The Salem Witch Trials

Undergraduate / Graduate

By the time the Salem Witch Trials ended in May 1693, 200 people had been accused of witchcraft, 30 had been convicted, and 19 executed-most of them women. The Trials are one of the best-known outbursts of violence in American history, often seen as a brief but intense slip into witchcraft hysteria almost a century after European witch hunts had faded out. But the Salem Witch Trials did not occur in a vacuum. This course will place the trials in their religious and cultural context, considering how orthodox theology, popular religion, magic, the supernatural, witchcraft, and gender were understood by Puritan New Englanders in the seventeenth century. It will then examine the trials themselves-both Salem and witchcraft trials more broadly-to tease out the anxieties they expressed (all of which are still relevant today): fear of women, fear of God, fear of change, and fear of the other.