The Salem Witch Hunt is surely the most-written-about persecution of alleged witches anywhere, because of both its extraordinary size and the multitude of surviving primary sources for historians to work with. The hunt started during March of 1692 in Salem Village of the Massachusetts colony with a few girls who claimed to be attacked by witches. These girls blamed three women on the margins of decent society. Over the next few months, legal proceedings expanded beyond these three to over a 150 arrests, including many respectable citizens across New England. Authorities had hanged nineteen people by the time the governor suspended the trials in late October. In Satan & Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692, a scholar who helped to digitize the court records (salem.lib.virginia.edu), Benjamin C. Ray, seeks to explain the deadly panic.

Ray's unique approach is to examine the hunt from different perspectives, especially those of key participants. He therefore does not present a chronological narrative, or even a convenient summary of the trials, which might challenge readers unfamiliar with the sequence of events. Additionally, his organization gives the impression of a collection of essays rather than a tightly constructed argument. As a result, he covers some of the same ground several times. But his categorizing Salem as “a multivalent society tragedy involving a number of critical factors and several major characters” (6) justifies the varied viewpoints.

The decisive player in this tragedy was the Reverend Samuel Parris, father of one of the girls who started the accusations. Ray attributes Parris's role in this crisis to the minister's insecurity about his parish, his sermons about Satan's threat to New England, and his writing of depositions to accuse others. The confession of Parris's “Indian” slave Tituba intensified matters, with her tale of a demonic plot against the minister's family. Parris's supporter Thomas Putnam, the father of another of the first “afflicted girls,” also contributed substantially to the accusations.

As for those young accusers, Ray argues that their “families and the authorities, both ministers and magistrates, stage-managed the girl's actions at every step of the way” (46). The girls’ main contribution was to dramatize their afflictions with shouts and contortions in both church and courtroom, claiming to be choked, pricked, pinched, and bitten by the invisible witches in spirit form. The magistrates encouraged this performance out of a sense of urgency to do something, anything, since they believed the girls’ claims that dangerous witches were meeting in the heart of their community. They acted counter to the diminishing belief in witchcraft throughout Western civilization and instead took the direction of local religious leaders (such as Cotton Mather) and medical authorities. Flaws in their legal procedures only increased the numbers of the accused and facilitated convictions.

Another unique issue was that the accused who actually confessed to being witches were not put on trial; at first, only those who stubbornly denied being a witch were tried and, usually, convicted. While magistrates coerced some confessions (although only one case involved torture), many people quickly realized the leniency offered for those who admitted dealings with the Devil. Cotton Mather's father, the preeminent scholar Increase Mather, actually interviewed some of those who had confessed, and then criticized some of the legal procedures in his Cases of Conscience. Yet Ray cites Increase Mather's agreement with the conviction of the former Salem minister George Burroughs, going further to criticize Increase Mather for his willingness to excuse the persecuting magistrates.

Ray integrates himself into the long line of historians who have worked on Salem. He often cites Mary Beth Norton approvingly for her description of magistrates trying to compensate for failures in wars against the Indians. He is much more critical of Paul Boyer and Steven Nissenbaum's study, which blamed rivalries between agricultural and commercial parts of Salem. Ray devotes a chapter to updated demographics and maps to assert that people's standing as members in the parish church was more important than property or location in determining their involvement in the trials.

Ray regularly points out the failings and mistakes of the historical actors, noting tipping points where the hunt might have been reined in. In his view, the accumulated human actions of individuals fearing Satanic plots led to many innocent people suffering for crimes they could not have committed. While perhaps overshadowed by the publication of Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 (2015), Ray's study effectively explains why authorities in Massachusetts hunted witches.