A History of Hysteria

...Spaniards and Swedes were even more secure...

...The 1984 events in Maiden were fueled by grotesque, fantastic accusations against the owners of a day-care center...

...He also has an entire chapter on the anti-Masonic movement in the country's early period...

...Perhaps not even the intervention of a just deity can be excluded as helping to bring the craze to a halt...

...Or resentment and jealousy might have been directed at widows whose economic independence sometimes spurred self-assertiveness, which activated the reassertion of patriarchal power...

...Further, the author himself says, "Masonic lodges are, of course, an exclusively male preserve...

...Demos' closing section, "Modern America," is the least satisfactory...

...Residents of Poland or northern Italy or Scotland were somewhat safer...

...Included is a judicious but scathing portrait of the learned author of The Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather...

...In 1960, as a first-year graduate student in American history at Harvard, he wrote a term paper on the subject that became a published article...

...If so, then, why end The Enemy Within with a clearly local, though Massachusetts-based scandal...

...But what persists is how thin, in a crisis, are the membranes intended to protect us from the rancor of our neighbors...

...In Europe, four out of five victims were women, a disproportion the author attributes to misogyny...

...But the eerie work, which Demos observes is "drenched" in misogyny, is still in print and available from Amazon...

...The answer, I think, is an abiding curiosity about the history of witchcraft...

...The trail back to Salem seems too sinuous, the parallels not very persuasive...

...Demos evidently gambled that a mix of dramatic incidents and literary elegance would compensate for a lack of thematic rigor...

...But two crucial facts undermine his argument: There were no witches then (in the sense of allies of the Devil), while the Masons included the likes of George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay...

...No single explanation can cover all or even most of the cases, nor does Demos offer any fully applicable theoretical model...

...But the historiographical question lingers: What have been the distinctive geographical and chronological features of witch-hunting...

...These variations are effectively presented yet readers may find them disconcerting...

...Instead what he has put together is ultimately less than the sum of its parts...

...Was the injustice visited upon the family that ran the Fells Acres Day School a vestige of witch-hunting...

...But witchcraft trials were conducted with great intensity in Bavaria, Demos points out, until about 1750 (near the peak of the Age of Enlightenment...

...At 58 pages it is the longest chapter, and besides portraying the events in Essex County, Massachusetts, he illustrates the way chroniclers have tried to explain the whole mad phenomenon...

...fears of betrayal and conspiracy continue to lurk...

...Moreover, he argues, the countersubversive impulse has survived...

...Very few scholars are better equipped to trace the historical role of witch-hunting and, through command of the sources, to inform the general reader...

...Witchhunting was most commonly unleashed between 1580 and 1650, with the two decades between 1610 and 1630 being the worst...

...The second section, entitled "Early America," opens with a chapter set in Windsor, Connecticut in 1654...

...It was neither pervasive nor unending...

...But his conjectures in particular instances are at least tenable, and represent sensible interventions in the debates that have swirled around the disparate eruptions of witch-hunting...

...This might have stemmed from the fears associated with the primal experience of birth and the dependency upon the magical aura of maternity...

...If a modern sequel to Malleus Maleflcarum were to be nominated it might be that canonical text of the countersubversive imagination Masters of Deceit, J. Edgar Hoover's 1958 bestseller on Communism...

...A weakness of The Enemy Within is its oscillating between the synoptic and the local, between overviews and cameos...

...The one that stands out, "The Most Famous Witch-Hunt of All, 1692-93," comes appropriately at the center of The Enemy Within...

...Though our courts no longer permit the introduction of spectral evidence, he maintains that the psychodynamics of witch-hunting have not been extinguished...

...Witch-hunting has been episodic rather than a constant in human affairs...

...In addition to the fear of Masonic power, Demos writes, the later scares in American public life were commonly associated with warnings of a "potentially apocalyptic menace"—the conspiracy earlier witch-hunters ascribed to the cosmic power of the Devil...

...That the drama premiered on Broadway while Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was still on his rampage, or that the opera was composed just four years after his death, is understandable...

...Since they were hardly unique to Salem in the late 17th century, the mystery is not dispelled...

...That the Book of Exodus mandated death (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”) has also meant that hysteria has been characteristic of the West ern world, an artifact of Christendom...

...American history has been dotted with all sorts of scares—against Masons, against anarchists, against Communists, to name merely a few...

...As the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale, Demos has cultivated throughout his career a special interest in the intersections of family dynamics and village arrangements, gender relations, and religious devotion in colonial New England...

...Sometimes it opts for trial records, other times for miniature biographies...

...In 1718Noyes died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage, which caused his mouth (at least according to local gossip) to be filled with blood...

...It should be noted, however, that Demos has organized this book according to his own predilections...

...Miller sought to compare the panic caused by the 1692-93 witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts to the contemporaneous Red Scare...

...So why did this phenomenon occur in some towns but not in adjacent villages...

...All three chapters of the next section are lavished on Salem...

...A third profiles a particular victim of mistrust, the "haughty" Mary Parsons...

...The danger increased for those living in what are now Germany, Switzerland and the southern part of the Netherlands...

...Even historians whose expertise lies elsewhere have long admired the felicity of his prose as much as his ability to pick up psychic signals emitted from the archives...

...Another chapter provides an overview of the phenomenon in the colonies, spanning from Jamestown to Salem ( 1607-1692...

...They were convicted and imprisoned thanks to testimonies of abuse given by children who had been rehearsed and coached...

...Demos shows how feminism, pharmacology, epidemiology, and the stagecraft of Arthur Miller have been enlisted in the effort to probe what triggered and eventually calmed Salem's suspicious minds...

...The Malleus Maleflcarum (1487), the "handbook" of unspeakable actions witch-hunters relied on, was abandoned centuries ago...

...Although Europe was far more afflicted by the crazes than the American colonies, for example, only the first of its four sections is set in the Old World—in the medieval and early modern periods...

...When Reverend Nicholas Noyes, the austere town minister who championed the trials, urged Sarah Good to confess on Gallows Hill before her hanging, she retorted: "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink...

...John Demos is no novice to the field...

...His chief concern, though, is scholarly...

...His 1982 book, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, drew deftly on anthropology to illumine outbreaks of hysteria and won the Bancroft Prize...

...In his final section, Demos attempts to bring the story up to date...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Professor of American studies, Brandeis University THIS SUMMER New York’s Dicapo Opera Theater revived Robert Ward’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Crucible, inspired by Arthur Miller’s frequently mounted eponymous 1953 play...

...His own conclusion focuses on two factors, "rising capitalism and Indian terror...

...A passion to remind us of the needless persecution, torture and death caused by f alse accusations and outbursts of paranoia surely animates Demos’ synthesis...

...The Enemy Within includes a 10-page “Bibliographic Commentary” but has no footnotes...

...Why did these panics break out in the German states and in northeastern France and in New England more frequently than in, say, Ireland or southern Italy or Virginia...

...But what accounts for the enduring impact of both works beyond artistic excellence...