What makes The Witches so fascinating is Ms. Schiff’s ability to show us the details of Colonial life with detail and clarity, in all its facets, from the personal to the public. The research is impressive, but not s0 much as Ms. Schiff’s skill at making lives and times so distant from our own not only interesting, but affecting. Until this book I pretty much assumed that I would never be able to put myself, for even a moment, into the shoes of someone with such overwhelming conviction in causality and religious belief that nearly every innocuous action could be portended to be a Sign, but Ms. Schiff pulled it off.
One of the more intriguing ideas in The Witches is that the Trials was the first time in American history where women had a pivotal role to play, at least until the beginning of the Suffrage movement. Ms Schiff gives us a taste of the rebellious role that many women from this period played in an otherwise Patriarchal society, from famous examples like Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, to the everyday mothers, daughters, sisters and even servants, whom were frequently left out of the history books. Even more astounding is that during the Trials these were, for the most part, unwed teenaged virgins, figures for most of history that have been ignored to the point of being invisible.
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July 2020
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