Quinn & The Witch Hunt

    To accompany last week’s reading – “The Invisible Saint Against the Invisible World” – I decided to investigate the convicting of Rebecca Nurse further. Something unique about Nurse’s case was that she wasn’t a usual suspect in the witch trial. As explained on page two of “The Invisible Saint Against the Invisible World,” Nurse fit with only two of the nine characteristics of an accused witch. While she was a woman and from an English Puritan background, she didn’t fit with the seven other traits: middle-aged, married with few or no children, frequent conflict with family members, previously accused of committing crimes, practiced a medical vocation, was of low social position, and “was abrasive in style, contentious in character.” In other words, Nurse was an outlier among those othered in the Salem Village Witch Trials. Interestingly, many different theories speculate about why Nurse was singled out and accused. One theory argues that the farm that Nurse and her h...

As I examined this week’s transcripts, depositions, and documents in The Salem Witch Hunt, something that caught my eye – in the last section, which focused on John and Elizabeth Proctor – was the connection to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Senator McCarthy’s 1950s witch hunt. I found this connection interesting and helpful in contextualizing the relationships, motives, and tragedies of the trials of 1692. As The Salem Witch Hunt shares, for example, the purpose of McCarthy’s witch hunt was “to root out alleged Communists threatening the security and moral fiber of the nation” and “Miller’s play is a gripping piece of theater and a powerful commentary on the deadly impact of fear, suspicion, and malice.” It was also interesting to investigate the broad and specific Merriam-Webster definitions of “crucible” – “Crucible looks like it should be closely related to the Latin combining form cruc- (‘cross’); however, unlike crucial, it isn’t. It was forged instead from the Medieval Latin c...