The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

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History Makers: Female Writers Dominate the 2023 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award Shortlist At times, this book reads almost like a dark fairytale, but at others it's very fact driven, almost rattled off like a list. This didn't necessarily deter from my enjoyment, but definitely halted the reading process.

Witches & witch trials have emerged as a trend in publishing in recent years, with the success of works like A.K. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches which looks at the Essex witch trials. What do you think is behind this trend? While the beliefs of the Springfield citizens may appear bizarre to modern readers, their motivations are not unfamiliar. The people of 17th-century Springfield express their fears, rivalries, grief and ambition in the language of their day - Puritanism - projecting their emotions, including those unacceptable in a society of “saints,” where human feelings could condemn you to an eternity of punishment, onto their hapless, unconventional, often mentally ill neighbors. Their stories are told in a narrative that humanizes them, focusing on the experiences of three Springfield residents, a poor couple, the Parsons, and the wealthy magistrate/landowner, who departs form Calvinist orthodoxy and is accused of heresy. These long-gone individuals become live human beings in this excellent historical study. Laura Carlson will be the next provost of the University of Delaware. A member of the University of Notre Dame’s psychology faculty since 1994, Professor Carlson has served as the institution’s vice-president, associate provost and dean of the graduate school since 2013. At Delaware, Professor Carlson will succeed Robin Morgan following her retirement. Dennis Assanis, the institution’s president, hailed Professor Carlson as “an inspirational academic leader with impressive experience in scholarship, teaching, and administration”. A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.A bona fide historical classic ... Historical writing of the very highest class, impeccably researched and written with supreme imagination and wisdom. Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times The story of Mary Parsons, and her husband Hugh, both tried as witches following a witch hunt panic in their village ahead of the Salem witch trials.

Gaskill brings all of this to pulsating life – and is clear that we should not look down on these people. We, who have suffered the delusions of global warming deniers, 5G phone mast conspiracies and vaccine microchip babble, could, in fact, learn a lesson or two. Mandy Downing has been named Curtin University’s first dean of Indigenous futures in the Faculty of Humanities. She has held a variety of research management and institutional governance roles during a decade at the Perth institution. When peculiar things begin to happen in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, tensions rise and rumours spread of witches and heretics. What follows is a web of spite, paranoia and denunciation – a far cry from the English settlers’ dreams of love and liberty at the dawn of the New World. The historian Malcolm Gaskill retells this dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in The Ruin Of All Witches. This was a fascinating look at, not just witchcraft and the trial of the Parsons, but of life in general for migrants in mid 17th century New England, with a wealth of interesting information about their daily lives.It provides insight into another age, a vividly painted portrait of a small community. The research needed to bring together this fascinating story must have been phenomenal, providing a truly compelling read. Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world.

Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and the author of Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans. Gaskill is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Having finished it in just a few days, I will start off by saying that I only wish there were more works of historical nonfiction like "The Ruin of All Witches." This book is absolutely at the top of its game in the genre. The author's research is meticulous and obvious (around half the book's total length is sources). His closeness to the subject matter and authority in writing about it are equally obvious, and it is clear this book is a labor of love that must have taken him I can't imagine how long to research and complete.

Your research drew on the Springfield city archives. What did you learn about the city in your time there?

A riveting micro-history, brilliantly set within the broader social and cultural history of witchcraft. Drawing on previously neglected source material, this book is elegantly written and full of intelligent analysis. Having studied witchcraft in early modern England, what led you to shift focus to America for this book? Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. In the middle of the 17th century a witch craze burnt across New England. This is a study of one town in the Connecticut Valley.

The townsfolk were meant to strive ever onwards – yet to take pride in their work, their achievements, was considered sinful. Their founder, Pynchon, thought himself pious, yet was effectively a feudal lord who pitted neighbours against each other, and himself started having spiritual thoughts considered heretical. The Ruin of All Witches was born of two previous books: Witchfinders, the story of the East Anglian witch-hunt of the mid-1640s; and Between Two Worlds, a survey of the English colonisation of North America in the 17th century. It never felt like a huge shift of focus because, despite the altered geographical location, the people and their culture under scrutiny were English or – in Springfield, Massachusetts – Welsh. PRAISE FOR WITCHFINDERS: 'A brilliant new study ... In the vivid three-dimensionality of its dramatis personae, the eloquence of its writing, and the richness of its evocations of vanished worlds of landscape and belief ... Gaskill displays a masterly wizardry all his own.' -- John Adamson - Sunday TelegraphThe book is also a very personal study of the mental, emotional, and physical toll life in Colonial America could take on anyone, but most especially women. While hindsight is no diagnosis (and the author does not attempt to make one), it seems clear that Mary Parsons may have suffered considerably from anxiety, depression, and fear of abandonment, among possibly other things. While there's no way to know, her ultimate total inability to cope seems especially tragic in the eyes of us 21st century readers, who can see her decline through a lens of knowing she may have suffered from conditions that could be treated today.