Satan's Scourge

Lewis Putnam Turco is well-known in the literary culture of the United States as an award-winning poet, author of A Book of Fears which received the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize; as a literary scholar, author of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, known for decades as "the poet's Bible"; as an award-winning critic, author of Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, recipient of the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, and as the founder and original director of both the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and the Program in Writing Arts of the State University of New York College at Oswego. Dr. Turco is not known, however, as a historian, although many of his books are full of material taken from history, and he is the author of several memoirs, including Shaking the Family Tree and Fantaseers, A Book of Memories which celebrate his Italian-American background and youth in Meriden, Connecticut, as the son of an Italian Baptist minister. The fact of the matter, though, is that Lewis Putnam Turco, as his middle name attests, is also a descendant, on his mother's side, of the Putnam family of Salem Village, Massachusetts, which was involved in the New England witch hunt that brought to a close the Age of Witchcraft in 1692, and he has been researching and writing about it most of his life, beginning in the early 1950s when, for a high school project, he wrote in Nathaniel Hawthorne's own style an addendum chapter to The House of the Seven Gables. The first draft of this present book, Satan's Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, was finished more than thirty years ago. Besides being a book of American history, it is also a history of the Putnam family in America. Both these intertwined histories will fascinate most readers, for this book is perhaps the most complete treatment to date of the end of the age of "Sympathetic Magic" and the beginning of the age of "The New Philosophy" - science.