Salem Village, Massachusetts, winter 1692. Two young girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, use magic to foretell who they will marry. Within days, both girls display the telltale signs of witchcraft possession. For the next fifteen months, witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions spiral out of control. Nineteen "witches" are hanged, and one is pressed to death. At the eye of the storm stands Cotton Mather, a prominent Boston pastor. During the trials he advises the Salem judges. Afterwards he defends them in his book, The Wonders of the Invisible World. It will be Mather's consummate theological explanation of Salem's dark hour, and it will seal his historical fate. Contemporaries will attack him; subsequent historians will castigate him, largely ignoring his theology in Salem trial studies. A World of Darkness is the first work to utilize Mather's theological beliefs as a lens to interpret the Salem witchcraft trials. It asks the question, "What can Mather's seventeenth-century Puritan theology tell us about the Salem witchcraft episode?"

In this fascinating account of witches and devils in colonial America, the renowned and influential minister of Boston's Old North Church attempts to justify his role in the Salem witch trials. A true believer in the devil's battle to get converts in Salem and other Massachusetts towns during the late seventeenth century, Mather also believed the fantastic accusations of those who accused their neighbors of witchcraft. The theologian's book, first published in 1692, provides readers with guidelines for discovering witches, explanations for how good Christians are tempted by the devil to become witches, and methods of resisting such temptation. The great Boston minister also provides testimony from a number of similar trials, describes instances of witchcraft in other countries, and explains the devil's predicament in dealing with Christianity. Essential reading for students of the Salem witch trials, On Witchcraft will intrigue anyone interested in early American social and cultural history.