In art history, the Salem witch trials often take the form of the most cinematic moments: arrest, prosecution, and execution. These images define our popular understanding of this historic event, told through the lens of its most public moments. But we see very little of the reams of paperwork that made this possible — and how these trials eventually came to an end.
There’s an astonishing moment in Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson, professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter in England. Describing the infamous Salem witch trials, she points out that by 1693, some 200 people — the majority of whom were women — were awaiting trial, and the civilians of Massachusetts began to protest.
“Whatever demonology said,” Gibson writes, “there could not be so many witches. As well as becoming theologically implausible, the number of trials was organizationally unsustainable, and the court system collapsed under a backlog.” As a result, an entirely new court and an updated law were formed for the rest of the cases. The trials, Gibson shows us, functioned like any other trials: with paperwork, protests, politics, and people mixed into an often messy and bureaucratic process that required state intervention to adapt. And while the author embarks on a journey through the legal and procedural considerations of witch trials from the 17th century to today in places like England, the United States, France, and the former British colony of Basutoland in present-day Lesotho, she never lets us lose sight of the accused persons caught up in them, often suffering under an existing culture of misogyny, ableism, enslavement, and colonization.
Gibson begins with a simple question: “What is a witch?” The answer is deeply political. Magic, she notes, has been with humanity for a very long time, and while witches seem to be creatures from time immemorial, she argues that they represent a specific shift during Europe’s Medieval period. By the 15th century, Christian institutions drew a distinction between daily magic and the work of God, which “were thought of as springing from religious truth, a special class of power reserved for Christian clergymen.”