Overview
- Provides the first and only study of the Salem witch trials to focus solely on the accused and accusing children
- Examines narratives of the trials including court records, contemporary accounts, histories, and literature to discover how Salem’s children are created by and within cultural memory
- Takes a theoretical approach to childhood, considering the shifting assumptions about childhood across time, between texts, and in terms of an ideal Puritan childhood that rarely, if ever, is borne out by narratives of Salem
Part of the book series: Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic (PHSWM)
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About this book
This book discusses the role of children in the Salem witch trials through a close reading of the many and varied narratives of the trials, including court records, contemporary and historical documents, fiction, drama, and poetry. Taking a critical theory approach to explore both what we might understand as a child in 1692 New England and to consider our adult investment in reading the child, Kristina West explores narratives of the afflicted girls and the many accused children whom are often absent or overlooked in histories, and considers how the trial structure is continually repeated in attempts to establish the respective guilt and innocence of these and other groups. This book also analyses later manuscripts and fictional rewritings of the trials to question the basis on which assumptions about the child in history are made, and to consider why such narratives of Salem’s children are still relevant now.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“West in her Reading the Salem Witch Child: The Guilt of Innocent Blood sheds light on how to interpret the roles of children and families in the Salem witch trials. … West demonstrate that discerning the functions of the ordinary components of witchcraft, sometimes hidden in plain sight, can enhance our understanding of this complex subject. These two recent works help to contextualize childhood and material culture within the larger history of magic and witchcraft in early New England.” (Tricia R. Peone, Early American Literature, Vol.57 (2), 2022)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Kristina West is an affiliated member of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on American literature, children’s literature, and critical theory. Her first book, Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Reading the Salem Witch Child
Book Subtitle: The Guilt of Innocent Blood
Authors: Kristina West
Series Title: Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49304-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-49303-5Published: 18 November 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-49306-6Published: 18 November 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-49304-2Published: 17 November 2020
Series ISSN: 2731-5630
Series E-ISSN: 2731-5649
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 233
Topics: Cultural History, Social History, US History