SOURCE: "Underlying Themes in Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England," in The American Historical Review, Vol. LXXV, No. 5, June, 1970, pp. 1311–26.

In the following excerpt, Demos comments on the significance of the fact that most of the accused Salem witches were eccentric and / or anti-social, middle-aged women, while their accusers were girls a generation younger.

It is faintly embarrassing for a historian to summon his colleagues to still another consideration of early New England witchcraft. Here, surely, is a topic that previous generations of writers have sufficiently worked, indeed overworked. Samuel Eliot Morison once commented that the Salem witch-hunt was, after all, "but a small incident in the history of a great superstition"; and Perry Miller noted that with only minor qualifications "the intellectual history of New England can be written as though no such thing ever happened. It had no effect on the ecclesiastical or political situation, it does...