The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

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Over time, ambition led colonists to look outwards in comparison to their neighbours who were more prosperous or held a higher social standing than them. Jealousy fuelled arguments, arguments created distrust and soon accusations of witchcraft would spread like wildfire, levied against those in the community who were seen to not be pulling their weight economically, socially, and ideologically. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman My only previous knowledge of this area and time period comes from accounts of the Salem witch trials and acting in a production of Miller's 'The Crucible'. I mostly think of those horrific events as being the result of bouts of mass hysteria, but Gaskill gives an interesting elaboration on the economic, social and religious factors which contributed to the spate of witch trials that occurred during these decades in both England and the American colonies. The author gives a well judged overview of how large scale transformations in society directly contributed to the extreme actions of individuals. Though people in the small, rapidly-growing communities in New England had to rely on one another there was also a lot of envy and mistrust. Gaskill's research dramatically places us in the psychological mindset of these figures by drawing upon historical records and their testimonies.

The subtitle is pretty indicative, and the book seems much more interested in richly detailing life in colonial Springfield and contextualising what we know is coming than going down the easy route of sensationalising a witch trial. The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World is a historical account — a piece of nonfiction written with the fluidity and narrative heft of a novel — about a small New England town in the 1600s. It's so easy to see how mental illness, illness and disease, superstition, jealousy, greed and hypocrisy paid such a part in the death of so many women (and men in some cases) LoveReading exists because books change lives, and buying books through LoveReading means you get to change the lives of future generations, with 25% of the cover price donated to schools in need. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives.This was an interesting journey into the lives of Hugh and Mary Parsons, who both lived in Springfield, America, and how they both met terrible consequences, die to their unpopularity within the village and because accused of performing witchcraft. This book has been structured well, and Gaskill has obviously done his research on the history of Springfield, and the surrounding areas. It was amazing to handle English records that William Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, had brought to America in 1630, and which had travelled only a mile in nearly four centuries. That thread of continuity fired my imagination. And when I wasn’t sitting in the archives, I was walking and surveying. Historians should go to the places they write about, and downtown Springfield helps one to visualise a lost world because so much of the modern street plan corresponds to the original layout of home lots and lanes branching off Main Street. Today, Springfield is a big city – but its beginnings were humble and precarious. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ I like microhistory, I like social history, so this is pretty much a slam dunk in terms of targeting me personally. Some wondered if I’d been at my wits’ end, but that wasn’t it at all. Like many academics, I disliked the managerial rhetoric and creeping commodification of higher education, largely resulting from student fees. But the most compelling reason for leaving was simply that I had done the same thing for 27 years, taught similar courses again and again, and said everything I felt I had to say about early modern England. It was time for a change. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. In my mind, the word ‘witch’ is often seen as gendered and synonymous with women, however in the book Hugh Parsons is accused of witchcraft along with his wife, Mary. Was it a conscious choice to position both a man as well as a woman at the heart of these accusations?The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of love and liberty, of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich, previously neglected source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death.

As his 759 footnotes attest, Gaskill is an academic of note – an emeritus professor of early modern history. But The Ruin of All Witches is no stuffy textbook, as he weaves primary sources – much of it gleaned from Springfield founder William Pynchon’s Deposition Book, found in the New York Public Library – into a thriller worthy of Stephen King. And like King’s works, the supernatural permeates his story. Home & Garden Ask Diarmuid Gavin: Can you give me some ideas for plants for an interior courtyard that’s quite dark? 03:30

Malcolm Gaskill Press Reviews

Springfield’s fortunes have been mixed. People were divided about my admission that being alone and travelling on foot there made me afraid: some were defensive and dismissive of the impressions of a timid Englishman abroad; others were more sympathetic and saw that mostly I was expressing admiration for the city’s history and the resilience of its people. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place…Thought-provoking and absorbing.”—Hilary Mantel, best-selling author of Wolf HallA contextually rich history of the first witch panic during a tumultuous time in Massachusetts in 1651. The superstition, hypocrisy and despair in Mary in particulars tale was both tragic and eye opening at the same time. David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai Even on the voyage there they felt pursued by the powers of evil. “Babies’ cauls were prized as talismans against drowning. Red-hot horseshoes were nailed to masts as protection, and stories were heard of alleged witches thrown overboard.” They brought all of these dreads and suspicions with them when they sailed to the New Jerusalem.