Schiff’s ‘ Witches’ stirs up a thrilling historical brew

It’s tempting to use historian Stacy Schiff’s revelatory, sumptuously written new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692, as yet another occasion to apply American history’s favorite metaphor.

The witch hunt, exploited so memorably in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as an allegory of McCarthyism, might legitimately be used to describe to any number of follies of our national life today.

To indulge in the witch- hunt metaphor now, however, would be to lose sight of the all too literal events on which it’s based. In a sense, we can’t lose sight of what happened in late 17th- century Salem, a small village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, because — contenting ourselves with Miller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and a few other writers, mostly of fiction — we never had an accurate view of it in the first place.

What really happened, and why? Fortunately, if also horrifyingly, Schiff — who returns to the primary sources, including the few relatively unbiased contemporaneous accounts — has the answers. The trials were Kafkaesque at best, based on outlandish accusations made nominally credible by Puritan officials predisposed to believe them and who proceeded to browbeat and brainwash many of the accused into false, often elaborate confessions.

Not all of the accused confessed, but in the end it made no difference. They were guilty as sin, so to speak, for which the consequences were biblically prescribed (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”) and not remotely metaphorical. Nineteen people, including five men, were hanged — not burned at the stake, as later myth would have it.

It’s unsettling, gripping stuff, rendered in the burnished sen- tences of a master prose stylist. Perhaps it’s unusual to speak of reading a book of history — especially one about events as gruesome as these — for the quality of the writing. But every page of The Witches is almost scandalously pleasurable, the phrases rising, cresting and falling like all the best incantations. She casts a spell on you.

BARRY WETCHER, 20TH CENTURY FOX Events of 1692 did not unfold as in The Crucible, adapted from Arthur Miller’s play, with Winona Ryder and Daniel Day- Lewis.

ELENA SEIBERT THE WITCHES: SALEM, 1692 Stacy Schiff Little, Brown eeee 417 pp.