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Title: It Was the Worst of Times
Review: If I remember correctly, Starkey's book started off as a doctoral thesis. It reads like one, despite her attempt to inject drama into a period of history that needs no such injection. Her modern enquiry is rather dated now, as she used the technique of Freudian analysis to explain away the hysteria surrounding the trials and to explain how something like this could have happened. The psychoanalysis may hit on a grain of truth, but a lot of what she stated was merely conjecture. I would have been more interested to know about the link between the real dangers the Puritans faced (dangers over which they had very little control in their new, hostile, strange environment) and their belief system, which left them ripe to believe in imagined ones.
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