Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: The Salem Witch Trials: Making Documents Talk with Stacy Schiff

The Salem Witch Trials: Making Documents Talk with Stacy Schiff

Please note: This workshop is during the public school spring break.

In 1692 the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed 14 women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The trial records have disappeared, as have many contemporaneous accounts of that year.  We are left with about 950 legal documents, mostly records of preliminary hearings, depositions, complaints, and arrest warrants. These ‘reports’ are highly unreliable.  Adolescent and pre-adolescent girls leveled the Salem accusations, and what they said has been conveyed to us by men. In the hearing room, reporters recorded answers but not always the questions that elicited them, and summarized testimony in their own words. At the same time, they left detailed accounts of talking cats, enchanted fireplaces, high-speed journeys through the air, and, ultimately, a diabolical Sabbath. While examining the causes of America’s only witchcraft panic, we’ll read several sets of documents closely. What do they reveal and what do they obscure? Whose story do they tell? What can we extract from those accounts and how does one craft a reliable narrative from them – an enterprise that is particularly fraught when the entire crisis revolves around a delusion?

Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of The Witches: Salem, 1692. Her previous books are Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America; and the widely acclaimed bestseller, Cleopatra: A Life. She was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2002-2003.

This seminar is not open to the public. It is only for teachers who have applied and been accepted into the class.