ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the Great European Witch-hunt to illustrate the roots of the Salem witch trials in the European experience and understand that, although somewhat late in that experience, the Salem trials were neither historically out of place nor greatly different. It explores the history of witch-hunts in seventeenth-century New England. As was the case in the Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies of the Americas, the British colonists assigned Native Americans to Satan almost from the start. They too believed that prior to their arrival, New England had belonged to the Devil, and that the Devil had a grip on its native inhabitants, that the Devil 'visibly and palpably reigned there', as the Reverend William Crashaw of Virginia put it. The chapter concludes seventeenth-century New England witch trials with two of perhaps the most influential cases of all on the Salem witch trials. They were the cases of Elizabeth Knapp and the Goodwin children.
