A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials Book

As an academically-minded graduate student in Literature and Theology, I could not get through this book. While it does fulfill the promise of providing a broad overview of the events that did occur, each narrative is flooded with Hill's personal beliefs, beliefs that consistently ignore the contextual and contemporary perspectives. Many phrases like "one can easily imagine" attempt to make the reader believe that Hill's explanation, usually one about a fradulent, fear-mongering Puritan society that doesn't actually believe its beliefs, seem like the only possible one. Sentences like "Never was the principle of the leading question eliciting the expected information more graphically illustrated" and repeating use of "leading questions" in the midst of what is supposed to be an account of the most accurately recorded (according to Hill's commentary) interrogation are hardly academic and barely allow a reader that did not have an opinion before beginning a book to come to any thought other than Hill's. Hill begins judging Puritan society and belief in the first pages. Karen Armstrong's Introduction sums up accurately Hill's apparent starting belief, that "They [Puritans] also brought from Europe an inadequate concept of religion" (ix).

I was able to read through the end of the fourth chapter, but when the fifth chapter began "Charles Upham, writing in the mid-ninteenth century, believed that Parris and Thomas Putnam had told Tituba in advance what to say when she confessed" - such a preposterous idea that does not fit at all what we know about Puritan society and yet is presented here as the best of all research conducted - I knew, then, that I was doomed, and would not find in this book the good historical overview that pays attention to actual, contextual historical realities.

This is the book for you, only if you are looking for an easy, simple excuse to be made for the terribly tragic and incredibly influential events of late 17th-century Salem.