Robert Calef

Robert Calef (1648–1719) was a Boston merchant remembered as a critic of the Salem witch trials. In More Wonders of the Invisible World, published in London in 1700 because no Boston printer would take it, he collected documents and his own observations to attack the credulity of the judges and the role of the ministers Increase and Cotton Mather in encouraging the prosecutions. His title answered Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. The book provoked angry replies from the Mathers' supporters, but it contributed to the later judgment that the trials had been a tragic delusion.