The Witches / Stacy Schiff

   Every once in awhile things will suddenly start popping up everywhere, in a way that I associate with the word "synchronicity", although I think my terminology is faulty. This has happened with two things lately, the first is Dungeons & Dragons, which has been showing up ALL OVER THE PLACE. A small selection of instances: an acquaintance on the fbook who said he wanted to get into playing tabletop role-playing games, The Adventure Zone along with other podcasts, a set of knuckle tattoos in the shapes of various dice used in D&D posted by the artist who did my latest tattoo, and in Stranger Things. It seems like a lot of D&D!

is the universe telling me to play D&D?

   The other one has been more spread out, and the other one is witches. Suddenly, witches are showing up everywhere. On the exact day that I finished reading The Witches by Stacy Schiff, A Century of Murder - which is a documentary about witch hunts mostly in Scotland in the 1500's-ish - appeared on my "recommended for you" tab on Netflix. There was another book - Six Women of Salem - I was trying to put a hold on that led me to The Witches in the first place. Basically: what is with witches and D&D, and is it actual sorcery, someone let me know. And now that I've read this book about witches I've also realized that it's Fall, otherwise known as Spooky Reading Time.

   So: I started reading(listening to) The Witches because suddenly witches were everywhere and I've always wanted to know more about Salem anyways (I haven't read The Crucible because my deep dislike of Death of a Salesman has kept me away from it, please someone let me know if I need to read that play, or see it). The Witches is a very long book. Goodreads says it is 417 pages, and the audiobook version that I listened to was just over 18 hours. That's a lot of reading! There are a lot of Puritans to keep straight! Who on earth names their son "Increase" and/or "Cotton"?!

   First: two genuinely baffling things:

• The last of the executed women weren't exonerated until The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand One; and,
• A few years after 1692 people from the area were like "at least we didn't BURN anybody" AS IF BEING PRESSED TO DEATH IS BETTER THAN BURNING, and as if you didn't really do anything wrong by hanging innocent people because at least they didn't get burned.

   As a function of being very long, this is very thorough. Now that I've read it, I'm wondering why it isn't billed as a scholarly source instead of just a lil history book on witches. This thing Goes Into Detail; BUT it still somehow manages to be a bit scattered and confusing timeline-wise. This impression, however, could be largely due to my sometimes zoning out while listening.  Even so, I learned a great deal and knowledge that I already had was greatly fleshed out. I now know names like Sarah Good and Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse, women whose primary crimes were things like being poor, being ornery, being old, or being loud. It was a horrifying time to be an even slightly unlikable woman in Salem and the surrounding areas. 

   Schiff also includes the stories of the "afflicted girls", and how their lives played out post-1692. Some of them were fine, and went on to get married and have babies and live out their lives, while others died early or remained in an afflicted state until they died. Before talking about where they ended up, Schiff talks about how the witch trials began in the first place. 

   While trying to answer the question of why the girls started to accuse people, Schiff spends a great deal of time dwelling on hysteria. As soon as the word "hysteria" popped up, I was off put and disappointed. Schiff used the term interchangeably with conversion disorder, and I wish she would have just used the more accurate and specific diagnosis to describe what she had arrived at as a possible cause of the beginning of the accusations. "Hysteria" has a fraught history, and isn't in use anymore as a diagnosis, so why pepper it throughout the theorizing on what caused the fits, hallucinations, and convulsions? There was so much talk of hysteria and nary a mention of ergot poisoning and it just left a bad taste in my mouth. 

   To sum up this somewhat disjointed review: very informational, kinda dry, too long, "hysteria" isn't a real disorder, and I was planning on reading Schiff's book about Cleopatra but now I don't know if I will.