ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a synthesis of the major schools of thought on the Salem witch trials. It goes to considerable length to place the events of 1692 into historical context, both of seventeenth-century New England and of the Great European Witch-hunt, which lasted some three centuries. The people of Salem believed in witches. As George Lyman Kittredge said, what happened in Salem in 1692 was neither an aberration nor an isolated event; it was "a mere incident, a brief and transitory episode in the biography of a terrible, but perfectly normal superstition". Greco-Roman sorcerers, mostly women it was believed, met at night in isolated places, in caves or deserted fields, where they tore apart and devoured black lambs and clawed the ground with their talented fingers, evoking spirits of the underworld. The Hebrew Bible took for granted the existence of malevolent supernatural beings.
