SOURCE: "Witchcraft in Historical and Sociological Perspective," in Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, pp. 184–89.

In the following excerpt, Weisman compares the Salem witchcraft prosecutions with those that took place before them, finding notable differences in the types of individuals accused and in the approaches taken at the trials.

This study differs from previous investigations of New England witchcraft in that it attempts to deal systematically not just with the Salem prosecutions but with the entire history of witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts Bay. From this perspective, the events of 1692 become comprehensible neither as a sudden, aberrational manifestation of witchcraft belief nor as a simple amplification of earlier patterns of prosecution. The difference between the pre-Salem and the Salem prosecutions in terms of both the scale of operation and the social distribution of witches was indeed the outcome of different expressions of...