The Ruin Of All Witches

Malcolm Gaskill Allen Lane £20

On March 24, 1651, Mary Parsons and her husband Hugh were transported from the small town of Springfield, New England, to Boston to await trial. Their suspected crime – witchcraft. But far from the black-cat-andbroomstick carry-on of our modern imagination, this was the most sinister of crimes.

Mary was thought to have killed her own baby son while under the possession of the Devil, while

Hugh was believed to have a diabolical vendetta against the entire town. And, as they were carted away for one of America’s first witch trials, the couple will have been fully aware that the punishment for guilty witches was death by hanging.

Malcolm Gaskill traces the Parsonses’ story with novelistic power. We hear how they separately came to emigrate to America and how they met and married in Springfield. But after a briefly happy period, their marriage turned sour. We learn how they managed to alienate the townspeople, Hugh through his aggressive behaviour and Mary through her unstable moods and visions, which Gaskill suspects were in fact paranoid schizophrenia or postpartum psychosis. One by one, their neighbours turn on them, suspecting witchcraft.

But as this moving story unfolds, Gaskill also provides the cultural and intellectual context that allowed it to take place. The 17th Century was a time of political and religious upheaval, with a civil war raging across the sea in Old England, and witch-hunts across Europe. Gaskill skilfully weaves this backdrop into the Parsonses’ story, showing how in an America of strict religious orthodoxy, book-burnings and witch-hunts were the result.

This is a masterpiece of microhistory, the genre in which a small event is used to illuminate an entire period. Drawing on painstaking research and a deep empathy for the past, Gaskill allows us to see how superstition could hold sway in a world that was still becoming modern.