Tag Archives: Witch Trials

April 29, 2013

Spring Witches

By daseger

In central and northern Europe the closing days of April and commencement of Spring converge on Walpurgisnacht, a bonfire festival based on both pagan and Christian traditions. On the eve of May 1, the canonization day of Saint Walpurga, an English Christian nun and missionary based in southern Germany in the eighth century (and presumably was so named to replace a pre-Christian harvest goddess also named Walpurga), witches gather to fly off to the highest mountain (in the case of Germany, Brocken Mountain in the Harz mountain range) to pay homage to the Devil with a night-long bacchanalian celebration. Newly-empowered and inspired, they fly back to society, on broomsticks or goats, to continue their demonic service.

Spring Witches

Hermann Hendrich Die Walpurgishalle in Goethes Faust

Fireworks over the Rhine on Walpurgisnacht, 2012, and Hermann Hendrich’s vision, 1901.

Like Halloween, exactly six months later, Walpurgisnacht is a perfect example of early medieval assimilation, in which a saint’s day is grafted onto an existing “calendar” and there is a clash of evil and good, or perhaps a last hurrah for evil before good prevails in the merry new month of May. Evil is always very, very close–but the actual ritual by which the witch enters into the pact with the devil–described and perceived as in inverse Sabbath–happens far away, in a remote place that one could only access through flight. As I wrote about in an earlier post, fears about a conspiratorial demonic force intensified in the sixteenth century along with the Reformation, resulting in over 100,000 trials for witchcraft in the early modern era. Two hundred years later, after the Devil had lost much of his power, he was revived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epic and tragic Faust (1808-1831), with its vivid scenes of Walpurgis Night.

Spring Witches Faust

Spring Witches Faust 2b

Spring Witches Faust 3b

Title page of the 1908 Hayward/Hutchinson translation of Goethe’s Faust, with illustrations of Walpurgis Night by Willy Pogany.

Goethe, along with his near-contemporaries the Brothers Grimm and a host of other authors and artists, was both reflection and inspiration for an intensifying interest in German folklore in the nineteenth century. Witches became more fanciful than fearful; even if it was with or for the devil, they still danced. Given its long association with the witches’ sabbaths, the Brocken and its adjacent Hexentanzplatz  (a plateau long referred to as the “witches’ dancing floor”) became popular tourist destinations. A hilltop hotel on the Hexentanzplatz drew a steady stream of visitors from 1870 on, and the addition of an open-air theater and the Walpurgishalle, a museum dedicated to Goethe and Walpurgis Night, increased their number after the turn of the century. The Hexentanzplatz became a place where everybody could come to dance, on the eve of St. Walpurga’s Day, Beltane, May Day, or simply Spring.

walpurgisnacht pc 1890s

Walpurgisnacht pc 2

Walpurgisnacht in Meissen

The focus is clearly on the Hexentanzplatz hotel in postcards from the 1890s and 1911 (along with the now-naked witches); a century later the more generic Wulpurgisnacht is celebrated in Meissen (photo by Tobi_2008@ Flikr).

4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

October 30, 2012

Weather Witches

By daseger

The witch trials in early modern Europe, which resulted in the execution of between 40,000 and 60,000 people and targeted double that figure, focused on devil worship more than anything else, but maleficia (harmful magic) was often the trigger, and the evidence, for the identification of conspiratorial witchcraft. And of the various types of harm that witches were accused of committing, nothing was more generic, and more harmful, than weather witchcraft. One of the earliest printed depiction of witches makes the connection concrete:  two hag witches are literally whipping up a storm in a cauldron.

Ulrich Molitor, (fl. 1470-1501), De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus (Cologne, 1500).

Even if we can’t understand the fear of witchcraft in our rational era, we can understand the threat of weather witchcraft to a civilization that depended on the climate for food, and life. Our supposed mastery of nature leaves us a lot less vulnerable–at least we like to think so. But in the premodern past, a storm could bring hunger at best and starvation at worst. The source of evil is always a problem in Christianity, as it is in every culture:  why do bad things happen to good people?  The devil and his witches–the servants of Satan–provided an accessible explanation. And for these reasons, I think that the earliest disseminated images of the witch focused on weather witchery:  certainly those of the greatest printmakers of the day, Albrecht Dürer and his apprentice Hans Baldung (Grien) did: Dürer pictures a goat-riding witch attending by several putti and bringing forth rain, while Baldung’s more shapely weather witches are yielding their apple-capped flask to bring forth a storm with the aid of another demonic putto and of course, the demon-goat. This particular image is obviously a painting, but Baldung created several influential woodblock prints of witches depicted in an overtly sexual manner, intensifying interest in them even more in the early sixteenth century.

Albrecht Dürer, The Witch (1500-02), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hans Baldung Grien, The Weather Witches  (1523), oil on panel, Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

As I am writing this, I keep checking for updates on Hurricane Sandy, and I just read about the abandonment at sea of the Canadian replica tall ship HMS Bounty (made for the 1962 Marlon Brando film), and the loss of several members of her crew.  This was the particular witchcraft fear in Scandinavian cultures:  witches stirred up storms at sea and sank ships. You can see this fear illustrated in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus of Olaus Magnus (1555), a grand compendium of Nordic popular culture and folklore, as well as in King James I and VI’s pamphlet about the famous North Berwick trials:  Newes from Scotland – declaring the damnable life and death of Dr. John Fian (1591). Upon his engagement to Anne of Denmark, James spent time in Scandinavia and became exposed to continental witchcraft beliefs: the stormy voyage he endured on his return trip home combined with his belief that as “God’s lieutenant” he was the target of demonic conspiracies inspired him to be a particularly zealous witch-hunter both in Scotland and England.

Magnus’s Historia and Newes from Scotland woodcuts:  Ferguson Collection, University of Glasgow Library Special Collections.

The contemporary record of one of the largest witch hunts in European history, occurring at Trier in western Germany from 1581 to 1593 and resulting in the death of over 360 people, is illustrated with a composite picture of all the activities of witches, including storm-making with a broomstick. In central Europe, hail seems to have been the most commonly-identified form of magical weather and could definitely provoke accusations. Hail does seem kind of magical, if you think about it.

Title page of Peter Binsfeld, Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum (1592).

You can see from the title page of one of the pamphlets reporting the Lancashire (Pendle) trials of 1612, the largest trials in England, that weather witching was one of the accusations, along with riding the wind. I am not certain if any specific weather charges were leveled at the accused witches here in Salem, although I do know that the intense cold, and the hardship it brought to this community, has been considered among several contributing factors in the background of the 1692 trials. This follows the European historiography, which has been considering the impact of the “Little Ice Age” on witch-hunting for some time.

A goat-riding witch brings down a storm:  from  the Compendium Maleficarum of  Francesco Maria Guazzo (1628).

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

October 6, 2012

Big Pumpkins

By daseger

In typical contrarian fashion, I left Salem on Thursday when everyone was coming in for the big parade that signals the beginning of our city’s Haunted Happenings festivities. I was going to try to get in the spirit this year, but I’m not sure if I can. It is certainly difficult to be dour all the time when there are so many fairy princesses running around Salem and I’m sure I annoy everyone around me with my constant critique, but it’s just difficult for me to jump on the “festival” bandwagon:  Salem’s transformation into Witch City, the Halloween destination, seems so solidly and cynically grounded in the 1692 witch trials and the tragic death and suffering of innocent people. I can’t forget that, so I went to the Topsfield Fair in search of big pumpkins.

The Topsfield Fair has been held every year since 1898 as the county fair for Essex County, a region that was urban/rural a century ago but is now quite suburban.  Essex County farmers are dwindling but Essex County gardeners are still going strong, so there were great fruits and vegetables on display but relatively few animals:  and far too few pigs!  Here are some prize-winning chickens (in the Court of Honor–love that), carrots, garlic, honey and a quilt that seems to summon up the spirit of the fair: a very random sampling.

But it was the pumpkins I came for, and one in particular:  the pumpkin grown by a Rhode Island man that set the world record at 2,009 pounds.  I found it encased in the middle of the plants and vegetables building, while the second, third, and fourth-place finishers were shunted off to an empty arena, alone and forgotten. I accidentally came upon them when I went to look for the Clydesdales. I was glad to see the white one (grown by one of Topsfield’s own) as I jumped on that bandwagon quite a while ago.

Appendix:  One idea for my own (smaller) pumpkin, back in Salem:

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Current Events, Salem

September 10, 2012

Two Memorials

By daseger

This weekend the Salem Witch Trials Memorial was rededicated, 20 years after its installation and after a year of renovation and fortification by its original mason.  The Memorial remains the only Witch-trial-related initiative that I can bear in Salem, and the ceremony marking its re-dedication was, for the most part, simple and respectful, just like the Memorial itself.  Descendants of the 20 victims were present, and they placed flowers and rosemary (for remembrance) on their ancestors’ symbolic “graves”, granite benches marked with their names and dates of death built into an encompassing granite dry wall. As you enter the green rectangular courtyard that is the Memorial, surrounded by the colonial gravestones of the Old Burying Point outside of its perimeter, you can read the victims’ protestations of innocence, which are carved on paving stones.  Just like the actual words that were uttered, they are cut off , by the Memorial walls.

Exterior and interior views of the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, designed by James Cutler and Maggie Williams and built by Hayden Hillsgrove; the descendants of the victims of 1692 stand by their ancestors’ markers; John Willard’s marker/bench.

The Witch Trials Memorial is successful because it is so strikingly simple in its understatement:  it does not tell us how to feel.  The victims speak for themselves, until they are cut off.  Unfortunately, the proclaimed mission and attendant speeches associated with the Memorial and the other official commemorative initiative, the Salem Award, attempt to impose a redemptive lesson about tolerance which I believe diminishes the historical tragedy of 1692. If you emphasize the ideal of tolerance above everything else, the presupposition is that the accusers of 1692 were not tolerant of the victims’ aberrant belief system, when there is no historical evidence that the latter were practicing witchcraft. It is always difficult to reconcile the past and the present and not lose sight of one or the other.

Just last summer, an equally evocative memorial to the victims of another seventeenth-century series of witch trials, the Vardø trials in the Finnmark region of northeastern Norway, opened to the public. As with the Salem installation, the Steilneset Memorial is a collaboration between an architect and an artist: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and the late French-born artist Louise Bourgeois.  The Vardø trials, which occurred in two distinct phases in the dead of the Arctic winter (in 1621 and 1662-63), resulted in the execution of 91 people for the crime of sorcery. Zumthor’s two-structure memorial is a far more elaborate construction than Salem’s, but still absolutely austere. The architecture and the art represent both the individual victims and the collective tragedy, via one illuminated window for each of the victims in the long gallery building and a perpetually-burning chair in the “cube” structure next door. Like the Salem Memorial, Steilneset focuses completely on people, and lets its viewers draw life lessons.

The Steilneset Memorial in summer and winter, overlooking the Barents Sea, and the last creation of Louise Bourgeois,  “The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved”.  Photographs by Bjarne Riesto.

7 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Design, History, Salem

April 6, 2012

Easter Weekend Witches

By daseger

Given my city’s reputation, I think it is appropriate for a Salem-based blog to pay tribute to the Scandinavian tradition of påskkärringar: Easter witches.  According to this custom, most likely dating from a folklore “revival” in the nineteenth-century, Swedish children dress up as witches armed with broomsticks and copper kettles and go trick-or-treating on Maundy Thursday, the very day that their distant ancestors supposedly believed that “real” witches left on their journey to the faraway Blåkulla (Blue Mountain) to pay tribute to the Devil in a hedonistic sabbath.  These same witches returned from the mountain for Easter Sunday services (during which they would say their prayers backwards), if they could fit through the chimneys after several days of partying, or avoid the fires that were lit to keep them away.  Glad Påsk (Happy Easter) postcards from the first half of the century appear to feature the påskkärringar far more than they do eggs and chicks (or Jesus) and the tradition seems to be alive and well today.

It’s always interesting to trace modern customs and “traditions” as far back as you can go.  When you examine all the various details that make up the celebration of Easter in Sweden– flying witches, a far-off mountain, branches and bonfires, feasts–there definitely seem to be some pre-Christian elements, combined with pre-modern Christianity and modern commercialism.  At the very least, Blåkulla goes way back.  It is referenced in the key early modern source for Northern history and culture, the Historia de Gentibus Septentionalibus (History of the Northern Peoples) of Bishop Olaus Magnus, first published in 1555.  Magnus makes Blåkulla a bit more tangible by identifying it with a real island in the South Baltic, Blå Jungfrun, which retains its mystical reputation.  He also describes, with a bit of skepticism that is later lost, the activities of witches and devils and other magical beliefs and entities.

The island of Blå Jungfrun, now a Swedish national park; devils and “weather witches” from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, Book Three.

Magnus was writing (and living) right on the precipice:  the period of 1560-1660 was one of intense religious conflict and witch-hunting in Europe.  Sweden managed to escape the former but not the latter, though it was a little delayed: the most intense series of witch trials in the north were the Mora and Torsåker Trials (1668-76), which resulted in the death of 85 people.  The testimony in these trials is characterized by 2 distinct themes:  references to Blåkulla, and the accusations of children, who claimed to have been abducted by witches to demonic sabbaths which took place there.  The reliance on child witnesses, who were allowed considerable time together to get their stories straight, is indeed remarkably similar to Salem.

Title page of Joseph Glanville’s popular Saducismus Triumphus:  or Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions(1682), which includes the Appendix: A True Account of What Happen’d in the Kingdom of Sweden in the Years 1669,1670, and Upwards.

Given the central role played by Swedish children in these late-seventeenth-century trials, it’s a big jarring to see them on Glad Påsk postcards from several centuries later, but this is only one more example of how something very serious (and scary) in the pre-modern past becomes benign in the near-present.  The Easter witches of the past century are so weighed down by kettles and cats, and the occasional chicken and egg, that they have no room for children on their trip to Blåkulla.

Glad Påsk postcards from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s:  by the last decade, Easter Witches were taking planes to Blåkulla!

10 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, History

October 6, 2011

Haunted Happenings

By daseger

And so it begins. Haunted Happenings, the city’s month-long celebration of Halloween, officially begins tonight with the Grand Parade from the harbor to the Common.  If you scroll down the schedule of events, you will see that the celebration consists primarily of offerings by local businesses: Halloween in Salem is a commercial happening more than anything else.  Rather than join in the festivities, I tend to hide out in my house during this long month; I never really accepted the connection between the Witch Trials and Halloween or understood the compulsion to profit on the persecution and death of innocent people.  That said, Salem is far more than Witch City, and maybe more than a few people among the crowds who descend upon the city in October will come to realize that.

October in Salem:  A  commercial awning invades the sacred space of the Witch Trial Tercentenary Memorial and the Old Burying Point beyond.

Actually, Halloween has become increasingly bearable over the past few years as the focus of activities has shifted to family fare and the logistical problems associated with thousands of people descending on a compact city have been addressed: the police have become far more efficient in dealing with crowd control, and the city tries to clean up after everyone.  A decade ago, it seemed as if no one was in control and that was scary.  And everything is relative: more and more real businesses have been established in the city, to balance out the pop-up tee-shirt shops, sausage vendors, psychic parlors, and haunted houses.  This particular year, I am also cheered by the fact that visitors who really care about what went on in 1692 have, for the first time really, several places to go for substantive information, orientation, and context:  the new Salem Museum, on the first floor of the Old Town Hall, and the National Park Service Visitors’ Center down the street, where the new film Salem Witch Hunt. Examine the Evidence, featuring some of the most eminent historians in the field, will be on view four times a day during Haunted Happenings.

So if you’re coming to Salem, my advice (instructions):  take the train (or the ferry), get oriented, look at some architecture besides the Witch House, go to a real museum like the Peabody Essex, have a meal at a great restaurant before your fried dough, and bring home more than a tee-shirt:  the ensembles of witch hats and aprons at Pamplemousse are actually pretty cute.

4 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Salem

September 21, 2011

It Takes a Village

By daseger

The Salem witchcraft hysteria began in the outlying settlements of Salem “town”, or present-day Salem, in Salem Farms and Salem Village (West Peabody and Danvers).  Both areas are quite developed now, given their proximity to Routes 1 and 95, but you can still sense the presence of the past if you look hard enough.  A short walk along Centre Street in that part of Danvers which was once Salem Village is a particularly accessible way to go back in time and place, and see some lovely old houses in the process.

The town of Danvers decided long ago that, unlike Salem, it did not want to be “Witch City”, so many of its witch trial-related sites are literally off the beaten path.  The best example is arguably the most important site related to the witch trials, the excavated foundation of the Reverend Samuel Parris’s parsonage, where the girls began telling their stories.  There is a sign on Centre Street that will lead you to this site, but inevitably it is covered by snow or leaves.  If you can find the sign, you turn off the street onto a little cart path that takes you to the parsonage site.

An 1891 Frank Cousins photograph of un-excavated Parsonage Site

Back on Centre Street, you’re in the midst of several seventeenth-century houses that stood witness to the events of 1692, or, as in the case of the Ingersoll “Ordinary” (Tavern) at the corner of Hobart Street, actually hosted them.  The Ingersoll house was the site of examinations and deliberations, along with the Salem Village Meeting House down the street (no longer standing), before the whole matter was moved to Salem Town.  Now it’s a private house that is for sale—for what strikes me as the rather low price of $366,000.  Exterior and interior views are below.

And here are four more seventeenth-century houses in the vicinity:  a large house with a very impressive wood-shingled roof, just across from the Salem Village Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial on Hobart Street about which I know nothing, several Centre Street houses belonging to the prominent Holten family of Salem Village, and the Thomas Haines House (1681).  In these last two houses lived influential witnesses against  Rebecca Nurse and Elizabeth How, sisters-in-law and two of the victims of 1692.

A Frank Cousins photograph of the Judge Samuel Holten House in 1891

Addendum:  A photograph of the absolutely delightful doubly privy beside the Judge Samuel Holten House, taken by photographer Arthur C. Haskell for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1936 (Library of Congress).

6 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

September 19, 2011

Giles Corey

By daseger

The long life of Giles Cory, the only victim of the Salem Witch Trials to die as a result of torture, ended on September 19, 1692.  Cory suffered from a rare colonial application of the medieval peine forte et dure (“strong and hard punishment”), in which accused persons who “stood mute”, or refused to enter a plea, were pressed to do so literally:  increasingly-heavy weights or stones were placed on the body until the victim complied (or died).  Cory, whose wife Martha would hang three days later, was generally cantankerous, over eighty years old, and a wealthy landowner who had deeded his property to his sons-in-law weeks before.  He had nothing left to lose  and therefore refused to cooperate with his torturers and is even said to have asked for “more weight”. (The few times I’ve been FORCED to attend the show at the Salem Witch “Museum”, which basically consists of a diorama plus audio thrown together around 1972, I’ve been horrified to hear laughter by the crowd at these words).

The Howard Street Cemetery, near the site of Corey’s torture/death.

Even though Cory’s death by pressing is unique in the American experience, there were several English precedents of the previous century.  The most notorious case involved a Catholic woman from northern England, Margaret Clitherow, who was accused of harboring priests in her household during one of the most fevered moments of the English Reformation.  Clitherow refused to participate in the proceedings against her as she did not want to implicate members of her family, consequently she was subjected to a particularly harrowing process of peine forte et dure that brought about her death (and martyrdom) on Good Friday, 1586 and canonization shortly thereafter.


The Torture/execution of Margaret Clitherow, 1586

There was definitely a judicial reaction to the Clitherow case, and in the seventeenth century pressing was used sparingly and only as a death sentence for convicted murderers like George Strangwayes (1658) and Henry Jones (1672).  So the Corey case is conspicuous in the relatively late use of peine forte et dure as judicial torture.  But then again, everything about the Salem Witch Trials is late  from the European perspective.

To me, it seems rather obvious that Cory’s passive resistance to the proceedings of 1692 was motivated by disgust rather than fear of forfeiture of his considerable estate upon conviction:  in July of that year he had already deeded his lands in Salem Farms (now West Peabody) to his sons-in-law William Cleaves and Jonathan Moulton, “being under great troubles and affliction…and knowing not how soon I may depart this life”.

Because of his defiance, Corey has been among the most revered of Salem victims in both literary and historical interpretations of the trials after 1800, including two nineteenth-century plays, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868) and Mary Wilkins’ Giles Corey, Yeoman (1893). In Arthur Miller’s Crucible, the Giles character is irascible and independent, a characterization that is somewhat supported by the historical evidence.  Like the death of  Margaret Clitherow over a century before, Corey’s horrible death went a long way towards ending the circumstances that produced it.

The Giles Cory Marker on Crystal Lake in West Peabody, Massachusetts, in the midst of  what was previously Corey’s 150-acre property.

4 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

September 6, 2011

Back to School

By daseger

It’s back to school week for me, as it has been every single week after Labor Day for my entire life; I went straight from high school to college, undergraduate to graduate, doctorate to full-time professorship.  I’ve been really lucky.  There is a natural rhythm to my year; I do teach a course or two in the summer, but come September, it’s back full-time.  Since it’s time to get a bit more academic, I thought would recommend a few of my favorite  books for my ongoing blog and my upcoming semester.  First some Salem texts.

As I have stated continuously (and perhaps a bit defensively), I am a historian, but I’m not a Salem historian.  I’m not even an American historian; I was trained in early modern European history.  So in order to write with some authority about Salem’s history I have to rely on quite a few sources, primary and secondary.  Here are my favorites:

First and foremost, Salem:  Place, Myth and Memory, edited by Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz.  This compilation of essays on many aspects of Salem’s history and culture, edited by my colleagues at Salem State, Dane Morrison and Nancy Schultz, is absolutely invaluable.  It includes essays on Salem’s colonial, maritime, and industrial pasts, as well as its architecture, educational legacy, and “witch city” present.  If you’re interested in Salem, in either the past or the present, it’s a must-read, must-have book.

One of the contributors to Salem:  Place, Myth and Memory, Robert Booth, has very recently published a book on Salem’s commercial peak and decline, Death of an Empire.  The Rise and Murderous Fall of  Salem, America’s Richest City.  I have to admit that I haven’t actually read this book yet (it’s in my bedside stack of must reads, pretty close to the top), but I am recommending it because Salem’s nineteenth-century history (and all of its non-witch trial-related history) simply must be better covered and understood.  It’s one of the reasons I started this blog.  The subject of the witch trials is definitely in the background of  many of the essays in Salem:  Place, Myth and Memory, but it is not the primary focus; that ground has been covered too often before.  The historiography of the witch trials is vast, and includes such classics and Paul Boyer’s and Steven Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed:  the Social Origins of Witchcraft and John Demos’s Entertaining Satan and more recent works like Mary Beth North’s In the Devil’s Snare:  The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.  For my part, I like Salem Story:  Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 by Bernard Rosenthal, but I think all of the Salem witchcraft texts could benefit from a wider, more comparative focus.  This semester I am teaching one of my most popular (and difficult) courses, “Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe”, about witchcraft beliefs and trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the text that I use, Brian Levack’s The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe should also be required reading for anyone seeking to understand what went on in Salem.

 

I have cited Bryant Tolles’ Architecture in Salem:  an Illustrated Guide often when discussing house histories and styles; it’s got a few flaws but is nonetheless absolutely essential for architectural history.

My final recommended Salem book is The Peabody Sisters of Salem by Louise Hall Thorp.  There is an updated narrative of the lives of the three Peabody girls (Elizabeth Peabody, Boston bookstore-owner and founder of the American kindergarten movement, Mary Peabody Mann, who married the great educator Horace Mann and shared his work), and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne) by Megan Marshall entitled The Peabody Sisters:  Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism, but I prefer Thorpe’s older book, which is wonderful at evoking the mid-nineteenth-century world of the sisters.  I first read it in high school, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move to Salem later on.

And now for something completely different. This semester, I’m teaching three courses at Salem State University:  World History, our core course for freshmen, the Magic & Witchcraft course, and a graduate course  in early modern English history which covers the long period from the Tudors to the American Revolution.  My reading list for these courses is long and varied, but here are some of my tried-and-true favorites.

The world history course is very difficult for both myself and the students; after all, it’s the history of the world–a lot of material (we have two world history requirements, the first covers the period to about 1500, the second the later period).  One book that I’ve used successfully in this course for several years is Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which helps students grasp early globalization in a very accessible way.

For the Witchcraft course, which covers both the medieval background and the early modern era, in which thousands of people were put on trial for witchcraft and at least 50,000 people executed across Europe (compared to 19 in Salem, one reason why comparative perspective is important), we read and discuss the actual trial records in an ongoing effort to ascertain what was going on.  But this is a difficult task, so I also give my students an occasional break by assigned secondary-source “micro-histories” that do the analysis for them:  Malcolm Gaskill’s Witchfinders, about the exploits of English “witchfinder-general” Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s, has been a particularly popular book for this purpose, along with James Sharpe’s  The Bewitching of Anne Gunter.  A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England.

And finally, two of my favorite books from the long list on my Early Modern England syllabus:  Carole Levin’s gender history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, The Heart and Stomach of a King. Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, and Linda Colley’s cultural history of the construction of  a distinct British collective identity, Britons.  Forging the Nation, 1707-1837.  Both are perfect examples of accessible and academic history.

    



1 comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

August 31, 2011

Street Art in Salem

By daseger

At the beginning of the Summer, four large metal sculptures were installed on the streets of downtown Salem, the first pieces of a “full public art program” to follow.  I wasn’t sure about these sculptures at first (both as works and in situ), but I’ve been watching people, especially children, interact with them for several months, and now I like their presence on the street.  The sculptures, by Massachusetts artist Rob Lorenson, will be on Essex and Washington streets until early November.

Unfortunately there is one sculpture downtown that will not be leaving the streets of Salem in November:  the Bewitched statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, which was inflicted on the city by the executives of TV Land (with the full cooperation of the city government) in 2005.  Not only is it a terrible piece of “art” (just look at the “cloud” pedestal! ) but it demeans Salem’s history and the prominence of its site, Town House Square, which has long been the city’s political and commercial center.

Town House Square in 1906.  The Samantha statue is located near the street opening at center left.

In stark contrast to the Samantha statue in terms of taste, historical relevance, and artistic merit is the Witch Trials Memorial installation adjacent to the Charter Street cemetery in downtown Salem, dedicated in August of 1992 by Elie Wiesel in a ceremony that marked the culmination of the year-long commemoration of the Trials’ tercentenary. Designed by artists Maggie Smith and James Cutler, the Memorial features a solemn courtyard enclosed by a stone wall incorporating 20 cantilevered steps, inscribed with the name and date of execution of each victim of 1692.  It is always a poignant place to visit, and was all the more so on an absolutely beautiful afternoon with the remnants of Irene strewn about.


2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Salem

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