by Stacy Schiff
When Massachusetts exonerated the Salem victims in 1710 it overlooked six women. They remained missing through the 1940s and 1950s, as the commonwealth considered pardons but could not seem to make up its legislative mind. One lawyer appearing before a Senate committee objected to “fooling with history.” Some legislators feared expensive suits for damages. Others hinted that a pardon might knock Salem’s witches from their tourist-bewitching brooms. As the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had not existed in 1692, it surely had no jurisdiction over a verdict of Massachusetts Bay. On Halloween 2001—weeks after we began to wonder anew about unseen evils—Massachusetts pardoned the last of the condemned. They included Susannah Martin and Bridget Bishop, who had transformed themselves into gleaming lights and disturbed men in their beds, afterward spending weeks together in a stifling prison. Parris had testified and Mather had written against both women. Bishop was not entirely sure she knew what a witch was. The convulsing girls wholly mystified her. “Do you think they are bewitched?” Hathorne asked Susannah Martin. “No,” she had replied, three hundred and nine years before her pardon. “I do not think they are.”
Frontispiece to Joseph Glanvill’s much consulted 1681 volume. With unassailable logic, the Royal Society fellow proved the existence of witchcraft; nothing so preposterous could be a sham. And how was it possible, asked Glanvill, “that imagination, which is the most various thing in the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places?” The “wonderful story of certain Swedish witches” traveled to New England with Glanvill as well. (© The British Library Board 084228)
From a pamphlet on a sixteenth-century English witchcraft case. Four women stood accused of various misdeeds; three hanged within weeks of their arrest. English witches in particular maintained menageries of “familiars,” demonic mascots that did their bidding. This one feeds her blood to her diabolical toads.
A sixteenth-century French woodcut, probably from a text that argued that witches could not perform magical feats but deserved to be prosecuted anyway as heretics. The prying neighbor observes a sort of time-lapse sequence as the witch spirits herself up the chimney. (The Bridgeman Art Library)
The cover of a pamphlet on a Northamptonshire trial, at which several women were accused of murder and pig-bewitching. One of their victims suffered “such a gripping and gnawing in her body that she cried out and could scarce be held by such as came unto her.”
A late-arriving, probably eighteenth-century set of English broomsticks. The devil rides along with two confederates; the woman on the ground is either an accomplice or a potential recruit. (© The British Library Board C13724-46, T. 1855 [19]).
Reverend Samuel Parris, in whose contested meadow the witches congregated. The miniature probably dates from just before the move to Salem. Parris had the proclivity for tidiness that creates a shambles. He could be sharp. “I cannot preach without study, I cannot study without fire, I cannot live quietly without study,” he warned his disobliging parishioners, slow to provide firewood over the wretched winter of 1691–1692. (The Bridgeman Art Library/Massachusetts Historical Society)
Fragment of a monogrammed pewter plate—a rarity in seventeenth-century Salem village—excavated at the parsonage site. It is the only physical trace of Elizabeth Parris’s existence. (Photograph by Richard B. Trask)
The homemade walking sticks on which George Jacobs hobbled into court, to inform the justices he was as likely a buzzard as a wizard. (Peabody Essex Museum)
Pins from the Salem proceedings, where they punctured throats and protruded from arms. They were removed, noted an eyewitness, “by the judges’ own hands.” One was found sticking upright in a victim’s hair; another pierced an enchanted girl’s upper and lower lips, binding them together, leaving her unable to testify. (Courtesy Danvers Archival Center)
The restored Nurse homestead, where four villagers called on seventy-one-year-old Rebecca in March to break the news that she had been accused of witchcraft. “What sin has God found in me unrepented of that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?” she asked once she had recovered from the shock. She hanged four months later. (Photograph by Richard B. Trask)
The Salem village meetinghouse, reconstructed in 1985 and in better shape today than it was in 1692. Adolescent girls interrupted both hearings and sermons in the dimly lit 34-by-28-foot structure. (Photograph by Richard B. Trask)
From the account of a 1621 English case, in which three young women—falling into fits and trances—conversed with dead siblings and specters. Among the accused was an old widow, known to have consorted for over forty years with a spirit in the shape of a great black cat; she appears here with her demon familiar as well. She was acquitted. (© The British Library Board B20051-69, Add. 32496 f.2)
Increase Mather, Cotton’s father, Harvard’s president and New England’s most eminent minister. The portrait dates from 1688, four years after the publication of Illustrious Providences, a treasure trove of shipwrecks, portents, tempests, and possessions collected to political end. Those oddities proved New Englanders to be a chosen people on an exceptional mission. (American Antiquarian Society)
Cotton Mather, later in life. Although largely absent from Salem, the twenty-nine-year-old minister wrote himself into the story; no one in Massachusetts poked as insistently into and around the subject of witchcraft. Nor did anyone offer such contradictory opinions. In June, Mather advised the court to exercise “very critical and exquisite caution,” five paragraphs later endorsing a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.” (American Antiquarian Society)
The Salem town jail keep’s December 1693 accounting. A New England prisoner paid for his provisions, hay, and shackles; to the costs for having kept Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, Giles Corey, and his other prisoners, William Dounton added his salary, only partially paid since the Andros administration. The forty-pound total was nearly what a minister earned in a year. A prison could be built for the sum. (MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum)
William Stoughton, the starchy chief justice and Harvard benefactor, among the most eminent of New England legal authorities. The survivor of four previous Massachusetts administrations, Stoughton also served as deputy governor in 1692. (Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, H37)
Samuel Sewall as he appeared in 1729, thirty-two years after he publicly repented for his role on the Salem court. Eager for political stability and intent on consensus, Sewell tripped occasionally over his conscience. (Peabody Essex Museum)
Samuel Willard, the Boston minister who tactfully deviated from his colleagues. Satan could work his evil without entering into a formal pact with an accomplice; he could assume “the image of any man in the world.” A generation earlier, Willard had conversed with the devil through a possessed sixteen-year-old servant girl. (Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, H18)
Buccaneering Massachusetts governor Sir William Phips, who absented himself from the trials, to wail afterward that “some who should have done their Majesties and this Province better service” had acted precipitously, a criticism aimed squarely at his deputy governor. The witchcraft stymied all official business; Phips’s enemies exploited it, he complained, to undermine his fledgling administration. (Courtesy of Cory Gardiner)
Margaret Sewall, the wife of court recorder Stephen Sewall, “that pearl of yours” in Cotton Mather’s estimation. As a much younger woman, Mrs. Sewall took in Betty Parris, whom the devil followed, promising the enchanted nine-year-old anything her heart desired. (Peabody Essex Museum)
An early list of witnesses against Sarah Good, the first deposed witch. Tituba and Abigail Williams appear; though included in the original complaint, Betty Parris does not. The last name is that of a forty-four-year-old Salem town man. The trial list would include William Good, the defendant’s husband. (From the records of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, 1692, property of the Supreme Judicial Court, Division of Archives and Records Preservation. On deposit at the Peabody Essex Museum)
Convuls
ions and contortions as illustrated for an 1881 study of hysteria, prefaced by the artist’s mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot. The pioneering French neurologist suggested a connection between trauma and hysterical symptoms, on which Freud would build. (From Etudes Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Epilepsie, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)
An indictment against Reverend George Burroughs for having “tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and tormented” Ann Putnam and “also for sundry other acts of witchcraft.” The Procters’ servant, the doctor’s maid, and Ann’s cousin Mary testified to the afflictions, observed at Burroughs’s May hearing. (MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum)
Detail from a seventeenth-century German engraving of a witches’ Sabbath, a more symphonic production. The Puritan preoccupations are missing but certain notes chime: male and female participants fly to a clearing; winged lions and monkey-goblins join them; frogs drop from the air. A woman tumbles from her uncooperative mount, as did the little Swedish girl and the elderly Ann Foster. (Walpurgisnacht, by Michael Herr: akg-images)
Fifteenth-century French fliers. Among the earliest depictions of witches on brooms, the two are heretics rather than sorceresses—ironically, proto-Protestants from a sect that held that laypeople, of either sex, could preach. While enchanted brooms turned up in Salem, they conveyed no one through the air. (akg-images)
From a 1670 illustration of Sweden’s witchcraft epidemic, to play a defining role at Salem. Families travel here as they did in Essex County; women did not elsewhere load broomsticks with their children. “Several have confessed against their own mothers,” observed a minister in the Salem court-room, marveling that girls of eight or nine accused mothers of coercing them to sign diabolical pacts. (National Library of Sweden)
Reverend Parris’s account of his prison visit with Martha Corey. He found the self-described “gospel woman” obdurate and imperious, reluctant to pray with him. He pronounced her an excommunicate; she hanged eight days later. (Courtesy Danvers Archival Center)
From Martha Corey’s deposition six months earlier. “Tell us who hurts these children,” ordered Hathorne as the girls convulsed around her. “I do not know,” she replied. She had no acquaintance with witchcraft. “You speak falsely,” a court reporter chided, leading Corey ultimately to ask, “Can an innocent person be guilty?” Parris recorded her testimony for the court. (MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum)
Acknowledgments
In 2008 David D. Hall observed that his decades in the seventeenth century had convinced him that the past remains eternally open to fresh questions; he could hardly have suspected that someone might read that line as an invitation. Patiently, incisively, and all too frequently, he has fielded queries ranging from the elementary to the insane. It is a pleasure at last to acknowledge a gratitude equaled only by my admiration for his work. I owe an immeasurable debt as well to John Demos, who has made the seventeenth century a more congenial place than it could have been even on the sunniest, cider-soaked afternoon. There are not that many people who happen to know whether, if you were flying on a pole just above the treetops, heading southeast from Andover, in 1692, you would be able to glimpse the ocean in the distance. I am hugely grateful to Danvers town archivist Richard B. Trask, who does.
I have leaned, heavily at times, on the following experts: J. M. Beattie, Elizabeth Bouvier, Richard Godbeer, Evan Haefeli, Hendrik Hartog, Richard R. Johnson, David Thomas Konig, Eve LaPlante, Kenneth P. Minkema, John M. Murrin, Daniel C. Richman, Bernard Rosenthal, David Grant Smith, Roger Thompson, Douglas Winiarski, and Michael P. Winship. For help with and around archives, I am indebted to Kent Bicknell, Robin Briggs, Carolyn Broomhead, Nicholas Cronk, Rebecca Ehrhardt, David Ferriero, Amanda Foreman, Jonathan Galassi, Malcolm Gaskill, Birgitta Lagerlöf-Génetay, Paul LeClerc, Marie Lennersand, Krishnakali Lewis, Maira Liriano, Megan Marshall, Scott McIsaac, Stephen Mitchell, Oliver Morley, Robert J. O’Hara, Eunice Panetta, Caroline Preston, Kathleen Roe, Rob Shapiro, and Abby Wolf. For archival assistance and for permission to quote from manuscript collections, I should particularly like to thank Irene Axelrod, Sidney E. Berger, Kathy M. Flynn, and Catherine Robertson at the Peabody Essex Museum; D. Brenton Simons, Bridget Donahue, Timothy Salls, and Suzanne M. Stewart at the New England Historic Genealogical Society; Barbara S. Meloni at the Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library; Amy Coffin at the Topsfield Historical Society; Inga Larson and Carol Majahad at the North Andover Historical Society; Kris Kobialksa at the First Church of Salem; Dana C. Street at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum; Richard B. Trask at the Danvers Archival Center, Peabody Institute Library; Peter Drummey, Elaine Grublin, Elaine Heavey, and Brenda Lawson at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Elizabeth Watts Pope, Ashley Cataldo, and Kimberly Toney Pelkey at the American Antiquarian Society; Barbara Austen at the Connecticut Historical Society; Justine Sundaram and Andrew Isodoro at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library; and Elizabeth Bouvier, head of archives at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Matthew J. Boylan, Ella Delaney, Kate Foster, the indefatigable Mary Mann, Rachel Reiderer, David Smith, Tim Wales, and Andy Young supplied research and fact-checking assistance. Tom Puchniak expertly tracked down images. Anne Eisenberg, Lis Bensley, Ellen Feldman, Patti Foster, Harry G. Frankfurt, Shelley Freedman, Laurie Griffith, Mitch Katz, Charlotte Kingham, Souad Kriska, Mameve and Howard Medwed, Carmen Marino, Ronald C. Rosbottom, Robin Rue, Andrea Versenyi, Will Swift, Strauss Zelnick, and William Zinsser provided various seventeenth-century interventions. Elinor Lipman read these pages in their earliest incarnation and improved every one. Eric Simonoff and Alicia Gordon are the most inspired—and patient—of agents.
It has been a privilege to work again with the impeccable Michael Pietsch. I am indebted to him for many things but especially for his consummate skill with an erasable blue pen. He could have used ballpoint. Across the board, the Little, Brown team—in particular Reagan Arthur, Amanda Brower, Amanda Brown, Victoria Chow, Heather Fain, Liz Garriga, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Marie Mundaca, the visionary, possibly wizardly Mario J. Pulice, Tracy Roe, and Tracy Williams—continues to astonish. Households suffer when women disappear into the archives too; if there is a way to thank Marc de La Bruyère and our children for thriving in my absence, I intend now to find it.
About the Author
STACY SCHIFF is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Cleopatra: A Life, a #1 bestseller and winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Schiff has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as many other publications. She lives in New York City.
ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF
Cleopatra: A Life
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
Saint-Exupéry: A Biography
Selected Bibliography
Baker, Emerson W., and John G. Reid. The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
———. Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.
Burr, George Lincoln. Narratives of the New England Witchcraft Cases. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002.
Cooper, James. F., Jr., and Kenneth P. Minkema. The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694. Bo
ston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1993.
Demos, John. The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World. New York: Viking, 2008.
———. Entertaining Salem: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Dow, George Francis, ed. The Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County. 9 vols. Essex Institute, 1911–1975.
Felt, James Barlow. Annals of Salem. 2 vols. Boston: James Munroe, 1845.
Gragg, Larry. A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel Parris. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
Hall, David D. The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
———. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.