Switching Sides

Since the 1690s, a multitude of analysts have offered explanations of the witch crisis in Massachusetts. Contemporaries sought to understand the role of Satan in the accusations, but with their passing, subsequent commentators assigned blame to human agents. Thomas Hutchinson in the eighteenth century, Charles Upham in the nineteenth century, and Marion Starkey in the twentieth century saw the accusing girls of Salem as the key to understanding what happened. George Bancroft, Brooks Adams, and Vernon Louis Parrington blamed the Puritan clergy, a notion that Chadwick Hansen challenged in Witchcraft at Salem (1969), arguing that the clergymen sought to restrain the excesses of the witchcraft crisis. In Switching Sides, Tony Fels argues that since Hansen's book, major authors have too often relied “upon economic, sociological, psychological, gender-based, ethnic, and political factors to explain the witch hunt” (p. xii). Fels sees these as seriously flawed approaches. They neglect a critical religious factor, “a fear based on the perceived threat of hidden supernatural attack,” that he believes is essential to understanding what happened (ibid

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