by Stacy Schiff
“a grave of the living”: Dunton, Dunton’s Letters, 119–20.
Prison breaks: RFQC, 4: 275; RFQC, 8: 31–32; RFQC, 9: 26.
“And it was thought”: JH in Burr, 415.
mentioned God only once: The point is Kahlas-Tarkka’s in “‘I Am a Gosple Woman,’” Studia Neophilologica 84, 58.
“And thus”: JH in Burr, 415.
“A witch is one”: Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1966), 268. The volume dates from 1681. The etymology is of interest: “wizard” derives from the German root wissen, “to know,” while “witch” derives from wiccian, “to bewitch.”
toad into the family milk: RFQC, 4: 57.
the witch’s mark: For the authority, see Dalton, The Country Justice, 73; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 530; Koehler, Search for Power, 270. The witch’s mark was a fairly new arrival.
what enchantment looked like: See Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men, for a description of the gnashing, frothing, and tumbling. Other signs align perfectly with the description in Dalton, The Country Justice, a copy of which Sewall carried about with him on the circuit; EIHC 129 (1993): 68–69.
the Cheshire cat: IM in IP, 165. For the taverns, see Richard P. Gildrie’s excellent “Taverns and Popular Culture in Essex County, MA, 1678–1686,” EIHC 124 (1988): 162.
“No wonder that”: Cited in Louise A. Breen, Transgressing the Bounds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178; “the worst of drunkards,” Gildrie, “Taverns and Popular Culture,” 163. The modern historian is Emil Oberholzer Jr., Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 152.
Witches had troubled New England: The literature is vast. I have relied especially on Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: Penguin, 1998); Fox, Science and Justice; Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (London: Blackwell, 1984); Brian P. Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2010); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Brian A. Pavlac, Witch Hunts in the Western World (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009); Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. There were exceptions on the orgies; a 1662 Connecticut case involved dancing and sex with the devil. The first known prosecution is from Fox, Science and Justice, who points out that there is no recorded history without witches. For the traditional witches’ Sabbath: Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
false memories: IM cited in Koehler, Search for Power, 271.
witch’s ultimate target: Or as Samuel Willard put it in a June 1692 sermon, the devil “aims at the soul but if he cannot succeed there he will do his utmost against the body” (Sewall sermon notebook, Ms. N-905, MHS).
greatest hunts: Numerically speaking, Catholic Germany and northern France executed the greatest number of witches. The Channel island of Guernsey: Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 185. Though ecumenical, witches had their predilections. As John Gaule put it in his 1646 Select Cases of Conscience, a volume familiar to New England: “There has been, are, and are likely still to be more witches under the Popish than in the Protestant religion. For not only their popes, priests, friars, nuns (many of them) have been notorious witches: but their prestigious miracles and superstitious rites little better than kinds of witchcrafts.”
The devil boasts: Edward K. Trefz, “Satan in Puritan Preaching,” Boston Public Library Quarterly 8 (1956): 71–84; Trefz, “Satan as the Prince of Evil,” Boston Public Library Quarterly (1955); 3–22; Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974).
Swedish girl who had plummeted from her stick: Demos, The Enemy Within, 90.
a pact with Satan: See Hall, Witch-Hunting, 24. For a NE history, see Demos, Entertaining Salem, 401–9.
disseminated an instructive account of her compact: MP, 1–44. The problem may have been CM’s Gaelic; he concluded that the Irish used the same word to mean both “spirits” and “saints,” 11. Martha Goodwin did name additional tormentors; CM kept the information to himself.
“never been in a place”: Journal of Jasper Danckaerts (New York: Scribner’s, 1913), 290.
“You have a neighbor”: R, 370.
accused witch languishing: Rosenthal discovered her; R, 16.
Connecticut had been more troubled: Godbeer, Escaping Salem.
“We inclined to”: JH in Burr, 412. On the leniency of the system, see David D. Hall, A Reforming People (New York: Knopf, 2013), 87. On the other hand, of the fifty-six people executed in Massachusetts between 1630 and 1692, the greatest number—by a factor of two—were for witchcraft.
spectral bear: Koehler, Search for Power, 291.
“Many things are done”: Albert Kyper, cited in Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 233.
to doubt the sun: William Perkins, Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1618), 31. The colonists returned to Perkins again and again with their questions.
“We have the attestation” to “times and places”: Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, 67.
“Flashy people”: Magnalia, 1: 187.
official 1692 version: CM in Burr, 261. The description, he noted, tallied with what they had heard from abroad. Interestingly, in Catholic countries, the devil interfered with the reading of “Popish books,” where in NE, he made it impossible for a Puritan girl to read Mather volumes.
more devils than men: See, for example, IM, Angelographia; or, A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Power of the Holy Angels (Boston, 1696), 111.
“was nothing to him”: RFQC, 8: 272. Epithets appear to have been different in other colonies, where you might be written off as a noodle, an ape, an old rogue; see John Demos, Remarkable Providences (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 288. John M. Murrin notes similarly that the NE court record is all sin and evil, sin and pollution, where other colonies counted in felonies and misdemeanors; see David Hall et al., eds., Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 188. See also Hall, Witch-Hunting, 87; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 74. “had so much”: RFQC, 7: 362. On the Indians and the devil, David S. Lovejoy, “Satanizing the American Indian,” New England Quarterly 67 (December 1994): 603–21.
“the devil take you”: David Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, 36.
foreigner in an unusual hat: From Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper, 1955), 110. The overbearing English official was, in IM’s estimation, “a child of the devil.” Edward Randolph Papers, III: 329.
“it is the main drift”: SPN, 184.
“Where will the Devil”: WOW, 10.
“infernal fiends”: CM in Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 112.
prosecutions stuttered: Carus, The History, 379–90.
the Apocalypse: In the 1640s, it was prophesied for the 1650s; Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 86; it had been imminent since 1655 according to David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 123.
Mather defied anyone: CM in Burr, 143.
“they would act”: Lawson in ibid., 342. There may have been an additional reason to send off Betty. As Moody noted of the Goodwins in 1688: “If any step home they are immediately afflicted, and while they keep out are well.”
That was the devil: Cited by Lawson in Burr, 160. Betty would not be mentioned again in a 1692 witchcraft complaint.
“I know what you are” to “nothing that was good”: R, 149–50. On the previous marriage, see Eleanor V. Spiller, “Giles Corey,” Essex Genealogist
5 (February 1985): 11–14.
“I will come” to “iron rod”: R, 152–53. Martha Goodwin was propelled in much the same way through Mather’s house, “dragged wholly by other hands.”
“the people who make”: CM, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Boston, 1692). See Jane Kamensky’s Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). In her “Words, Witches, and Women Trouble: Witchcraft, Disorderly Speech, and Gender Boundaries in Puritan New England,” EIHC 128 (October 1992), she provides a marvelous tour of the lexicon, with a chart of the forms of speech associated with the accused, 307.
Ann Putnam Sr.: Rosenthal believes she was not yet thirty; Salem Story, 229n and RFQC, 8: 348, 424.
“helping to tend” to “black pen”: R, 160–61.
“I have perceived” to “heard nothing”: R, 155.
IV. ONE OF YOU IS A DEVIL
“Two errors”: Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (New York: Collier Press, 1910), 220.
“as rare an history”: Lawson in Burr, 152. Lawson and SP could not have been out of touch; the copy of Perkins on SP’s desk came from a deacon at Lawson’s congregation. Lawson, CM, and SP regularly invoked the same imagery over these months.
could not have returned: Interview with David Hall, January 23, 2013.
“after I was removed”: Lawson in Burr, 148.
“‘Whish, whish, whish’”: The cry resembled a 1637 German spell for takeoff: “Whoosh! Up the chimney, up the window hole!” Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 207.
“ought I know”: Calef in Burr, 148–53.
“Now stand” to “enough of that”: Lawson in Burr, 154.
Quaker women: Earle, The Sabbath, 96–97. Women spoke so often at Quaker meetings you might as well call them ministers, CM huffs in Little Flocks Guarded Against Grievous Wolves (Boston: 1691), 94.
“I know no doctrine” to “pathetic prayer”: Lawson in Burr, 154–55.
“distracting and disturbing”: B&N, 296.
“We did not send” to “prove she was a witch”: R, 146; Lawson in Burr, 156.
delegation assembled: R, 162. Roach thinks the Nurse family requested the neighbors call: See Marilynne Roach, Six Women of Salem (New York: Da Capo, 2013), 130. On the family, see Lee Shai Weissbach, “The Townes of Massachusetts,” EIHC 118 (1982): 200–220; RFQC, 5: 341.
Lawson called on Ann Putnam Sr.: Lawson in Burr, 157–58. Lawson had reason to hesitate; bibliomancy was strongly discouraged. The passage in question offered a sort of litmus test as to where one stood on Judgment Day; it was a text designed to make the impious squirm; e-mail with David Hall, September 24, 2013. Ann was six weeks pregnant. In her trances Mercy Short tended to offer remarkably apt passages, CM in Burr, 275.
Rebecca Nurse stood before Hathorne and Corwin: R, 157–58, 160–61; Lawson remarks on her indifference in Christ’s Fidelity: The Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity (London: J. Lawrence, 1704), 109.
shed only three tears: MacKay, The Witch Mania, 510.
He had prepared carefully: Lawson in Trask, “The Devil Hath Been Raised,” 65–106. He may have added to the sermon after its delivery and before publication, as he would again later.
Martha Corey’s husband: The only men convicted of witchcraft in Massachusetts prior to 1692 had been married to witches. There was a reason for a husband to offer up incriminating remarks.
the arrest of Dorothy: R, 155–56, 163.
“terror, amazement”: Lawson in Trask, “The Devil Hath Been Raised,” 95; “vile and wicked” to “is a devil”: SPN, 194–98. On the sudden, sweeping swerve from hypocrisy to devils, interview with David Hall, November 29, 2012. By March, SP did not believe anyone colluded unwillingly with the devil. The door-slamming is from Lawson in Burr, 161, and interview with Richard Trask, November 28, 2012. Cloyce’s exit: R, 415.
“thresh the devil”: R, 538.
“sport, they must have”: R, 537. The reporter had married into the Cloyce family.
rush to narrative: CM wrote his account of the Goodwins’ enchantment in real time, which allowed Martha to read it over. She did so repeatedly, ridiculing the work and warning the author that he “should quickly come to disgrace by that history.”
Scripture provided the bedrock: David D. Hall, “Toward a History of Popular Religion in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (January 1984): 49–55. John Dane appealed to the Bible to decide to come to NE, where he would be safer from temptation; “John Dane’s Narrative,” New-England Historical Genealogical Record (April 1854): 154; the Sewalls retreated to bedrooms with the Bible after harsh words were exchanged. One woman used hers to deck a New Hampshire sheriff’s assistant; Koehler, Search for Power, 372.
seer and watchman: See CM, Midnight Cry; Roger Thompson, “‘Holy Watchfulness’ and Communal Conformism,” New England Quarterly 56 (December 1983): 504–22; and Earle, The Sabbath, 75–77, for the watchful deacons. To mind other people’s business was, asserted Edmund Morgan, to be a good Puritan.
the daughter’s bonnet: CM Diary, 1: 369.
“If any people”: Cited in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 1: 245.
“had willingly risked”: Stout, New England Soul, 31. If one reviewed the record, God had been frowning on NE from the beginning. He would continue to do so; in 1701 you could still title a sermon “Prognosticks of Impending Calamities.”
“ravening wolves” and “wild boars”: Scottow, A Narrative, 28.
revoke their charter: David S. Lovejoy is especially fine on the period, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). For the end of prosperity, Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “The Puritans’ Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of American History 60 (June 1973): 16.
“the petty differences”: “Letter from New England,” November 11, 1694, CO 5/858, PRO.
Andros asked John Higginson: Cited in The Andros Tracts (New York: Burt Franklin, 1868), 1: 26. Dunton described Higginson’s speech as “a glimpse of heaven” in The Life and Errors of John Dunton (London: J. Nichols, 1818), 127.
“remote, rocky, barren”: Edward Johnson, Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (New York: Elibron Classics, 2005), 210.
in a military coup: Historians have happily noted that that revolt took place eighty-six years to the day before Paul Revere’s ride. The Tower of Babel: Edward Randolph to the governor of Barbados, May 16, 1689, Edward Randolph: Letters and Official Papers (Boston: Prince Society, 1899), 4: 267.
“that strange agglomeration”: Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), 39. The annunciation is from Ann M. Little, “Men on Top? The Farmer, the Minister, and Marriage in Early New England,” Pennsylvania History 64 (Summer 1997): 134.
great Enlightenment thinkers: See Lawrence Stone, “The Disenchantment of the World,” New York Review of Books, December 2, 1971, and David Stannard, “Death and the Puritan Child,” American Quarterly (December 1974): 472.
Almanacs sold briskly: John Partridge, Monthly Observations and Predictions for This Present Year, 1692 (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1692), 4. The almanac’s prediction for April was even more ominous: “If there is any roguery now against the government, be sure there is a woman up to the ears in it; but be it what it will, a woman is at the bottom, and the thing is villainous.” On the overlap of science and magic, folklore and erudition, Hall’s seminal 1990 Worlds of Wonder; Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); John Winthrop et al., “Scientific Notes from the Books and Letters of John Winthrop, Jr.,” Isis 11 (December 1928): 325–42; Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage,” American Historical Review 84 (April 1979): 317–46; and Ann Kibbey, “Mutations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Remarkable Providences, and the Power of Puritan Men,” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982): 125–48. As a rule, the more intently you immersed yourself in sci
ence, the more interest you displayed in the supernatural.
best-educated community: Cremin, American Education, 189–207. There were more educated men in Massachusetts than in any other colony. There was also more witchcraft.
“prodigious witchcrafts”: Harley, “Explaining Salem,” 315.
best pig followed him: Michael P. Winship, “Encountering Providence in the Seventeenth Century,” EIHC 126 (1990): 35. Luck had not yet entered the picture; it was divine providence when the woodpile collapsed just after you had called the children away from it. Apocalypse practice: SS Diary, 1: 331.
inclement weather: Karen Kupperman, “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Seventeenth-Century New England, ed. David Hall and David Allen (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), 9. The overenjoyable sex: Edward Taylor, cited in Koehler, Search for Power, 80. The lame knee: “The Autobiography of Increase Mather,” Proceedings of the AAS (Worcester, 1961), 350. See also Kibbey, “Mutations of the Supernatural.”
“inquire, instruct, advise”: “Records of the Cambridge Association of Ministers,” October 13, 1690, Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 17 (1880), 264.
“I observe the law”: Hull, Diaries, 136.
Cantlebery’s wife: RFQC, 2: 101. Cantlebery had paid the call to complain that the neighbor’s swine were in his peas. The neighbor’s initial response had been to inform him he was a “rogue, whelp and toad.”
land grants were defined: George Lee Haskins pointed out that the initial charter was based on two rivers parallel to each other only if you squinted; Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 9.
rotten, decomposing fence: SP’s October 28, 1690, list of proposals, Simon Gratz Collection, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. CM described the devil as “the make-bait of the world” in “Things to Be Look’d For,” 1691, 18.