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Presented by the Salem Award Foundation for Human Rights and Social Justice & The Salem Athenæum

"No scholar has done more to illuminate the terrifying psychology of witchcraft in Western culture than John Demos. The Enemy Within is a masterful synthesis of this phenomenon.”

David Oshinsky, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History

“In a distillation of a lifetime's research, Demos, who is the foremost scholar of early American witchcraft, reveals patterns that go back to the European middle ages and explains how shifting interpretations of Salem reflect its place at the heart of the American psyche.”

Lyndal Roper, Professor of Early Modern History,
Balliol College, Oxford

Noted historian John Demos spoke at Hamilton Hall, 9 Chestnut Street, on Friday, November 7. Demos had just published The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World, an original and fascinating look at the cultural, societal, and psychological practice of witch-hunts that illuminates the dark side of communities driven to rid themselves of “evil,” no matter what the cost.

The term “witch-hunt” is used today to describe everything from political scandals to school board shake-ups. But its origins are far from trivial. Long before the Salem witch trials, women and men were rounded up by neighbors, accused of committing horrific crimes using supernatural powers, scrutinized by priests and juries, and promptly executed. The belief in witchcraft—and the deep fear of evil it instilled in communities—led to a cycle of accusation, anger and purging that has occurred repeatedly in the West for centuries. The Enemy Within takes readers from the early Christians persecuted in Rome through the Salem witch trials, McCarthy’s hunt for communists, and the hysteria around child sex-abuse cases and satanic cults in the 1980s.

John Demos is the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University. Among his other books are Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, and A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony.