I have long since forgotten much of what I studied at high school, but one text that left a lasting impression was Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
In equal parts terrifying and enthralling, not least because it is based on real events, it left me with many questions; why and how could a community be consumed by such apparent madness as to execute 19 people and imprison more than 150 for witchcraft based solely on the testimony of a bunch of children?
These are problems that, as Stacy Schiff, the author of the latest history of the Salem witch trials puts it, writers and historians have been conjuring with for years.
Their efforts have been helped (or hampered) by the paucity of written records from the time, many of which seem to have been deliberately destroyed in an attempt to preserve reputations and careers, and it is a testament to Schiff's tenacity that she has managed to assemble the remaining fragmentary accounts into some sort of narrative order.
The difficulty of her job is evident from the start.
The Witches opens with six tightly spaced pages naming the cast of characters, a bewildering catalogue of accusers and accused, judges and sceptics - many related by blood and/or marriage - that serves as both synecdoche and essential reference for the material that follows.
It is a twisted tale in which accused becomes accuser, husbands denounce wives and daughters their mothers in an epidemic of witchcraft that eventually encompassed 25 towns and villages throughout New Hampshire.
As well as detailing the trials themselves, Schiff looks at both the lead up to and aftermath of events, situating them within a broader cultural and historical context.
It is not a flattering picture.
Living as they did in a state of political flux and beset by marauding Indians and Frenchmen, New Englanders had good reason for their existential fears.
But she also depicts the Puritan settlers as primed by their beliefs and customs to a state of watchfulness, religious superstition and austerity that made the events almost inevitable and, unlike other writers (including Miller), Schiff frames the story as one of women in peril rather than of perilous women.
She diagnoses the girls whose testimony precipitated the first accusations as suffering from Freudian hysteria brought on by the physical, emotional, psychological and sensory austerity with which they lived, their behaviour subsequently copied by disenfranchised adolescent girls for whom it provided a source of much-desired (male) attention and empowerment, as well as a way to settle personal or familial grudges.
It is the authorities themselves who emerge as the real villains, so driven by political, theological or personal motives that they were willing to convict on the flimsiest of evidence, and even go so far as to reverse verdicts of innocence or acquittal won on appeal lest it undermine their position.
As interesting as Schiff's handling of the material is, I found myself struggling at points with her dense and sometimes confusing writing style and uneasy with her thesis that the presence of Salem in American historical and cultural memory serves as a vaccine against such excesses in the present day.
Instead I was left dwelling upon numerous more recent analogues where the fear of the enemy within has been used to create an atmosphere of fear in which to justify the extraction of confession under torture and enable the elision of inconsistent or contradictory testimonies that cast doubt upon the official narrative.
Even George W. Bush's "You are either with us or against us'' has its antecedents in 17th century pronouncements.
Schiff does touch on contemporary examples of American political paranoia, and I would like to think The Witches serves the purpose she intends.
But by painting events in Salem as arising from an unusually literal-minded and tight-laced religious community at a particularly troubled point in history, the lessons that it has to teach us may be lost to many.
• Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
