cleopatra: A Life ) applies her descriptive prowess and flair for the dramatic to the Salem witch trials. The book is packed with details and delivered with a punch...Schiff's passionate use of the active tense places the reader right in the midst of the action...This retelling succeeds as a work of gripping popular nonfiction." Publishers Weekly

"Engagingly thorough, thrillingly told, and bracingly authoritative." NPR

"Unlike the drudgery of the movie adaptation of The Crucible , which you probably watched in high school, Schiff writes with conviction and a strong sense of narrative, elevating the dry snooze of history to a new level. It's an endlessly fascinating read." Gawker

"Few authors set the scene of history quite like Stacy Schiff...[her latest] brings a fresh eye to the worst misogynist atrocity in American history, tracing the complex cultural and psychological origins of the Puritan hysteria." Vogue.com

"Schiff's account is better written than any I have encountered....you are likely to find yourself turning the pages (as I did) with a sense that until now you'd never quite taken in what happened...[a] brilliantly assured narrative." Christianity Today

"Stacy Schiff gets it. She gets people. She studies lives tirelessly and fiercely and perfectly, and when she is finished studying, she publishes works of flawlessly interpreted, beautiful, and meticulously researched prose....has the gripping narrative of a novel...Schiff's exacting eye and compelling narrative voice take us closer to comprehension than ever before." Barnes & Noble Blog

"Fantastic...reminds all of us that witches are highly imaginative and smarter than you and disrupt the patriarchy wherever they go." Kristin van Ogtrop, TIME Magazine

"Compulsively readable." Newsday

"Remarkable...Schiff delves into the minds and history of 1692 Salem as no one has before." Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Brilliant, exceptionally well-researched account of the 1692 Salem witch trials...Much of what is so compelling about The Witches is how vividly Schiff brings this very different era to life...This narrative approach works so well because Schiff just happens to be a superb and witty writer.... The Witches definitely sparkles." Bookpage

"Masterly...Alternately absurd and heart-rending." The Economist

"A comprehensive illumination of an unsettling period of American history that continues to captivate our cultural imagination." Christian Science Monitor

"With fresh feminist insight, Schiff plumbs the mindset of late-seventeenth-century New England to explain our original 'national crackup.'" Elle

"No stone [is] left unturned.... Schiff recreates the most chill-inducing, finger-pointing months in American history." Marie Claire

"[Schiff] brings her gifts to the confusions of Salem, piecing together a dramatic narrative from disparate and often tersely unrevealing sources." Harper's

"Brilliant.... Schiff writes movingly as well as wittily; this is a work of riveting storytelling as well as an authoritative history." Guardian

"Absorbing and enlightening." Miami Herald

"Spellbinding." Daily Beast

"[A] must-read." Cosmopolitan

"Diabolically entertaining." More

"A masterful modern reassessment of the deadly and tragic mania that gripped the colonies in the late 17th century." Globe and Mail

Further praise for The Witches

"History in the hands of Stacy Schiff is invariably full of life, light, shadow, surprise, clarity of insight, and so it is again and then some in her latest work, The Witches . Few writers combine as she does superb scholarship and an exceptional gift for language with amazing reach and agility of mind. This is a superb book." David McCullough

" The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692, and no one else could tell it with the otherworldly flair of Stacy Schiff." Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quartet

"From Cleopatra to the Salem coven. From intelligent rule to hysteria, mayhem, and murder. The Salem witch trials offer Stacy Schiff an out-sized drama that seized Americans' imaginations more than 300 years ago. All of Schiff's books demonstrate her rigor as a historian and her dexterity as a stylist. The Witches proves she has something else: the instincts of a thriller writer. This book needs a seat belt." Kathryn Harrison, author of Joan of Arc

"Once again Stacy Schiff dazzles us. The Witches is a must read for anyone intrigued by this baffling and horrifying chapter from America's Puritan past. What Schiff uncovers is mesmerizing and shocking. Her meticulous research and lyrical writing lay bare an injustice that we should never forget-lest we repeat it." Patricia Cornwell, author of Depraved Heart

" The Witches is a vivid investigation of the original American nightmare. Stacy Schiff brilliantly teases apart the strands of myth and history. In an age when superstition remains a vibrant and dangerous force, her book is, alas, also relevant." Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World

"This brilliant, compelling book is the most meticulously researched, effectively constructed, and beautifully written work I have read in a very long time. It is dramatic history and also a timeless thriller: who—or what—drove a New England town to madness three centuries ago, resulting in the deaths of nineteen men and women for 'witchcraft?' The answers are astonishing." Robert K. Massie, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Catherine the Great

"Enchanting. Out of the shadows of the past come excitable young girls, pompous ministers, abusive judges, grieving parents, and angry neighbors, all of them caught up in a terrifying process that seemed to have no end: discovering who among them deserved death for being in league with Satan. The Witches is as close as we will ever come to understanding what happened in and around Salem in 1692. Courtrooms, streets, churches, farm yards, taverns, bedrooms—all became theater—like places where anger, anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy are entangled. An astonishing achievement." David D. Hall, Harvard University

"Stacy Schiff's The Witches is an indelibly etched morality fable, the best recounting of the Salem hysteria in modern times. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Schiff makes the complex seem simple, crafting a taut narrative that takes in religion, politics, folklore, and the intricate texture of daily life in Massachusetts Bay, with particular attention to those 'wonder-working' women and girls who chose this moment to blow apart the Puritan utopia they'd helped to found. It's all here in one devilish, oracular book." Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller

Stacy Schiff has beautifully combined remarkable story telling with historical accuracy and insight. She has opened up important new avenues for Salem scholarship." Bernard Rosenthal, editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

"Stacy Schiff has brought her extraordinary gifts as researcher and writer to revivify the old but endlessly compelling story of the 1692 Salem witch hunt. Her mastery of detail, her ingenuity in spotting connections and trend lines, and her intuitive feel for the people involved combine in a brilliant portrayal of cascading human tragedy. It is sharply etched. It is ground level. It is emotionally powerful. It is full of surprising twists and turns. If history is time travel, this is a journey readers will never forget." John Demos, author of Entertaining Salem

"Schiff delves into the archive to remind us that one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history was also one of the few moments which featured regular women—not queens, not goddesses, but mothers and wives and daughters and servants—at the very center of drastic historical change. A wrenching, unforgettable read." Katherine Howe, author of The Appearance of Annie van Snideren

2015 year-end best-of lists and recommended reading

USA Today , Top 10 Books of 2015 "An exhaustively researched, gorgeously written history of the Salem witch trials that unearths what really happened and why it matters in 21st-century America."

Time Magazine's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2015 "With her impressive attention to detail and atmosphere, she conjures an eerie vision of the 17th century."

NPR's Great Reads for 2015 "Eerie and engrossing. As a popular historical writer, Schiff is a proven spellbinder. Schiff may not lead us out of the dark, but she makes it an inviting place to linger a while." — Recommended by Maureen Corrigan, book critic, NPR's "Fresh Air"

Boston Globe 's Best Nonfiction Books of 2015 "In this beautiful retelling of one of our ugliest tales, Schiff describes the sheer strangeness of the trials and the society from which they sprang."

Washington Post 's Notable Nonfiction of 2015 "Schiff's contribution to the familiar story of the Salem witch trials is her penetrating evocation of the environment that engendered them."

San Francisco Chronicle 's Best Books of 2015 "Schiff's splendidly written account brings it thrillingly to life."

David McCullough's Favorite Reads of 2015 "To read her books is something like watching a great dancer. To say that her latest bookis fascinating and insightful is hardly sufficient. It's brilliant from start to finish."

Hilary Mantel's "Book of the Year," Times Literary Supplement "Sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian."

Bloomberg 's Best Books of 2015

Amazon's Best Books of the Month, November 2015

Apple iBooks Best Books of 2015

Book Review

The witches: salem, 1692 by stacy schiff.

by Elyse · Nov 5, 2016 at 3:00 am · View all 8 comments

The Witches

by Stacy Schiff

October 27, 2015 · Little, Brown and Company

More Info →

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Genre: Nonfiction

So, unsurprisingly, it turns out being a woman in 17th century New England was not awesome. I mean, it was probably awesome for some people, but not a lot. Stacy Schiff’s 500 page analysis of the famed Salem witch trials doesn’t shy away from the gender politics that lead to the “execution of fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft,” although Schiff also never points to that as the sole reason for whole bizarre episode.

The Witches : Salem, 1692 is an incredibly detailed account of what happened during the Salem witch trials. Starting in early 1692, hysteria regarding witches and devil-worship resulted in between 144 and 185 people being accused of witchcraft and nineteen people being executed (and those two dogs — I feel really, really bad about those dogs). The Salem witch trials have become imbedded in our culture, thanks to everything from The Crucible to R.L. Stine’s The Betrayal (totally read that at summer camp, y’all). It’s so wrapped up in popular culture that the facts of the story have been confused–and it’s a confusing episode in history already. The puritans did not do an amazing job of keeping written records of the event, so names get mixed up, and Schiff does an admirable job of sorting it out. This book is heavy on detail, and even with Schiff’s expert recounting of events, I still had to frequently flip to the Cast of Characters to remember who was who.

This book is predominantly about the What of the Salem witch trials, so if you’re looking for a conclusive Why to explain the reason all this insanity happened, The Witches may prove a tad disappointing. I was hoping Schiff would wade in with analysis as to the cause of the hysteria—and to an extent she does–but she focuses more on documenting the facts of the case and letting the reader draw her own conclusions.

Schiff does hint at reasons for the hysteria that plagued this New England town, and she points out that it was a complex affair involving a lot of people with a lot of motives. The episode can’t be boiled down to a single cause and effect. For me the most fascinating parts of the book were the discussions about how the crisis upended traditional gender roles:

At twelve and eleven, Ann Putnam Jr. and Abigail Williams, Parris’s niece, were the youngest of those under Satan’s supernatural spell. Nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid, and twenty-year-old Mary Warren, the wavering Procter maid, were among the eldest. None of the four left a diary. Nor did any other Puritan girl. Even assuming she had paper and could write, she would have had little opportunity to do so in the course of a day spent milking and spooling, churning, weeding, washing, and candle-making. Only in the devil’s presence did the girls enunciate their desires, which come to us by way of the court clerks; we get the girls’ hankerings under duress and at a remove.  […] History is not rich in unruly young women; with the exception of Joan of Arc and a few underage sovereigns, it would be difficult to name another historical moment so dominated by teenage virgins, traditionally a vulnerable, mute, and disenfranchised cohort. From the start, the Salem girls made themselves heard. Theirs quickly proved the decisive voices. By April a core group of eight girls assumed oracular import. Twitching and thrusting, they played the role of bloodhounds, soothsayers, folk healers, moral authorities, martyrs to a cause.

Like I said, being a young woman in 17th century New England was not optimal. The Salem girls were under intense stress that would be hard for a 21st century audience to fully understand. They were under constant threat of attack by Native Americans (or at least they thought they were). Their domestic burdens were intense, and they were expected to be totally subservient to their fathers, but only until he was replaced by a husband. Some of the girls were servants, bringing them lower than a daughter in terms of power. There were rumors of sexual abuse in some households.

Not that life was easier for adult women; one woman claimed that Satan literally offered her peace and quiet in exchange for her soul.

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

“No, I wouldst the kids shut up for ten fucking minutes, ok?”

So when young women began exhibiting signs of demonic possession–said twitching and thrusting–Schiff points to

Grudges, disputes and biases no doubt came into play during the many accusations. Some of the accused pointed to others in an effort to save their own lives.

I found it fascinating that the women accusers claimed witches tortured them with physical pain–pinches and pricks. The male accusers claimed that the witches climbed into their beds at night. Perhaps that alone says something about how divided gender roles were in Salem.

In some respects turning to the supernatural made a lot of sense:

Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. As Samuel Parris was discovering, it deflected divine judgement and dissolved personal responsibility. The devil not only provided a holiday from reason but expressed himself clearly; for all the perversity, his motives made sense. You did  not need to ask what you had done to deserve his disfavor, preferable to celestial rebuke–or indifference. And when diabolical machinations were what you were watching for, they quickly became what you saw. Amid glaring accountability, witchcraft broke up logical logjams. It ratified grudges, neutralized slights, relieved anxiety. It offered an airtight explanation when, literally, all hell broke loose.

It’s little snippets of explanation like this, amid the chronicling of the trials and who was accusing whom, that I liked best about The Witches . A big part of this book was breaking fact away from fiction: what really happened that year, who really was involved. It’s incredibly thorough, and also a little dense and dry. When Schiff starts examining the cause behind the hysteria (not that one single cause existed), I was really fascinated. She spends time discussing the fallout from the witch trials as well: many of the young “afflicted” women never recovered fully, and the community itself was riddled with guilt, confusion and shame.

The Witches is a engaging read. It steps away from the titillation of the Salem witch trials, rolls up its sleeves, and digs deeply into record and fact. I would have appreciated more analysis from Schiff into the cause of the crisis, and the text was occasionally dry, but the story overall is fascinating, in depth, and well told.

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The Witches by Stacy Schiff

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Thanks for the review. I’ve been contemplating ‘The Witches’ because I’m interested in the Salem trials.

Another good book on the issue is ‘In the Devil’s Snare’ by Mary Beth Norton. She points out that Salem was weird even in the context of witch trials. Prior to Salem, an accusation of witchcraft didn’t immediately lead to a conviction. It was investigated, and there were guidelines, including two independent witnesses. I find that *fascinating*. I want a book about a Puritan version of buddy cops who investigate witchcraft, or ‘CSI: Salem’.

You liked this much more than I did. I couldn’t make it past the 3rd chapter.

I read it for a book club and I’m not sure anyone finished it – the consensus was that the subject was fascinating but the book was a slog.

As a recovering academic, this sounds a lot like a dissertation that got lightly spruce up and repackaged for mass market. I am tempted (I love details, and can really appreciate what it takes to piece together a spotty historical record), but the lack of larger historical analysis would probably drive me batty.

I hope this book points out in 100% crystal clear terms, that the Salem Witch trials and executions did NOT take place in what is present day Salem, MA. No matter how much present day Salem capitalizes on the tourists.

The Salem Witch trials took place in Olde Salem Village, now called Danversport, a neighborhood in Danvers, MA.

I hope this book also makes it 100% crystal clear that no one in Colonial America was burned at the stake. That barbarity occurred in Europe.

I went to college in Salem! Hey, Salem!

I have not heard great things about this book. Most opinions seem to conform with @cleo’s – dry, along with some odd authorial …opinion…insertion? I haven’t read it, but that keeps scaring me away.

I initially tried to keep up with the many Salemites mentioned in this fascinating yet extremely overwhelmingly long book, and eventually gave up, and continued reading without absorbing a lot of the very dry and yes repetitive (the names changed the accusations were very similar) information.

Sorry for the run on. 😉

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

“No, I wouldst the kids shut up for ten fucking minutes, ok?”

I cackled. I’ll give it a try!

I think you guys are being generous. My book club and I read this when it first came out and every single one of us thought it was virtually unreadable. I’m not sure that any of us got all the way through it and that’s saying something considering the Graham Greene tome we read leading into this one. It was a shame since the author is clearly very talented and the subject is so interesting.

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Michael Douglas stars as a flirty Ben Franklin in this Apple TV+ series

David Bianculli

Franklin is worth watching — not only for what it reveals about how the U.S. won independence from England then – but also about the complexities of war, and international politics now.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The fight for American independence has inspired many dramatic treatments, from the Broadway musicals "1776" and "Hamilton" to the TV miniseries "George Washington" and "John Adams." Now, Apple TV+ adds to that specific historical subgenre with an eight-part miniseries called "Franklin." It's about Benjamin Franklin's multiyear visit to France in hopes of persuading that country's leaders to side with the American colonies in their rebellion against England. Starring in the title role as Benjamin Franklin is Michael Douglas. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.

DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: This new eight-part miniseries is based on the book "A Great Improvisation" by Stacy Schiff and begins its story in December 1776. The fight against the British isn't going well. After a recent battlefield defeat, the number of soldiers in the Continental Army is dwindling, and supplies and morale are even lower. The commander in chief of the Armed Forces, General George Washington, writes to Congress, I think the game is pretty near up. It's at that time that Benjamin Franklin is dispatched to France on a secret mission to enlist the French as allies against the British. Franklin lands in a small boat in the dead of night, then rides towards Paris in a carriage accompanied by his grandson Temple Franklin, played by Noah Jupe from "A Quiet Place." Michael Douglas, as the elder Franklin, wastes no time at all establishing his reserved yet quietly confident approach to the role.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FRANKLIN")

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) For a young man's instruction, Paris is the only city - much to indulge the senses but also engage the intellect.

NOAH JUPE: (As Temple Franklin) I thought I was meant to help you.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) No doubt you will, somehow or another.

JUPE: (As Temple Franklin) How long must we stay?

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) Until we win France through our side and secure our independence - or we are hanged.

JUPE: (As Temple Franklin) Is there a third choice?

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) I suppose there's always treason.

BIANCULLI: As the Franklins are fighting for liberty, it should be noted that, as with virtually all historical dramas, there are some liberties taken in the retelling of this fact-based story. When the real Ben Franklin made his trip to France, for example, he was accompanied by two grandsons, not one. But paring down the story and the cast makes for a clearer generational and personal conflict. The grandfather Franklin speaks softly, chooses his words carefully and disguises his true intentions in every conversation. The grandson, not so much. And their two differing clashing personalities are clear from the start. From the very first contact Ben Franklin makes, taking his grandson to meet Edwin Bancroft (ph), a friend whom Ben hopes will provide some sort of entree into the French court. Bancroft is played by Daniel Mays.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) The Congress has sent me here to elicit France in our war against England.

DANIEL MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) Oh, no wonder your guts are twisted.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) As an unofficial emissary, I cannot approach their side directly.

MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) You're looking for a go between.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) Someone well placed at court.

MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) Well, I have some patience of influence.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) See? I told you we could rely on Mr. Bancroft.

MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) Whether they can be persuaded to oblige themselves.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) I'll do the persuading. An introduction will suffice.

MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) America's situation, it's not ideal.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) I count the loss of New York as nothing. Armies merely regrouping by springing another 80,000 trained men. And the deeper the British press into the continent, the worse they will fare.

MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) You concur in this opinion, Master Temple?

JUPE: (As Temple Franklin) Respectfully, sir, we are outmanned, outgunned and outspent. There are many who side with the enemy, including some I, at least, hold dear.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) Remind me to instruct you in the usefulness of the well-timed lie.

MAYS: (As Edward Bancroft) Does he speak the truth?

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) Unless the French court provides us with men, money and arms, the United States will end before it has begun.

BIANCULLI: "Franklin" is written by Kirk Ellis, whose credits include the "John Adams" miniseries, and Howard Korder, who, like "Franklin" director Timothy Van Patten, worked on a period piece set in a much more recent period, "Boardwalk Empire." Together, they balance both sides of the scale just right. There are lavishly staged and photographed scenes of the powdered wig French aristocracy attending operas and having opulent dinners, but there also are dimly lit intimate scenes with two people whispering of intrigue. Sometimes those hushed conversations are political, and sometimes they're more of a seduction, because Ben Franklin was a bit of a rogue and a flirt. A side of the role that Michael Douglas of "Fatal Attraction" fame nails effortlessly, as when he first meets a woman to whom he's clearly drawn.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin) Benjamin Franklin, ma'am. Lay to the printing trade from the city of Philadelphia.

LUDIVINE SAGNIER: (As Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy) Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy of Passy.

DOUGLAS: (As Benjamin Franklin, speaking French).

BIANCULLI: The sexual distractions in this drama are amusing and quite varied. Ben Franklin is invited to play cards with Marie Antoinette, the French queen, while his inexperienced grandson is escorted to a French brothel. But it's the political flirtations that are the true spine of this "Franklin" miniseries. Like the movies "Lincoln" and "Jefferson In Paris," "Franklin" is about the long, compromising path to a particular goal - the large setbacks, the small triumphs and the perseverance that make victory possible. And finally, there's the context of this centuries-old story as it applies to our time. Ben Franklin is branded as an insurrectionist. There are high-level government debates about whether and how to fund a country that's at war with a repressive enemy, and there's talk about the rebellious Tea Party and what constitutes a true patriot. All in all, "Franklin" is worth watching not only for what it reveals about how the United States won independence from England then but also about the complexities of war and international politics now.

GROSS: David Bianculli is professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the new miniseries "Franklin," starring Michael Douglas. It begins Friday on Apple TV+.

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll talk about the great Serengeti land grab. Our guest will be Atlantic staff writer Stephanie McCrummen. Her new article is about how Gulf princes, wealthy tourists and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai - cattle-herding tribespeople - from their grazing lands in Northern Tanzania. I hope you'll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF ADAM BIRNBAUM'S "PRELUDE IN DB MAJOR")

GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Franklin review – Michael Douglas is absolutely compelling in this period drama

The star is utterly convincing – if slightly creepy – as Benjamin Franklin in this Apple TV+ miniseries about the polymath. Shame they’ve chosen to base it on such a boring period of the statesman’s life …

Y ou have to admire the chutzpah of Apple TV+. They’ve chosen to make an eight-part miniseries out of the towering intellectual-slash-action figure of Benjamin Franklin – the son of a Boston candlemaker, who ran away to Philadelphia at 17 and rose to become one of the US’s founding fathers, via polymathic stints as a printer, publisher, inventor, writer and scientist. And they’ve based it on what was surely one of the least televisual accomplishments of his entire storied career.

Franklin (whose eponymous hero is played by Michael Douglas) is adapted from the historian Stacy Schiff’s 2005 book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America. It tells the story of the then 70-year-old statesman’s unofficial eight-year-long series of negotiations with the Gallic great and good, beginning in 1776 as America’s losses in the revolutionary war looked set to crush the young nation before it had fairly begun. Over to Paris hops Benjamin in the hope that the – well, let’s call them longstanding contretemps – between the French and the English would help him persuade the former to provide money, weapons and other supplies to the beleaguered seekers after independence.

His teenage grandson Temple (Noah Jupe) accompanies him – not his son, William, because he is a wellknown loyalist (and the less charming Frenchmen Franklin meets like to bring this shame up from time to time). Temple learns a lot about diplomacy and even more about fashion and fornication as he is taken under the wing of the Marquis de Lafayette (later to become a hero of révolutions américaine et française and more importantly, a star in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), played by Théodore Pellerin. Metaphors about seduction and chess abound as grandfather tries to keep the boy’s focus on their real mission.

Unfortunately for the viewer, that mission is composed mostly of meetings. Some more clandestine than others, but mostly in virtually indistinguishable chateaux with virtually indistinguishable French ministers and rich men. Those we do learn to pick out – such as the secretly sympathetic foreign minister Comte de Vergennes (Thibault de Montalembert) and the wealthy merchant Chaumont (Olivier Claverie), who decides to help fund US independence for the trading opportunities that would result – too often get sidelined by lesser characters. We spend too much time with the pawns in this monumental chess game, when we would really rather be concentrating on the alliances and treacheries among the main pieces.

Franklin is dogged by the same slight but dreary sense of worthiness that attended Apple’s other recent foray into US period drama, the meticulous Manhunt (about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the conspiracy behind it, and – almost as a distasteful afterthought – the capture and trial of his killer, John Wilkes Booth). This time, though, it doesn’t even have the background pursuit of a murderer to keep things moving. Douglas is wholly convincing as the experienced but idiosyncratic statesman and 18th-century celebrity. And he has his usual undeniable presence (so compelling but always with a hint of creepiness at the edges). But Franklin himself was wearying by this point in his illustrious career and it feels as though we are concentrating on the wrong part of his astonishing story. And when Congress becomes frustrated with Franklin’s perceived lack of progress and send John Adams (Eddie Marsan) over instead, Douglas/Franklin has to join le comte and Chaumont towards the sidelines too.

Doubtless it plays slightly better in its native land, where Franklin’s more immediately interesting and understandable accomplishments are better known. It probably feels more like a wrong being righted as an underacknowledged period of the national hero’s life is given its due. Whether this is quite enough to bring the punters in and satisfy the expectations for entertainment they have – mostly rightly – come to expect from Apple TV+, I am not nearly so sure.

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