r guilty of fraud and imposture”, and decided in favor of fraud. In 1831 Charles Upham agreed: the afflicted had acted with "a malicious disposition to wreak vengeance upon enemies" In 1867, however, Upham was less certain: it was "almost beyond belief that they were wholly actuated by deliberate and cold-blooded malignancy" and it was hard to say "how much may be attributed to such 'bodily distempers' ascredulity, hallucination, and the delirium of excitement”. In 1949, Marion Starkey had no doubts: the afflicted's odd affect was entirely due to psychological 'distempers,' and she offered a pop-Freudian diagnosis of "hysteria”. In 1969, Hansen agreed with Starkey that the afflicted had been hysterical, presenting his view with the scholarship and language of the academy. Starkey's "hysterical bobbysoxers" diagnosis has entered the popular canon and school textbooks, while Hansen's verdict of "hysterical in the scientific sense of that term” has been accepted as true by the majority of scholars, Demos, McMillen, and even Karlsen, who treat the cause of affliction as settled and go on to other projects. While I see the cause as not settled, I will look instead at the way the same descriptions of affect have produced such mutually exclusive interpretations -- fraud and illness -- and suggest why fraud went entirely out of fashion, after being accepted for over a century, while hysteria came into fashion oddly, only Upham allows a mixture of fraud and illness. I will suggest that these shifts in interpretation are not founded on any new knowledge or new theories of psychology, but grow out of changes in cultural and ideological attitudes, especially toward women, and that they are made possible by the ambiguities of historical documents, by inadequate analyses of the explanations that were available in 1692, and occasionally by poor reasoning on the part of the historians. According to Calef, afflictions at Salem fi...
