Marion Lena Starkey (1901–1991)

I’ve been working my way through a series of books on the Salem witchcraft outbreak of 1692; so far this includes Stacy Schiff’s The Witches, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaums’s Salem Possessed, and rel="nofollow" _target="_top">Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World.

Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts is the most readable so far, although the almost novelistic treatment may disguise some historical inaccuracy (in her Preface, she notes she “…has taken slight liberties with the records”). Her narration is in chronological order and her characters all have real personalities – perhaps not their actual personalities, of course. In Starkey’s version, Reverend Samuel Parris, the slave Tituba, and the children Betty Parris and Abigail Williams are somewhat more culpable in the initial events here than they are in the other books, as is Cotton Mather in the later part of the story (particularly the trial and execution of George Burroughs). Starkey, like Schiff, buys into “hysteria” as the cause of the girls’ accusations – even putting Freud in her references section. Starkey also refers to a suggestion – not in the main text but in her endnotes – that some of the accusers’ “possession” may have been due to consuming or handling Jimson weed. She doesn’t go to far with that and none of the other books I’ve read have mentioned it.

Of the work’s I’ve read, Boyer and Nissenbaum’s is the only one that really goes into the sociological background of what went on – the political and social aspects of living in 17th century Massachusetts. Starkey mentions a little of this – how the inhabitants of Salem were historically contentious, ready to dispute with each other over details of land boundaries and minister’s salaries, and suggests that perhaps some of these disputes may have metamorphosed into accusations of witchcraft.

One of the things that’s missing is any reference to the McCarthy Hearings – because they hadn’t happened yet; this book was written in 1947. And of course the Satanic Panic of the 1970s was decades in the future; in Starkey’s final chapter Massachusetts has redeemed itself by the early 1700s, offering compensation to those accused of witchcraft; there’s not the slightest suggestion that anything like Salem could ever happen again. Optimism springs eternal.

No illustrations. Starkey doesn’t use numbered notes; instead a “Notes” section has a discussion of the sources used for each chapter. There is a good reference section. The index seems sparse; I had a hard time finding some things I wanted to look up.… (more)