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A TIMES SUNDAY TIMES AND BBC HISTORY HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021
In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651 peculiar things begin to happen Precious food spoils livestock ails and property vanishes People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams Children sicken and die As tensions rise rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite distrust and denunciation The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife Mary It will be their downfall
The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark reallife folktale of witchhunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America when English settlers dreams of love and liberty of founding a city on a hill gave way to paranoia and terror enmity and rage Drawing on uniquely rich previously neglected source material Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic in curses and enchantments and precariously balanced between life and death
Through the gripping microhistory of a family tragedy we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment We see in short the birth of the modern world
The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing Hilary Mantel
A bona fide historical classic Sunday Times
Simply one of the best history books I have ever read BBC History
A great story exquisitely told This book is history at its illuminative best The Times
As compelling as a campfire story Gaskill brings this sinister past vividly to life Erica Wagner Financial Times
Malcolm Gaskill 2021 P Penguin Audio 2022
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