Six Women of Salem by Marilynne K. Roach

What was it like to be there and, if you were lucky, to live through it? In a compelling combination of narrative and groundbreaking historical research, Salem Witch Trial scholar Marilynne K. Mary Warren, a hired girl with few prospects for the future Tituba, the minister’s Indian slave, powerless with only her wits to save her Ann Putnam, an anxious woman of declining fortunes her daughter was on of the more active of the “afflicted girls” Rebecca Nurse, elderly and infirm but with a large, fiercely supportive family Mary English, a well-educated woman of property with a fine business sense like her mother, who was married to the richest man in Salem Bridget Bishop, widowed twice, a survivor of an abusive marriage, and known for her sharp tongue

Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women of varied origins and fates as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis: A total of 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn’t even include the ruling religious, judicial, and governmental leaders. By the end, beyond the twenty who were executed and the five who perished in prison, about 200 individuals had been accused, at least 70 had been “afflicted,” and more than 30 had officially accused their fellow neighbors. Between February 1692 and May 1693, a series of prosecutions, trials, and hangings of people accused of witchcraft in the Massachusetts colony traumatized the region and spoke of the dangers of mass hysteria.

Six Women of Salem by Marilynne K. Roach