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.61TWOFrom Shards to MeaningsHistorians Make Senseof the TrialsThe time, 1692.The place, Salem Village, Massachusetts.The roleof historian and the role of the playwright both begin with the establish-ment of setting.As historians have written their texts on Salem, they have,in effect, created sets, scripts, characters.They have asked readers to sus-pend their disbelief and enter with them into a past that, however recent,is, in reality, irretrievably lost.In the accounts I will discuss below, histo-rians have chosen different ways to bring the past to light.Some have usedrhetoric, while some have used science.There has been sleight of handand remorseful honesty.In addition to examining the content what dothese writers have to say about what happened in Salem? this chapter isas much examining the methodologies employed in these accounts.Withinthe series of arguments made by multiple historians about the events ofSalem s past, a shifting notion of what it means to look back at all beginsto take shape.Ultimately, even in their vast disagreements over the par-ticulars, these writers seem to be interested in the same dramatic quest: toseek out and define not only an era, but also a historical process.As theycollide with each other and with the ultimate unknowability that hauntsthem all, they invent sometimes playful, sometimes horrifying, always cre-ative methods to collapse the distance that separates them from the truththey seek.These methods, which unlike truth itself are representa-tions, are what comprise Salem s history, and what, more than witches andministers, keep the Salem story alive.62Two: From Shards to MeaningsCotton Mather and Robert Calef:A Foundational DialecticCotton Mather s The Wonders of the Invisible World was one of thefirst major written historical accounts of the Salem witch trials.Mather,who is known by most current-day scholars as the great defender of thetrials, was pressured into writing his account by the turning tide in Salem,a tide that was flowing towards an embarrassed, even horrified, reconsid-eration of the recent executions, and a tide that threatened to emasculateMather s own potency and credibility as a religious leader with a directline to God.1 From the beginning, Mather s Wonders was less a monologueproduced from the origin of raw conviction than it was a dialogue, aresponse to charges leveled by a changing political landscape.Wonders wasfirst published in Boston in 1693, and though it has served  perhapsappropriately as the document that cemented Mather s historical repu-tation as a rabid witch hunter and a defender of the Salem court, as BernardRosenthal puts it,  That characterization misses his complexity.Thereis more than one way to misconstrue what Mather was about in his defenseof the trials (147).While Rosenthal argues passionately for Mather s well-intentioned and earnest religious fervor, it may be more productive to con-sider the multiple ways that Mather can be construed, rather than just correcting perceived historical errors.Though Mather may have beenboth well intentioned and sorely misguided, what is most interesting aboutWonders is the way that Mather wrestles with the complexities and para-doxes of some central theoretical questions from the trials: What is thenature of truth? How does the devil relate to God? And what are the con-nections between witches and historians? Unlike Rosenthal, this chapteris less interested in redeeming Mather s reputation than in exploring theways in which his text complicates the central issues involved in the tri-als.Even though Mather s stance has generally been understood to beuncomplicated and overly zealous,2 his part in establishing the  originsof Salem historiography reveals a deeper level of complexity in his posi-tion.The Salem histories emerged from a central schism between apolo-gists and critics of the trials, and both  sides of the debate reflect thisdivisionist beginning.Mather s Wonders begins with an  Author s Defence,63The Making of Salemwhich sets Mather up as an opponent.The question is who or what doesMather oppose (and who or what opposes him)? Mather opens:This, as I remember, the learned Scribonius, who reports, that One of hisAquaintance, devoutly making his Prayers on the behalf of a Person molestedby Evil Spirits, received from those Evil Spirits an horrible Blow over theFace: And I may my self expect not few or small Buffetings from Evil Spirits,for the Endeavours wherewith I am now going to encounter them [v].On the one hand, it is clear that Mather sets himself up in opposition tothe Devil himself. I countermine the whole plot of the Devil, he writes(vi).But Mather also conflates the evil of the Devil with the evil of thosewho had begun speaking out against the trials. I am far from Insensible,he writes,  that at this extraordinary time of the Devils coming down ingreat Wrath upon us, there are too many Tongues and Hearts thereby seton fire of Hell; that the various Opinions about the Witchcrafts which oflater Time have troubled us, are maintained by some with such Fury, as ifthey could never be sufficiently stated, unless written in the Liquor where-with Witches use to write their Covenants (v, emphasis mine).Here,Mather sets up the trials as a dichotomy between good and evil; this wasa self-evident dichotomy to seventeenth-century Puritans who each Sun-day (and often more than that) heard sermons about their duty to counterSalem s attacks with piety, religious conviction, and moral righteousness.But Mather also sets up the trials histories as a dichotomy between  usand  them, between good supporters of Mather and those evil townspeo-ple who oppose him.For Mather, the unfolding debate is not just betweenGod and the devil, but between representations of good and evil, repre-sentations that can be consciously deployed and rebutted by Salem s earthlyinhabitants [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]