ABSTRACT
The lasting regret that westerners feel for the events at Salem, and the witch trials that claimed some 50,000 other lives in pre-modern Europe and America, is a welcome acknowledgement of the sufferings of people in the remote past. The women and men who perished on Hawthorne’s “haunted
height” were as real as us, and it is entirely right that we feel distressed that their lives were taken for reasons that now appear to be profoundly wrong. But we completely miss the point of this tragedy if we see it merely as a miscarriage of justice. Injustices were undoubtedly committed in witch trials, both at Salem and elsewhere, but the prosecution of witches was not inherently unjust in terms of the beliefs and procedures of the pre-modern world. Nor were witch trials the “darkest triumph” of superstition. In fact, Renaissance demonologists were among the first to condemn the “superstition” they perceived among ordinary people. Crucially, the crime of witchcraft was accepted by almost everyone as real. Even Increase Mather and Thomas Maule, along with the great majority of those who condemned the trials of 1692, acknowledged the harm done by witches and the need to punish them by law. “That there are devils and witches”, Mather wrote, “the scripture asserts and experience confirms; that they are common enemies of mankind, and set upon mischief, is not to be doubted”.2 The critics of the Salem prosecutions never questioned the reality of witchcraft; they challenged only the evidence by which the accused were condemned.
