A well-written analysis advocating mainly purely sociological aspects as the cause of the Salem Witch Trials. It didn't complete convince me, though, hence the four stars instead of five. ( )

A provocative book. Drawing upon an impressive range of unpublished local sources, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum provide a challenging new interpretation of the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem Village. They argue that previous historians erroneously divorced the tragic events of 1692 from the long-term development of the village and therefore failed to realize that the witch trials were simply one particularly violent chapter in a series of local controversies dating back to the 1660s. In their reconstruction of the socio-economic conditions that contributed to the intense factionalism in Salem Village, Boyer and Nissenbaum have made a major contribution to the social history of colonial New England...[They] have provided us with a first-rate discussion of factionalism in a seventeenth-century New England community. Their handling of economic, familial, and spatial relationships within Salem Village is both sophisticated and imaginative.
--T. H. Breen (William and Mary Quarterly )

my first book about the witchcraze in the colonies, boyer does a fine job of introducing the subject and the scenery. good for novice and scholar alike. ( )

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/salem/sc...
MSVU
Also See JSTOR by Cedric B. Cowing