Benjamin C. Ray, "The Salem Article Review

According to Ray, those explanations ignore what more recent research has identified as the principal cause of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem: religious paranoia, intolerance, and persecution.

In that regard, Ray details the historical record showing that the principal origin of the Salem Witch Trials was in the intense antagonism on the part of Reverend Samuel Parris toward village residents who refused to join his congregation. For months before the accusations about witchcraft against Tituba, Parris railed against the unconverted as "wicked" and referred to the "chosen" members of his church and those who had "betrayed" it and who sought to destroy his village church and, ultimately, the entire church of England. Ray also notes, significantly, that all of the young girls whose accusations were the initial spark for the witch craze were members of prominent church families. By the time their accusations first surfaced, Parris's audience had been well primed to root out supposed "agents of Satan" against whom Parris had directed his paranoid rantings for months.

Ray also introduces another important factor in the form of his explanation that judicial actions supporting the trials and failing to safeguard the legal protections against false accusations and unjust deprivation of liberty reflected the need of judicial magistrates and members of the Governor's Council in Boston to support any alternate explanation for the damage cause to New England by their decisions in other matters. Specifically, they had left the Maine frontier vulnerable to Indian attacks by removing the militia forces protecting Falmouth Maine in 1690, resulting in the loss of that settlement. By supporting the allegations against witches, they deflected responsibility from their decisions to the supposed workings of Satan through witches.

In general, Ray provides a well-referenced account, both of the inaccurate homogeneity among contemporary historical narratives before the 1990s and of the more detailed analysis of the available primary records by a minority of modern authors. Ultimately, it is likely that Ray's account will result in the eventual incorporation of the importance of religious paranoia and persecution as the principal fuel behind the Salem Witch Trials, replacing the inaccurate focus on comparatively insignificant elements that have…