The Devil's Disciples

This engaged account of New England's most notorious crisis fuses scholarly craft and chutzpah with the skills of a master story teller. The author's expertise as a legal historian, coupled with explorations of oral culture and informed conjectures on such topics as Tituba's origins and 'recovered' memories of child abuse, give The Devil's Disciples a distinguished place in the ever-lengthening line of Salem witchcraft studies.

A welcome recent edition is Peter Charles Hoffer's The Devil's Disciples (1996), which offers biographical and historical contexts while deliberately avoiding the kind of Procrustean thesis that has skewed so many earlier studies.

In this fascinating and well-researched study, Peter Charles Hoffer examines the events at Salem in both their social and legal contexts... Anyone interested in history of American culture or the development of the legal system will enjoy this book. It reads like a good novel in that you cannot wait to see what happens next, even though the verdicts were passed in 1692.

A superb legal scholar, Hoffer provides an excellent discussion of the procedures and evidence used in the trials. He reveals that grand juries demanded more tangible evidence of witchcraft that the assertions of afflicted adolescent girls before issuing indictments. Hoffer then demonstrates that, in determining the guilt of the accused, the trial juries essentially followed the lead of the judges, who were insufficiently prepared for witchcraft cases.