In the summer of 1692 all of eastern Massachusetts trembled in fear as neighbors and kinfolk accused one another of practicing witchcraft. Hundreds were jailed, and in the first round of the ensuing trials from June 2 to September 21, 1692—the most extensive mass trials of suspected criminals in the colonial period of American history—all of the defendants were convicted. Fifteen women and four men were hanged, and one eighty-year-old male defendant was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to accept the authority of the court. Four of the detained suspects had died, and many more were sick. The trials have become a watchword for unthinking panic and religious excess, but historians have recovered the broader context of the trials. This includes widespread belief in magic and countermagic, strong currents of anti-Catholicism in the dominant Protestant theology of the region coupled with fear of the Catholic missionaries and their Indian allies on the northern and western…