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

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The Ruin of All Witches was an attempt to make witchcraft make sense to a modern audience in the mind of their ancestors. His attention to their plight - material, psychological, spiritual - goes far to explain, though not explain away, the alien beliefs of a fragile, beleaguered community, torn between the old world and the new.

The tragedy of this story will stay with me for a long time and I’m sure on future revisits, there is much more nuance to be discovered. 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. This is through the excellent record keeping of the events and testimonies recorded by the town's warden and leaders as well as documents from Boston and indeed Old England. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates.The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. As his 759 footnotes attest, Gaskill is an academic of note – an emeritus professor of early modern history. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs. 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.

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. Having studied witchcraft in early modern England, what led you to shift focus to America for this book?The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the. It captures the spirit of adventure and courage of the first settlers but also shows how high ideals were transformed by the harsh realities of life.

Not too dry, and not too long either - would recommend if finding out more about the lives of a bunch of puritans is something you think you’d be into, or if you need to find out what to do if you suspect that your pudding has been split as a result of witchery. We are fortunate that historian Malcolm Gaskill immersed himself in this remarkable and, until now, largely neglected document.

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. The book doesn't focus totally on this however as it also deals with the religious beliefs of the town's founder and his clash with the authorities in Boston because his beliefs - which sound harmless from a modern day perspective - were perceived as heresy. October reads wrapped up with The ruin of all witches and it was definitely a read that will linger with me for a long time. Life in 17th century New England, with all its set-backs and calamities, seems very akin to personal hell to me, so no wonder that fear and jealousy made them turn innocent people into their scapegoat to make sense of all the chaos. An “enigmatic, taciturn man,” perhaps from East Anglia or Wales, with a red waistcoat and, clenched in his teeth, a clay pipe, Parsons needed a wife.

The author gives a well judged overview of how large scale transformations in society directly contributed to the extreme actions of individuals.

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. That then grew into a third-year history dissertation, and that grew into a PhD, and I just kept going. There’s hardly any area of early modern life which is not informed upon in some way by studying witchcraft.