Escaping Salem Themes

Throughout Escaping Salem, Richard Godbeer highlights how women who disrupted strict Puritan gender norms were considered a danger to the social order of these early American communities. Godbeer argues that such women were blamed for other people’s wrongdoings—or for things that could not be explained—just because it was an easy way to punish and demonize them for subverting gender norms.

Godbeer first examines how uncommon or aggressive social behaviors in women were literally demonized…

In Escaping Salem, historian Richard Godbeer focuses on “the other witch hunt of 1692”—a series of trials that took place in Stamford, Connecticut, far from the epicenter of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. Throughout the book, Godbeer highlights how Puritan societies often sought to legislate the unknowable—like, for instance, whether or not a woman was indeed a witch and thus responsible for her neighbors’ suffering. Godbeer argues that in both Stamford and Salem…

The title of Richard Godbeer’s book Escaping Salem suggests that the distrust, hysteria, and scapegoating that defined the Salem witch trials—and other witch hunts that took place throughout the 1600s and beyond in the landscape of early America—are firmly in the past. But as he rehashes the story of the Stamford witch trials of 1692, Godbeer ultimately suggests that the same driving forces of social uncertainty, financial or material crisis, religious extremism, and societal…