Science and Specters at Salem

Scholarship has generally viewed the Salem judges as credulous, cruel, or stupid but this book makes the case that the strong intellectual background of the judges at the Salem witch trials was the major reason that they were prepared to accept spectral evidence and touch tests, and to condemn so many accused witches.
Many histories of the Salem witch-trials have focused on the accusers and the accused. The judges, however, were the valve which regulated which accusations would be accepted in evidence. Several of the judges--Stoughton, Winthrop and Sewell in particular--had exceptionally strong intellectual backgrounds. The judges' close advisors, the Boston ministers, Increase and Cotton Mather notable among them, were some of Massachusetts Bay colony's most learned men. Why, then, were the judges and ministers not more liberal or enlightened in their treatment of accused witches? This book argues it was because they were steeped an intellectual tradition which insisted that scientists and philosophers must believe in the reality of an invisible world, which included witches. The fear was that the philosophy of Descartes and certain interpretations of natural philosophy (science) would lead to the association of science and philosophy with atheism and heresy. Exponents of this group often expressed their fears in some form of the dictum: no witches, no invisible world, no God.
The chapters uncover the work of the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Joseph Glanville, but included other leading members of the Royal Society and major thinkers, who launched an attack on contemporary authors (whom they called "Sadducees") who cast doubt on witch beliefs or doctrines of the afterlife. Their work included the collecting of witch stories from all over, to create a proof de consensus gentium that witches are not only real, but present an existential danger to society. Matt Goldish argues that those judges and ministers involved in the Salem witch-trials were heavily influenced by this tradition and explains their zealous treatment of the accused.
Specters, Science, and Skepticism in Salem is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of the Salem witch-trials and the history of witchcraft more broadly.