Welcome to Salem, investigating the witch trials.

Brought to you by History Extra. I'm Ellie Cawthorne.

This is episode four. On the eve of the Salem Witch Trials, a powerful force was at play in the New England settlement.

It influenced how the villagers saw their neighbours and gave shape to their fears about threats to their community.

It determined not only their daily routine, but their whole outlook on life.

If we're talking about societal influences on Salem, you'd be hard pushed to think of one

more pervasive than Puritanism.

As historian of early America, Kathleen M. Brown explained, the Salemites saw God's

hand in everything. What happens on earth is never far from God's plan, that in fact you could look

all around you at illness, at drought, at disease, at the weather, at severe lightning storms,

at eclipses, at freakish, unseasonal hailstorms, and to see God trying to send a message,

the hand of God in the world of human beings on earth.

In order to understand why the witch trials broke out in Salem, we need to get to grips

with the values that underpinned society there. And religion is a good place to begin.

In fact, religion was the entire reason this community existed in the first place. Professor Marion

Gibson. Because obviously the thing that set the American colonists apart, literally they went to

the other side of the world because of it, was because they were godly people. They wanted to

found their own branch of Christian religion, their own sect. and they went there to be separate from other

people so that they could do that.

So let's look at this in a bit more detail.

First of all, what exactly was Puritanism?

This radical brand of Protestantism had emerged following the Reformation of the 16th century.

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