Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012.
Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969.
Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987.
Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991.
Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57.
Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.
Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Ray, Benjamin. “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village.” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2008): 449–78.
Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002.
Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Rosenthal, Bernard, Gretchen A. Adams, et al., eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner, 1971.
Trask, Richard B. The Devil Hath Been Raised: A Documentary History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Outbreak of March 1692: Together with a Collection of Newly Located and Gathered Witchcraft Documents. Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 1997.
Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
A Note on the Text
Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have been modernized for ease of comprehension. In some instances, line breaks and italics have been added for clarity of the speakers and events described in a trial transcript.
Redactions in running text are indicated by an ellipsis.
Confusing vocabulary or usage is clarified in the endnotes.
Occasional problems in transcription of the original document, such as losses or illegible words, are indicated in brackets.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to my patient and excellent editor, John Siciliano at Penguin Classics, for his thoroughgoing vision and support, to his editorial assistant Douglas Clark, and to my agent, Suzanne Gluck at William Morris Endeavor, for her unflagging friendship and brilliance. Thank you also to the friends and colleagues who have believed in my work on this project, with particular gratitude to David Hall, Patricia Hills, Bruce Holsinger, Virginia Myhaver, Mary Beth Norton, Brian Pellinen, Benjamin Ray, and Bruce Schulman. Rebecca Goetz did yeoman’s labor reading drafts and providing commentary, and I am so grateful to her for her guidance and support. My particular gratitude also to Katerina Stanton for making order out of chaos, and to the librarians and archivists at Houghton Library, Cornell Special Collections, the Huntington Library, and the Massachusetts State Archives for their work preserving the heritage of witchcraft in North America for generations of scholars to come. The online Salem archive maintained by the University of Virginia is a boon to scholars of Salem that is hard to overstate, and I am grateful to UVA for maintaining that initiative.
Thank you to all the book clubs and individual readers I have encountered over the years whose hunger for history inspires me every day, and to my students at Boston University and Cornell for keeping me passionate about the life of the mind.
Finally, my most ardent thanks to Louis Hyman, whose love, support, guidance, counsel, research assistance, and psychoanalysis made the completion of this project a reality.
ENGLISH ANTECEDENTS
WITCHES IN THE BIBLE
When thinking about witches today, a certain standard image comes to mind: she is an old crone with a warty nose, a black pointed hat, raggedy clothes, and a black cat by her side. Though our contemporary picture of the witch has evolved away from the Puritan conception, the American colonists too had a set of assumptions about who a witch was likely to be, and how she—for it was almost always a “she”—was able to conduct her devilish doings. But where did these assumptions come from? How did the colonists define what a witch was?
We might assume that the early modern conception of a witch derived from a description in the King James Bible. This version of the Bible, which was begun in 1604 in response to Puritan criticisms of earlier English translations, became the most widely read translation of the Bible in English during the early modern period. Printing was expensive, but then, as now, the most commonly available printed object was a Bible.
And yet the Bible is strangely quiet about witchcraft. It confirms that witches exist, but most of the telltale details—the identifying characteristics that set a witch apart from a run-of-the-mill person, and the powers that a witch is supposed to have—do not appear.
In fact, witches, as a category of their own, rather than as wizards or sorcerers, are mentioned fewer than a dozen times in the King James Bible. The first appearance comes early, in Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This command forms the justification for capital punishment of witches, but it appears without any illumination or commentary, wedged between a guideline about dowry payment and a prohibition against bestiality. Witches are declared not allowed, and yet all of Exodus 22 remains silent on the definition of what or who a witch is, or on what activities might constitute witchcraft. Even a witch’s gender is, at least according to this translation, undefined.
A bit more detail emerges with the next mention, in Deuteronomy 18:10–12:
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
This passage appears as part of the advice to the tribe of Levi, so that their priests will not pick up any of the unsanctioned religious practices that they will encounter in the lands to which God will send them. Deuteronomy places witches in a context with other deviant forms of religion: “necromancers” who attempt to practice magic, astrologers, and diviners who claim to see the future.
The principal dangers of witchcraft in this context are twofold: first, witchcraft as a practice stands outside of sanctioned religious structure. Witchcraft is that which we, the chosen tribe of God, ought not to do. Defining witchcraft as a negative quality (that which we do not do) rather than by a set of affirmative qualities (divining, say, which is a concrete activity), Deuteronomy opens the possibility of a language to describe witchcraft that can be molded to suit any number of witch-hunters working within different contexts, and toward different goals. In this passage the signal quality of witchcraft is difference, specifically difference from those who hold religious power.
Deuteronomy does supply a few details about witchlike behavio
r that would be important in early modern accusations against suspected witches, in particular the mention of “familiar spirits.” This obscure signifier will eventually morph into the Hollywood witch’s black cat, but the idea of familiar spirits will come to play a substantial role in the thinking about, and prosecution of, early modern witchcraft in Europe and North America.
The proscription against witchcraft in Deuteronomy reappears in the story of Manasseh, in 2 Chronicles 33:6:
And he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.1
Manasseh makes himself worse than the heathens, for in theory he ought to know better than to question the practices that God has set forth for him. Fortunately Manasseh, in the course of his affliction, humbled himself before God and saw the error of his ways. Witchcraft in this context appears as more a question of adherence or rejection of orthodoxy, rather than as a specific set of deviant practices. The degree of God’s disapproval becomes clarified, including what is truly at risk for a person practicing witchcraft, and yet we still have only the vaguest sense of what a “witch” really is.
If the Bible could not provide clarity on how to identify a witch, and how to deal with her once identified, academic theologians appointed themselves equal to the task. By the early modern period in England, the religious and intellectual landscape that would predominate in initial waves of North American settlement, there was no shortage of theologians willing to do just that.
TRIAL OF URSULA KEMP, ST. OSYTH, ENGLAND 1582
The first witchcraft act in England was passed in 1542, and the last antiwitchcraft statute was not officially repealed until 1736. During that two-hundred-year span, witch trials in England occurred sporadically and tended to be clustered in Essex County, England, much as their North American counterparts would be clustered in Essex County, Massachusetts, a century later. English witch-hunting reached its peak in the 1580s, when witch cases made up 13 percent of all criminal hearings, an impressive number, even considering the high rates of acquittal.1
One of the most notable early modern English witch trials occurred in February and March of 1582, when Justice of the Peace Brian Darcy of St. Osyth, Essex, charged one Ursula Kemp with witchcraft. Darcy pursued Kemp under the antiwitchcraft statute of 1563, holding hearings to determine if there was sufficient evidence to present the case to the Chelmsford assizes. The trial of Ursula Kemp demonstrates a remarkable consistency with later North American witch cases, both in terms of the character of the suspected witch, and the context of her trial.2
The author of the ensuing text, given as “W.W.,” has not been conclusively identified. It could be a pseudonym for Darcy himself. Much of the evidence appears recorded in the first person, including statements that had been delivered with no one but Darcy present to hear them. The tract depicts Darcy as a committed witch-hunter, but also shows a small community under pressure, with long-standing grudges and quarrels unearthed for fresh consideration, a pattern that will be echoed in North America.3
St. Osyth, like many early modern English villages, was a poor society whose members depended on barter and trade, a sometimes fraught social relationship that often resulted in squabbling. The amount of begging represented in the Kemp trial indicates how widespread poverty was at the time, and how begging could instill resentment in neighbors.
Another contributing factor to suspicions of witchcraft in the early modern period was the inexplicable sudden onset of ailments in both persons and cattle.4 Sickness from unhygienic conditions made for a high infant mortality rate, but those deaths were easier to bear if they could be blamed on someone else. Harder to understand than the desire to assign blame is Ursula’s confession, however—was she insane? Did she enjoy the attention, however negative? Or did she really think she had witchly powers?5
Ursula Kemp’s witch trial establishes a pattern for witch trials to come. Her marginal status within the community, her alleged crimes, the use of children as witnesses, her familiar spirit, the promise of lenience in exchange for confession, and the search of her body for a so-called witch’s teat all reappear in North American witch trials a century later.
At the St. Osyth trial, one woman, Joan Pechey, was acquitted, but Ursula Kemp was executed after trial at the Chelmsford Lent Assizes.6 The injustice of this particular case likely inspired Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584, which is the most explicit skeptical account of witchcraft in England and which in many cases attacks Darcy by name.7
THE TRIAL OF URSULA KEMP8
[The Information of Grace Thurlowe]
The 19th Day of February the 24th year of the reign of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth. The information of Grace Thurlowe, the wife of John Thurlowe, taken before me, Brian Darcy, the day and year above said, against Ursula Kemp, alias Grey, as followeth.
[ . . . ]
The said Grace saith also that about three quarters of a year ago she was delivered of a woman child, and saith that shortly after the birth thereof, the said Ursula fell out with her, for that she would not suffer her to have the nursing of that child; at such times as she the said Grace continued in work at the Lord Darcy’s place. And saith that she, the said Grace nursing the said child, within some short time after that falling out, the child lying in the cradle, and not above a quarter old, fell out of the said cradle, and broke her neck, and died. The which the said Ursula hearing to have happened, made answer it maketh no matter. For she might have suffered me to have the keeping and nursing of it.9
And the said Grace saith that when she lay in,10 the said Ursula came unto her, and seemed to be very angry for that she had not the keeping in of the said Grace, and for that she answered unto her that she was provided. And thereupon they entered further into talk, the said Grace saying that if she should continue lame as she had done before, she would find the means to know how it came, and that she would creep upon her knees to complain of them to have justice done upon them. And to that she the said Ursula said, “It were a good turn.” Take heed (said Grace) Ursula, thou hast a naughty name. And to that Ursula made answer, though she could unwitch she could not witch,11 and so promised the said Grace that if she did send for her privately,12 and send her keeper away, that then she would show the said Grace how she should unwitch herself or any other at any time.
And the said Grace further saith that about half a year past she began to have a lameness in her bones, and specially in her legs, at which time the said Ursula came unto her unsent for and without request and said she would help her of her lameness if she the said Grace would give her twelve pence, [then] which the said Grace speaking her fair, promised her so to do, and thereupon for the space of five weeks after, she was well and in good case as she was before. And then the said Ursula came unto the said Grace, and asked her the money she promised to her. Whereupon the said Grace made answer that she was a poor and a needy woman, and had no money. And then the said Ursula requested of her cheese for it but she said she had none. And she the said Ursula, seeing nothing to be had of the said Grace, fell out with her and said that she would be even with her and thereupon she was taken lame, and from that day to this day hath so continued.
And she saith that when she is anything well or beginneth to amend, then her child is tormented, and so continueth for a time in a very strange case, and when he beginneth to amend then she the said Grace becommeth so lame, as without help she is not able to arise or to turn her in her bed.
[The Information of Annis Letherdall]
The information of Annis Letherdall, wife of Richard Letherdall, taken by me, Brian Darcy, Esquire, against Ursula Kemp, alias Grey, the 19th day of February.
The said Annis saith that before Michaelmas13 last, she the said Ursula sent her son to the said Letherd
all’s house to have scouring sand and sent word by the said boy that his mother would give her the dyeing of a pair of women’s hose for the sand.14 But the said Annis knowing her to be a naughty15 beast sent her none. And after she the said Ursula, seeing her girl16 to carry some to one of her neighbors’ houses, murmured as the said child said, and presently after her child was taken as it lay very big with a great swelling in the bottom of the belly and other private parts. And the said Annis saith that about the tenth day of February last she went unto the said Ursula, and told her that she had been forth with a cunning body, which said, that she the said Ursula had bewitched her child.17 To that the said Ursula answered that she knew she had not so been, and so talking further she said that she would lay her life that she the said Annis had not been with any, whereupon she requested a woman being in the house a-spinning with the said Ursula to bear witness what she had said. And the next day the child was in most piteous case to behold, whereby she thought it good to carry the same unto mother Ratcliffe, for that she had some experience of her skill. The which when the said mother Ratcliffe did see, she said to the said Annis that she doubted she should do it any good, yet she ministered unto it, et cetera.
[The Information of Thomas Rabbet]
The information of Thomas Rabbet, of the age of 8 years or thereabouts, base son to the said Ursula Kemp, alias Grey, taken before me, Brian Darcy, Esquire, one of Her Majesty’s justices, the 25th day of February, against his said mother.
The said Thomas Rabbet saith that his said mother Ursula Kemp, alias Grey, hath four several spirits, the one called Tyffin, the other Tittey, the third Pigeon, and the fourth Jack and being asked of what colors they were, saith that Tittey is like a little gray cat, Tyffin is like a white lamb, Pigeon is black like a toad, and Jack is black like a cat. And he saith he hath seen his mother at times to give them beer to drink, and of a white loaf of cake to eat, and saith that in the nighttime the said spirits will come to his mother, and suck blood of her upon her arms and other places of her body.18