Vexed with Devils

Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England

Erika Gasser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479847815
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England. Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms: fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and demonic possession, most famously, the Salem witch trials. While historians acknowledge some similarities in witch trials between the two regions, such as the fact that an overwhelming majority of witches were women, the histories of these cases primarily focus on local contexts and specifics. In so doing, they overlook the ways in which manhood factored into possession and witchcraft cases. Vexed with Devils is a cultural history of witchcraft-possession phenomena that centers on the role of men and patriarchal power. Erika Gasser reveals that witchcraft trials had as much to do with who had power in the community, to impose judgement or to subvert order, as they did with religious belief. She argues that the gendered dynamics of possession and witchcraft demonstrated that contested meanings of manhood played a critical role in the struggle to maintain authority. While all men were not capable of accessing power in the same ways, many of the people involved—those who acted as if they were possessed, men accused of being witches, and men who wrote possession propaganda—invoked manhood as they struggled to advocate for themselves during these perilous times. Gasser ultimately concludes that the decline of possession and witchcraft cases was not merely a product of change over time, but rather an indication of the ways in which patriarchal power endured throughout and beyond the colonial period. Vexed with Devils reexamines an unnerving time and offers a surprising new perspective on our own, using stories and voices which emerge from the records in ways that continue to fascinate and unsettle us.

1 / Discerning Demonic Possession and Witchcraft-Possession in Early Modern England

In 1584, an anonymous pamphlet entitled A true and most Dreadful discourse of a woman possessed with the Devil described the trials of one Margaret Cooper, who had recently suffered at the hands of the Devil in the shape of a headless bear. Her troubles first presented themselves as idle talk, for which her husband, Stephen Cooper, reproved her and prayed on her behalf. Soon she grew restless and called for her wedding ring and a coin her son had found, prompting her husband to pray “that it would please God to send her a more quiet spirit, and . . . that faith might speedily vanquish such vanity in her.”1 Instead, Margaret grew increasingly reckless, and began to suffer from fits during which she foamed at the mouth and shook so violently that the bedchamber rattled as her husband and sister sought to restrain her. As her husband and others prayed, she relayed her vision of the headless bear, and another of a snail-like creature. In time the witnesses also saw these spirits and, after Margaret was rolled around and nearly tossed from a window, saw the flames that filled the room with a terrible stench. Finally, her husband and his brother “did charge the Devil . . . to depart from her and to trouble her no more: then they laid hands on her and cried to the Lord to help them.” Subsequently, Margaret recovered herself and first she and then the company “espied a thing like unto a little child with a very bright shining countenance, casting a great light in the Chamber.” After the child vanished, Margaret asked forgiveness of God and acknowledged that her own sins had brought the evil spirits to her. The narrator reported in the end that she remained in “some reasonable order” from that time forward.2

Whatever “really happened” at Margaret Cooper’s bedside, the published narrative contains a wealth of suggestive information about her preternatural affliction. Demonologists might have considered Cooper obsessed rather than possessed because her symptoms were largely external assaults, but her range of symptoms and the title of the piece demonstrate that her suffering fell within the realm of possession phenomena. Possessions attracted converts and, many believed, presaged the impending day of reckoning, which helps to explain why these cases sparked fundamental disagreements among Protestants and Catholics.3 Despite their relative rarity, printed possession cases reveal the ways authors mobilized discourses, both explicitly and implicitly, to tell stories, sell pamphlets, and aid broader agendas. The Cooper narrative’s emphasis on sin as an overture from the Devil, and on prayer as the proper response, follows the “script” of the sort of godly Protestant possession narratives that viewed possession phenomena with great seriousness. While commanding the Devil to depart may have smacked of the Catholic ritual of exorcism, its emphasis on prayer and reliance upon God’s power channeled through a godly community demonstrates that the piece intended to provide moral instruction for Protestant readers.4 Even on its own, therefore, this account of Margaret Cooper’s ordeal is a rich source of early modern perceptions of possession phenomena.

Attempts to determine the meaning of Margaret Cooper’s story are complicated by the fact that it reemerged in 1614, in a pamphlet called A Miracle, of Miracles: As fearful as ever was seen or heard of in the memory of man. The new text retained the vast majority of the original, changing only “the ninth day of May last past Anno. 1584” to “the ninth day of September last past.”5 The subject matter stayed the same, but the erasure of the thirty intervening years helped to retain a sense of urgency. Another innovation was that the publisher appended other wonders to the Cooper story, including the story of “a poor country maid” who apparently died for twenty-four hours, revived, and then spent five days weeping and prophesying until she died a second time. This, plus news of a recent flood that had submerged several villages, marked the 1614 version of Margaret Cooper’s possession as part of a broader genre of literature devoted to the sensational presentation of miraculous wonders.6

Further complicating attempts to pinpoint the meaning of Margaret Cooper’s possession is her appearance a third time, in 1641, as Margaret Hooper. This pamphlet’s new title altered the protagonist’s identity and location, claiming to provide Most Fearful and strange News from the Bishopric of Durham, Being a true Relation of one Margaret Hooper. In its first sentence the author established that the events had taken place “Upon the 15 day of November now last past 1641,” and in Durham, where Stephen “Hooper” was the same “yeoman of good and honest reputation” despite his new name.7 The three lives of Margaret Cooper’s possession narrative, which spanned 1584, 1614, and 1641, demonstrate the staying power of the genre.8 The third iteration also accompanied a broader increase during the turbulent 1640s and 1650s in the number of published pamphlets about witchcraft and related wonders.9 The story persisted because it continued to offer something to readers; it was saleable because it was sensational, and both provocative and permissible because it exhorted the reader to godliness while avoiding some of the more controversial aspects of contested witchcraft-possession cases. These aspects of the Margaret Cooper narrative help to explain how it managed to be many things at once: a sincere godly account of an apparent possession, a snapshot of beliefs about the Devil and the unknown, a tract baldly recycled for profit, and a text that made use of symbols—such as the headless bear—with which modern readers are largely unfamiliar.10 Taken together, the Cooper narratives illustrate that the language of possession was powerful enough to captivate and flexible enough to serve the occasionally contradictory motives of various authors and narrators.

To encounter one version of Margaret Cooper’s narrative invites reflection upon what the source reveals about possession phenomena in early modern England, whereas to encounter all three versions necessarily destabilizes a historian’s sense of what truths they hold. But however circumspect the reader must be when considering such narratives’ objective meaning, the fact that they functioned as propaganda does not mean that the authors did not believe in the reality of what they described. In fact their sincerity frequently merged with strategy because, as Stuart Clark has explained, “it was intrinsic to the very notions of possession and exorcism that a contest for power should take place. . . . Propaganda was in this sense not extraneous to possession but one of its very presuppositions.”11 This fusion of possession, propaganda, and power recommends the reading of possession narratives as cultural texts. Given how many possession events were never published or were published but lost, any study of this sort provides less of a complete record than snapshots of early modern mentalities. Taken together, the Margaret Cooper narratives may destabilize our certainty about what happened at the bedsides of those who acted as if they were possessed, but they also highlight the ways possession cases reflected discourses of good and evil, revealed contests over social legitimacy, and posed critical questions about who had authority to pronounce judgment upon their meaning.

Possession Symptoms and Scripts

By the time Margaret Cooper’s narrative first appeared in 1584, there was already a long history of publications that described strange and wondrous occurrences. Published possession cases, whether they invoked witchcraft or not, played an important role in shaping the cultural conversation about the nature of wonders and miracles—both by spreading popular conceptions of the preternatural realm and by affecting the reception such cases received from ministers and magistrates. Demonic possession cases, and those that blurred the boundaries between demonic possession, witchcraft-possession, and obsession, shared a broad set of symptoms that reflected long-held beliefs about the malice of the Devil and his desire to seduce souls away from God. These symptoms evolved over time into cultural scripts that were disseminated in published narratives, so that observers accepted or rejected demoniacs’ behavior based upon their understanding of the proper parameters of spectral interference. It was possession’s communal and performative nature that explains both its power and limitations as published propaganda.12 Possessions were communal because, despite the immediate and primary focus upon the demoniac, a possession only became a possession as a result of observation and interpretation. The same strategies that helped authors make their case—paradoxically, describing extraordinary wonders and yet adhering to a familiar script—opened possession narratives to criticism from those who mistrusted the case’s political and religious implications. Because possessions were mutually constituted by demoniacs and observers, participants struggled over the power to fix the meaning of what had taken place.

To perform a recognizable possession, demoniacs drew upon a set of symptoms based upon scriptural and European precedents but that reflected evolving English and Protestant particularities. While some of these symptoms might initially seem like little more than antics, phenomena such as embodied sensation, perception, and movement played essential roles in the cultural recognition of possession. As Stuart Clark notes, the need to transform movement into meaning was “an especially vital matter in an area like possession where so much that was constitutive both of the experience of being possessed and of the ability to interpret that experience was obviously gestural.”13 Among these symptoms, the most common were painful convulsive fits and contortions. When Alexander Nyndge became possessed in 1573, for example, his brother Edward described the convulsions of Alexander’s face and body, and the incredible ways that his chest swelled, his eyes stared, and his back bent inward toward his belly.14 The minister George More, who described the symptoms exhibited by the seven Starkie children in the 1590s, explained that the spirits “did rent, and tear the possessed, insomuch that they were sorer vexed and tormented” by pinching and pricking.15 At other times what should have resulted in great pain did not, as when the young John Smith, whose witchcraft-possession took place in 1616, exhibited preternatural strength and violence by striking “himself such blows on his breast . . . that you might hear the sound of it the length of a long chamber . . . the least of them was able to strike down a strong man. And yet did to himself no hurt.”16 When acting as if they were possessed, demoniacs startled observers with a range of physical manifestations of their spiritual torment, frequently exhibiting such rapid transitions between contradictory behaviors that few could imagine how their affliction could be natural.

Demoniacs’ convulsive fits frequently incorporated a range of related symptoms such as unusual strength, alternating rigidity and flexibility, and trances that authors consistently described as wholly beyond the power of the demoniac to fake. In 1574, seventeen-year-old Mildred Norrington was so strong when her spirit took hold of her that “four men could scarce keep her down.”17 Similarly, those who observed Joan Jorden’s symptoms remarked that she had to be bound in a chair for restraint, but “she (or rather the Devil in her) struggled and strained so sore, that it broke in pieces. Being again bound in the chair, six strong men leaned with their whole strength thereon, each also setting one foot on the round of the chair to keep it down. But she, (though so bound) notwithstanding all their strength, removed the chair round about the house, a yard at a time, they hanging thereon.”18 In 1601, the twelve-year-old demoniac Thomas Harrison alternated between extreme weakness brought on by his debilitating fits and “extraordinary strength, that if he folded his hands together, no man could pull them asunder: if he rolled his head, or tossed his whole body . . . no man could stay, or restrain him.”19 Harrison sometimes lay “as if he had been stark dead,” only to then leap up and skip with “such agility, as no tumbler could do the like. And yet all this while his legs were grown up so close to his buttocks, so he could not use them.” His contortions also affected his face, as when an observer reported, “Sometimes we saw his chin drawn up to his nose, that his mouth could scarce be seen: sometimes his chin and forehead were drawn almost together like a bended bow.”20 Because convulsive fits provided the backbone of the possession script, published sources emphasized these astonishing feats to convince readers of the cases’ legitimacy.

If convulsive fits were the most common and widespread symptom of possession, broadly defined, then the one that most denoted demonic possession as opposed to obsession or bewitchment was the emission of strange voices from within. Frequently these were deep and guttural voices, like Alexander Nyndge’s “base sounding or hollow voice,” that differed enough from the subject’s natural tone to convince observers of their preternatural origins.21 Demoniacs also roared, hissed, and made noises like animals. At one point Mary Glover’s voice sounded “loud, fearful, and very strange, proceeding from the throat (like an hoarse dog that barks),” and observers compared her utterances to “the hissing of a violent Squibbe . . . an Hen that hath the squacke: and . . . the loathsome noise that a Catt maketh forcing to cast her gorge.”22 Some demoniacs argued vehemently with the devil(s) who harmed them, modeling godly resistance to the forces of darkness and temptation. Mildred Norrington, while attempting to provide spectral corroboration for her accusation against a woman (possibly her own mother) for witchcraft, engaged in a long dialogue as the Devil. Using a strange deep voice, she provided myriad details of the sins of the accused, including the murder of three people, before she ultimately confessed to fraud.23 Thomas Darling’s possession also involved the emission of voices both “small” and “big and hollow.” Darling performed an exhaustive show of resistance to the spirits, while pronouncing to observers that the prayer and fasting of faithful people was too strong for them to overcome.24 As these cases demonstrate, demoniacs’ dialogues with spirits made for effective propaganda because the practice allowed them to articulate doctrinal points that served Protestant or Catholic interests. Struggling against the utterances of the afflicting spirit, as well as struggling physically in convulsions, was a key part of the demoniac’s crossing through painful trials toward redemption.

Another important component of the cultural possession script was the tendency of victims of demonic possession and witchcraft-possession to see apparitions. Common visions included the Devil, the witch whose malice instigated their suffering, or creatures that represented the Devil’s servants and witch’s familiars. Richard Galis’s 1579 account made no explicit claims that he was possessed but neatly followed the witchcraft-possession script.25 Galis’s apparition took the form of a “Cat or the devil himself in a Cat’s likeness” that would “haunt my Chamber hurring and buzzing about my bed, vexing and troubling me beyond all measure.”26 The “Seven of Lancashire,” the group of demoniacs whom John Darrell and his associate George More treated in the late 1590s, helpfully reported the actions of their apparitions for the benefit of their audience: “They would say: look where Satan is: look where Beelzebub is: look where Lucifer is: look where a great black dog is, with a firebrand in his mouth: see how Satan runneth at me with a spear in his hand to stick me to the heart, but God will defend me.”27 Apparitions played an especially crucial role in witchcraft-possession cases because they directed observers’ suspicions and provided the kind of spectral evidence that could prove decisive in trials. In 1612 Grace Sowerbutts reported seeing visions of the female relatives she accused of bewitching her, both in human form and in the shape of a black dog. Grace’s narrative provided effective propaganda even after her eventual confession of fraud, because she accused a priest of orchestrating the false charges against her Protestant family members.28

Those suffering from possession symptoms frequently showed a strong aversion to prayer or the Bible and often lost their ability to hear or read Scripture. These aversions were sometimes accompanied by an avoidance of productive actions in favor of frivolous or blasphemous ones, as devils would seek to interrupt all that was wholesome or productive and to replace it with rebellion. At Warboys in the 1590s, the five possessed Throckmorton girls screeched and interrupted prayers with dramatic fits that ceased at the precise moment the prayers did, and Elizabeth Throckmorton had “merry fits” that resulted in the girls laughing “so heartily and excessively, as that if they had been awaked they would have been ashamed thereof.” Elizabeth was “also full of trifling toys, & some merry jests of her own devising, whereat she would force b...