The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology & psychology.   

In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, & people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. A woman is seen wading through the swamp like a lost soul. Disturbing dreams & visions proliferate. Children sicken & die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches & heretics & the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment & denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, & his troubled wife, Mary.
 
Drawing on rich, previously unexplored source material, Malcolm Gaskill vividly evokes a strange past, one where lives were steeped in the divine & the diabolic, in omens, curses & enchantments. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition & enlightenment, tradition & innovation.  
Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. One of Britain’s leading experts in the history of witchcraft, his works include the highly acclaimed Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy & Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans.