The Heretic’s Daughter takes great pains to set the stage for the mass hysteria that resulted in the Salem witch trials by describing the conditions that prevailed in the community at the time. The Puritan experience was unique in ways that set it apart from other colonies. Unlike Virginia or the Carolinas, which were founded to establish profitable plantations, Massachusetts was founded on ideological principles. The Puritan community in England had been harassed and persecuted. Migrating to North America seemed the only recourse for practitioners of this religious sect.

Puritans had already isolated themselves ideologically from Western European belief systems and now settled in a geographically isolated area. Consequently, the colonists needed to adapt to a harsher climate, different growing conditions for crops, and Indigenous neighbors who resented their territorial incursions. Thus, the colonists were strangers in a strange land. Aside from their religious battle against the devil, they were also obliged to battle disease, starvation, and Indigenous attacks. The author describes the planting and harvest cycles in painstaking detail to convey a sense of the struggle required simply to keep food on the table. A cow that couldn’t produce milk or a lame horse could impact an entire family’s survival.