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

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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? This book took me a while because I was constantly stopping to underline passages and scribble notes in the margins. There is much of great interest here to anyone fascinated by America's first European settlers and, in particular, the infamous Witch Trials.

As children and adults fall ill with unexplained ailments with some dying, strange lights, animals behaving oddly, and foodstuffs turning odd colours or disappearing suspicion falls on the Parsons. Gossip, arguments, signs and the Parsons' own conversations or statements with others sees these events reported to the town's leaders. There are accusations and counter-accusations involving not just the Parsons but others too. A nonfiction look at witchcraft, and more specifically a particular case in New England in the mid seventeenth century. Though told in such a detailed, atmospheric way that it was often like reading a story.Most of my career has been spent writing academic history, which is sort of removed from the stories, and with witchcraft I thought it was important to explain how witchcraft accusations developed over time. Accusing someone was not a kind of sudden knee-jerk reaction to misfortune, not being able to understand things and so on; instead they often simmer away. And so, for that I felt it really needed a timeline, it needed a narrative that went over months and in fact in this story, years. So, when you get to the moment when somebody is accused you understand the hinterland to it; you understand how they got to that position, because the people who are accused of witchcraft have their reputations gradually eroded over time until the moment that everybody feels bold enough to step forward and point the finger. I was very keen to tell the story with a beginning, middle and an end, and to use the evidence such as we have in such a way that it would really place the reader there in Springfield, in the 1650s, so that you kind of experience what they’re experiencing. So, in terms of embellishment, I think that a lot of historians nowadays are keen to reconstruct historical worlds for their readers but yeah, sure, without actually making anything up. The records in Springfield are actually very good, and so quite a lot of the picturesque, if you like, was drawn from other New England sources. Weather would be a good example; if you know what the weather is like somewhere further down the Connecticut valley, you can be certain that that’s what it was like in Springfield as well because it’s only twenty miles down the road. You can draw on all those techniques to draw up a novelistic picture of this story without inventing anything. I think that there is a line which historians shouldn’t cross, but it’s important to try to communicate the meaning of a story and to do that a certain amount of licence can be taken as long as there are other sources to draw on that allow you to build up that context. You bring 17 th Century New England to life in the book, but in your introduction, you are careful to distinguish the book as a historical reconstruction, not a novel. How do you construct a narrative and build a world while being careful not to embellish the facts? Laura Carlson will be the next provost of the University of Delaware. A member of the University of Notre Dame’s psychology faculty since 1994, Professor Carlson has served as the institution’s vice-president, associate provost and dean of the graduate school since 2013. At Delaware, Professor Carlson will succeed Robin Morgan following her retirement. Dennis Assanis, the institution’s president, hailed Professor Carlson as “an inspirational academic leader with impressive experience in scholarship, teaching, and administration”. The acclaimed actor Kathryn Hunter plays all three witches in the forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth. The film is directed by Joel Coen and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the central couple. Hunter tells Andrew Marr that she studied the witch hunts of the 17th century and was inspired by the ‘outcast women’ who survived and suffered. Her performance is rooted in something real, but also hints at something created in the mind of Macbeth. To paraphrase part of the sources and methods section at the end of the book, Gaskill has no interest in explaining away witchcraft or in belittling people from the past for their perceived ignorance, instead taking a more emic approach to the phenomena described. The thoughts, feelings and reasonings of historical characters are respected, and taken on their own terms, something I’d argue is essential whenever dealing with anything from the past that doesn’t seem immediately rational to us.

These lives were hard. We read of settlers coming from mostly, old England and Wales and Ireland, to live in Springfield, as well as some earlier settlers from the same routes moving out from Boston or other towns and villages to make a new start. From farming and food, to building houses, tilling the land, trading with Bostonians and Indians (native Americans but described as Indians contemporaneously), seeking trade and craftsmen, preachers and others to the marriages, child birth, and high mortality of children and and indeed adults through disease, illness, and accident, Mr Gaskill provides a good picture of settler life. One, that with solid documentary evidence, helps to show how these people lived, worked, loved, prayed and disagreed with each other. 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. The Wolfson History Prize revealed its shortlist for 2022 in April, showcasing the best historical non-fiction titles from the previous year including Malcom Gaskill’s The Ruin of All Witches, a dark, fascinating, real-life tale of witch-hunting in colonial New England. A leading expert in the history of witchcraft, Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and the author of Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans. We chat to him about the Wolfson History Prize, the gender-politics of his new book and what we can learn from witch-hunting today. Mandy Downing has been named Curtin University’s first dean of Indigenous futures in the Faculty of Humanities. She has held a variety of research management and institutional governance roles during a decade at the Perth institution. History Makers: Female Writers Dominate the 2023 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award Shortlist

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.’ PRAISE FOR WITCHFINDERS: 'A brilliant new study ... In the vivid three-dimensionality of its dramatis personae, the eloquence of its writing, and the richness of its evocations of vanished worlds of landscape and belief ... Gaskill displays a masterly wizardry all his own.' -- John Adamson - Sunday Telegraph I have no regrets: I’m free to read and write what I like, and I have more time to do it. I may yet return to witches, but right now I’m researching fugitive POWs in wartime Italy. I should stress, though, that I’m only able to do this because my wife has a job and we can manage on her salary. I’m very fortunate. Then again, she works full time, often overseas, which means I spend a lot of time looking after our three children. Forensic psychologist Louise Dixon has been appointed dean of the Wellington Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington. She was previously a professor of psychology at the same institution.

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) If you like what you're reading online, why not take advantage of our subscription and get unlimited access to all of Times Higher Education's content? When peculiar things begin to happen in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, tensions rise and rumours spread of witches and heretics. What follows is a web of spite, paranoia and denunciation – a far cry from the English settlers’ dreams of love and liberty at the dawn of the New World. The historian Malcolm Gaskill retells this dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in The Ruin Of All Witches.The Ruin of All Witches was born of two previous books: Witchfinders, the story of the East Anglian witch-hunt of the mid-1640s; and Between Two Worlds, a survey of the English colonisation of North America in the 17th century. It never felt like a huge shift of focus because, despite the altered geographical location, the people and their culture under scrutiny were English or – in Springfield, Massachusetts – Welsh.

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.

At times, this book reads almost like a dark fairytale, but at others it's very fact driven, almost rattled off like a list. This didn't necessarily deter from my enjoyment, but definitely halted the reading process. W itchcraft in the New England colonies is almost entirely associated in the public imagination with the craze in Salem, Massachusetts, that erupted at the end of the 17th century. Yet on both sides of the Atlantic, prosecutions rarely reached epidemic proportions, with a scattering of cases making it to the courts every few years as long-simmering accusations finally became substantive enough to require the attention of early modern officialdom. Having finished it in just a few days, I will start off by saying that I only wish there were more works of historical nonfiction like "The Ruin of All Witches." This book is absolutely at the top of its game in the genre. The author's research is meticulous and obvious (around half the book's total length is sources). His closeness to the subject matter and authority in writing about it are equally obvious, and it is clear this book is a labor of love that must have taken him I can't imagine how long to research and complete. This book follows the story of the a much more modest attempt by a small group of Christians, who saw themselves as righteous, pious and well intentioned, to build their own new world. Their dream was of simple communities based on religious freedom. But things went wrong from the outset. The winters in the new land were bitter. The tiny villages they set up were isolated and seemed threatened. They saw eerie lights in the surrounding woods, mists over the marshes and the eyes of primitive Indians watching from the behind the bushes outside the villages. The pilgrims separated into different sects, each believing their own to be right; and when unexplained tragedies started to become common, with mysterious illnesses and deaths of children, they turned against each other. They began to see evil in their neighbours, and they attributed it to idolatry, heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft - and eventually the presence in their communities of the devil. Within a few years the disenchantment and discord led to trials and executions of their fellow pilgrims. 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.