Salem Witch Trials: Internet Resources

"...consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.

The Documentary Archive is created under the supervision of Professor Benjamin C. Ray, University of Virginia. The Transcription project is supervised by Professor Bernard Rosenthal, University of Binghamton...resources include court records, contemporary books, and record books, as well as images of the original court documents, indexed according to various archival collections. The overview also refers to some of the notable people who played important roles in the trials and in the debate about the legitimacy of the trials. Users of the Archive may search the court records and contemporary books and letters for names of people involved, aided by a list of notable people and by a complete alphabetical list of everyone mentioned in the court documents.

The Archive's historical maps of Salem Village, Salem, and Andover show the locations of the houses of many of the people involved in the trials. The Regional Accusations Map displays the chronology of the accusations from February through November 1692, and shows the spread of the accusations across the towns of Massachusetts Bay. The Salem Village Accusations Map shows the day-by-day accusations the month of March, 1692. It displays the names of the accusers and the accused, and their household locations, as recorded in the court documents. The Archive's collection of literary works includes works by Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, and Freeman.

The Archive also contains educational information, such as biographical profiles, a collection of images containing portraits of notable people involved in the trials, pictures of important historic sites, historical paintings and published illustrations taken from 19th and early 20th century literary and historical works."

If interested in seeking information on witchcraft persecution in other places, particularly Europe, Cornell has you covered.

To quote: "It documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. The collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy.

It contains many early texts from the period when the theory of the heresy of witchcraft was being formulated, including fourteen Latin editions of one of the more sinister works on demonology, the Malleus maleficarum, which codified church dogma on heresy. Four of these Latin editions were printed in the fifteenth-century, most notably the scarce first edition printed before April 14, 1487. The collection also contains other defining texts of the doctrinal discussion of demonology, such as Jean Bodin's De la Demonmanie des sorciers (1580), Nicolas Remi's Daemonlatreiae (1595), Henri Boguet's Discours des sorciers (1602) and Pierre de Lancre's Tableau de I'inconstance des mauvais anges (1612)."