Some Penguin Classics are amazing original productions, which is an odd thing to say about the world’s best line of reprints. A perfect example – and a timely one, considering the Halloween/Samhain double-whammy that strikes most of the West today – is the new Penguin Book of Witches, a fantastic original anthology of key original documents in the witchcraft craze that swept Europe and colonial America two centuries ago. The collection is edited and curated by Katherine Howe (author of, among other things, the bookseller-favorite witchcraft novel The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane), who also provides a spirited and thought-provoking Introduction in which she attempts to lay out some clarifying taxonomy:

Belief in witchcraft was not an anomalous throwback to late medieval thought by provincial colonists, nor was it an embarrassing blip in an otherwise steady march to an idealized nationhood. It was not a disease. It was not a superstition. Witchcraft’s presence or absence was constituitive to the colonial order. It was a touchstone that reinforced what was normal and what was aberrant.

What follows are dozens of testimonies, tracts, and depositions ranging across the whole span of the last major Western flare-up of witch-hysteria, from its roots in England to the famous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 to the surprisingly long aftermath of Salem in the colonies. Throughout, in addition to the excerpts, Howe provides smart and helpful prefaces to orient students and interested non-specialists, as when she introduces Daemonologie, the 1597 treatise published by King James I:

Most striking to a contemporary reader will be the conflation of the pseudoscientific with the imaginary. In fact, James I was at pains to explain the difference between what was possible through witchcraft and what was merely mental delusion. He also must have grapple with the continually vexing question of why God permits the Devil to have such power. James I’s theodicy took a number of tacks, including the possibility that witchcraft could challenge those with flagging faith to rekindle their belief, but ultimately he resorted to the story of Job to justify the continual ability of Satan to tempt us into sin.

Howe reminds us that the Salem craze was far from the first such outbreak in the American colonies. Her priceless anthology includes fascinating documents from a dark interlude in Hartford, Connecticut in 1662, where at least eight people were executed, and where some of the accused were subjected to the “swim test” of hurling suspected witches into water and watching to see if they float (it was a 17^th century catch-22: if you float, you’re guilty and must be hanged; if you drown, you were innocent). The “swim test” was advised by Boston churchman Increase Mather, and the account Howe includes is an arresting glimpse into societal madness:

There were some that had a mind to try whether the stories of witches not being able to sink under water were true; and accordingly a man and woman mentioned in Ann Cole’s Dutch-tone discourse had their hands and feet tied, and so were cast into the water, and they both apparently sam after the manner of a buoy, part under, part above the water. A by-stander imagining that any person bound in that posture would be so born up, offered himself for trial, but being in the like matter gently laid on the waters, he immediately sank right down. This was no legal evidence against the suspected persons, nor were they proceeded against on any such account. However, doubting that a halter would choke them though the water would not, they very fairly took their flight, not having been seen in that part of the world since.

The account concludes with a fascinating nod to the fact that so many of those caught up in this witchcraft hysteria had moments when they themselves sensed their own derailment: “Whether this experiment were lawful, or rather superstitious and magical, we shall enquire afterward.”

As you read this amazing little volume, you increasingly realize that we ourselves are living in that afterward, when the madness has long since faded and witches have become the friendly caricature on the cover of The Penguin Book of Witches and merchandizing themes in a Salem that booms with tourists every Halloween. I haven’t checked, but I’m fairly sure Howe’s excellent little gem is on sale there year-round.