THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZEA TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARA bona fide historical classic Sunday TimesSimply one of the best history books I have ever read BBC HistoryIn the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall.The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, reallife folktale of witchhunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers dreams of love and liberty, of founding a city on a hill, gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich, previously neglected source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death.Through the gripping microhistory of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment....

Binding: Paperback;336 pages; Publisher: TBS-Penguin Random House Wholesale; Classification: HBJK; Weight: 368 g; Dimensions: 129 x 196 x 22

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