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Review Of The Salem Witch Trials: The Wonders Of The Invisible World

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The Salem Witch Trials are regarded as one of North America's most infamous cases of mass hysteria. In 1693, Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, wrote The Wonders of the Invisible World, an account of the Salem Witch Trials. Throughout the account, he states that witchcraft existed and that the devil exhibited its power through witchcraft. Mather, in the creation of this book, used religious pretext referenced from Against Modern Sadducism by Joseph Glanvill, which was a book that explored the concept of witchcraft and its application to society. Witchcraft had been a part of the scholarly conversation for decades leading up to the Salem Witch Trials, with those two works being the hallmark sources of witchcraft in the late 1600s. Those works …show more content…

The ministers’ intended effect of re-establishing trust in the Puritan community towards ministry in Salem backfired. Soon after the witch trials ended, scholars started to write about their opinions on whether the Witch trials were necessary or unnecessary and harmful. Most people agreed that the events that unfolded in Salem were horrendous. One of these opinions expressed was by a cloth merchant named Robert Calef. Calef wrote a book named after Mathers’s Wonders of the Invisible World, except Calef’s work, denounced Mather’s. Calef mentions how Mather took “bewitched” girls home and encouraged testimonies from the girls against accused witches in the trials (92). While these claims may be unfounded, it shows the already prevalent viewpoints of regular people on ministers, which highlights why the purpose of the trials backfired. The trials resulted in a more rapid decline of ministerial power, which further contributed to the decline of Puritanism as a congregationalist religion and …show more content…

More Wonders of the Invisible World, Or the Wonders of the Invisible World Displayed in Five Parts. London, printed by Nathaniel Hillard and Joseph Collyer, 1700, Early English Books Online.
Chevers, Ezekiel. “SWP No. 063: Sarah Good Executed July 19, 1692.” Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/n63.html#n63.2.
Como, David R. “Women, Prophecy, and Authority in Early Stuart Puritanism.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 2, 1998, pp. 203–22. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3817798.
Glanvill, Joseph. A Blow at Modern Sadducism in Some Philosophical Considerations About Witchcraft and the Relation of the Famed Disturbance at the House of M. Mompesson. With Reflections on Drollery and Atheism. London, printed by E. Cotes and James Collins, 1668, Early English Books Online.
Harthorne, John. “SWP No. 019: Examination of Mary Black and Clearance by Proclamation. April 22, 1692.” Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/n15.html
King, Ernest W., and Franklin G. Mixon. “Religiosity and the Political Economy of the Salem Witch Trials.” The Social Science Journal, vol. 47, no. 3, 2010, pp. 678–88, JSTOR, DOI:

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