A World of Darkness: Cotton Mather and the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials
Salem Village, Massachusetts, winter 1692. Two young girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, use magic to foretell who they will marry. Within days, both girls display the telltale signs of witchcraft possession. For the next fifteen months, witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions spiral out of control. Nineteen "witches" are hanged, and one is pressed to death. At the eye of the storm stands Cotton Mather, a prominent Boston pastor. During the trials he advises the Salem judges. Afterwards he defends them in his book, The Wonders of the Invisible World. It will be Mather's consummate theological explanation of Salem's dark hour, and it will seal his historical fate. Contemporaries will attack him; subsequent historians will castigate him, largely ignoring his theology in Salem trial studies. A World of Darkness is the first work to utilize Mather's theological beliefs as a lens to interpret the Salem witchcraft trials. It asks the question, "What can Mather's seventeenth-century Puritan theology tell us about the Salem witchcraft episode?"
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"To see the world through someone else's eyes is to be uniquely privileged. David Price has written a beautiful account of Cotton Mather's worldview and cosmology and in the process has transformed how we view Mather himself, and the Salem witch trials. By locating this pivotal episode in American history in its fullest intellectual, religious and social context--evidenced in the writings of its most powerful participant--Dr. Price explains how the forces of belief and of community conspired in tragedy."
--Tim Hitchcock
Professor of Digital History, University of Sussex, United Kingdom
"Wide-ranging reading, careful reasoning, and deep immersion in the life and writings of Cotton Mather have allowed David Price to achieve the nearly impossible--which is to offer a fresh word about the much-studied Salem witch trials of late-seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Price's 'historical-theological' method provides a perspective for showing how both general Puritan theology and Mather's own personal cosmology played out at Salem, but also lets him exploit insightfully many other scholarly viewpoints. In its goal of adding another level of interpretive meaning to a much-studied event, A World of Darkness is a significant success."
--Mark Noll, Research Professor of History, Regent College and Professor Emeritus of History, Notre Dame University; Author of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada
"This fascinating and scholarly book provides a new perspective on Salem. David Price reconstructs with forensic care the distinctive worldview of Cotton Mather, in whose end-times vision good and evil were in constant battle, and in so doing, helps us understand how and why the Salem trials happened as they did, and the limited but far-reaching role of Mather himself."
--Laura Gowing, Professor of Early Modern History at King's College London
"David Price's book A World of Darkness gives us an historical perspective and current worldview of the intricacies of witchcraft and Salem rituals. You will walk away enlightened and informed with a new perspective after reading this book."
--Dr. Dedra Sibley, JD, Provost, Eastern Florida State College, Cocoa Campus, Florida A&M University
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