Salem Witch Trials

8 Key excerpts on "Salem Witch Trials"

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  Languages of Witchcraft

  Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture

  • Stuart Clark(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  20. Richard Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Amhurst, MA, 1984), pp. 13-16; Gail Sussman Marcus, 'Due Execution of the Generall Rules of Righteousnessn: Criminal Procedure in New Haven Town and Colony, 1638-1658', in David D. Hall, John M. Murrin and Thad W. Tate (eds), Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York, 1984), pp. 99-100, 102-5, 109. 21. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (eds), The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, 3 vols (New York, 1977), replaces W. Elliot Woodward (ed.), Records of Salem Witchcraft Copied from the Original Documents, 2 vols (Roxbury, MA, 1864-65; reprinted New York, 1969). For the longer perspective, see David D. Hall (ed.), Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638-1692 (Boston, MA, 1991). 22. Quoting Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion, p. 132. 23. James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550-1750 (London, 1995), pp. 144-5; David Harley, 'Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession', American Historical Review, 101(1996),307-33; Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge, 1993), quotation at p. 9. On political myth-making about the Salem Witch Trials, see Philip Gould, 'New England Witch-Hunting and the Politics of Reason in the Early Republic', New England Quarterly, 68 {1995), 58-82. 24. As Jim Sharpe has observed of the East Anglian trials, few witch-panics outside England led to 200 prosecutions in six months: Instruments of Darkness, p. 130. 25. On this and other shifts in the recent historiography, see Alison Rowlands, 'Telling witchcraft stories: new perspectives on witchcraft and witches in the early modern period', Gender & History, 10 (1998), 294-302.

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  Demonology, Religion, and Witchcraft

  New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology

  • Brian P. Levack(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ISIONS OF EVIL : POPULAR CULTURE , PURITANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTS WITCHCRAFT CRISIS OF 1692 RICHARD P. GILDRIE  

  The study of New England witchcraft has undergone a marked resurgence over the last twenty years.1 In particular, the Salem trials can no longer be described apart from their social context. A complex system of belief and action, witchlore was a vital force in daily life, for it provided explanations, remedies and scapegoats. It also allowed aggrieved persons, believing themselves to be either witches or victims, some influence over others and modes of self-expression beyond the limits of respectability.

  Yet witchlore was also something more than a symptom of social conflict and an exercise in behavioral “boundary maintenance.” It also embodied rich traditions about the nature of evil, a concept with cultural and religious as well as social and psychological implications. An investigation of the symbolic complexity of witchlore itself and the ways varying groups understood the phenomenon may provide a fuller picture, not only of the Salem trials but also of the cultural tensions endemic to late seventeenth-century Massachusetts.

  Three major themes emerge from examining the visions of evil contained in New England witchlore. First, the conflicting interpretations of witchcraft among the colonists suggest wider contradictions between Puritanism and traditional English popular culture. Second, the tensions between these two traditions, aggravated by the military and political pressures of the era, helped to bring on the crisis of 1692 and to shape the inner dynamics of the Salem trials. Third, the trials and particularly the flood of confessions, indicate the extent to which many of the common folk had internalized the conflicts between Puritan standards and traditional values. Witchlore among its other functions became in 1692 a vehicle for symbolizing these wider conflicts.

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  Hellfire Nation

  The Politics of Sin in American History

  • James A. Morone(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  New England accused at least 123 witches and executed 16 between 1647 and 1691—before the panic in Salem Village. But nothing in New England ever approached the scope of the Salem Village trials—144 ac-cused, 19 hanged, 4 dead in prison, 1 pressed to death with stones. 92 The Setting By 1692 the city on a hill faced political chaos, war, disease, and religious toleration. The crown had revoked the New England charters. In 1686, James II pushed the colonies into the sprawling Dominion of New England, a politi-cal district that eventually stretched from Maine to New Jersey.The dominion’s governor, Edmund Andros, seized town land, eliminated representative gov-ernment, levied unpopular taxes, and held Anglican services in Boston’s Old South Church. Rebellions toppled both Governor Andros and King James in 1689. The dominion collapsed, but there was no going back. The Massachu-setts Bay Colony no longer existed (Connecticut had hid its charter in a leg-endary oak tree and was eventually permitted to restore it). When the witches burst in on Salem Village, the people of Massachusetts were in political limbo, waiting for both a charter and a new royal governor. Meanwhile, there was more bloody war. Native Americans, now allied with the Canadians and French, demolished Schenectady, Salmon Falls (New Hampshire), Casco (later Portland, Maine), and York (Maine). A failed mili-tary expedition against Quebec limped back into Boston with heavy casualties, big debts, and bitter recriminations. Alongside war came pestilence. A small-pox epidemic rippled out from Boston. Heretic, Heathen, and Witch 83 Salem Village had its own troubles. It was part of Salem town—a larger, richer, more urban community about five miles away. By the 1670s, the village was straining against the limits of its political institutions. The villagers had a long list of complaints. Men had to walk up to ten miles carrying a heavy weapon for their turn on the night watch in Salem town.

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  Witchcraft Myths in American Culture

  • Marion Gibson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  23 Witchcraft is taken seriously here, and its lessons are many and often repeated in a penitent echo of the soul-searching that we saw in the records of Massachusetts witchcraft in the seventeenth century.

  Trouble in Paradise: Fairfield, Widow Hardy, and Mercy Disborough24

  The witchcraft memorials at Danvers and Salem are now famous, items on every tour itinerary. But elsewhere in America witches are also remembered, in ways that reflect both the differing colonial cultures of prosecution and the localized nature of witchcraft historiography. Fairfield, now in Connecticut but originally in New Haven colony, is an excellent example of a small town with a strong sense of its witchcraft past. It has no witchcraft memorial, but there are several witchcraft events to be remembered there. The first was the execution of a woman known only as Goodwife Knapp in about 1653. This incident has left no surviving documentation, but it was recalled by witnesses in the slander suit brought by Mary Staples of Fairfield against Roger Ludlow a year later, of which we have already heard briefly in Chapter 1 . Charles H. Levermore praised the New Haven colony, where this case was brought, for the discernment of its magistrates in punishing Ludlow and clearing Staples’s name. But Fairfield itself did not come out of the trial well: its inhabitants, not satisfied with the death of Knapp, had questioned her at length before her execution, and she had allegedly conceded under this intolerable pressure that there was another witch in the town yet to be discovered. That woman was, Fairfield thought and Ludlow said, Knapp’s friend Mary Staples. Staples had tried to prove during Knapp’s trial, and even after her death, that her friend had been innocent, arguing that the witches’ teats found on her body were natural growths. But no one would listen to her, and they found her arguments self-incriminating. Her Fairfield neighbors soon charged her with having “Indian gods” and of appearing as a specter to her own sister. Staples was a well-connected woman whose defensive accusations of slander against Ludlow were supported by New Haven’s powerful governing family the Davenports — in whose house Ludlow had made his charges — but nevertheless she was lucky to escape trial. Allegations about her resurfaced in Fairfield’s next bout of witch-hunting in 1692.25

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  The Witchcraft Sourcebook

  Second Edition

  • Brian P. Levack(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part VWITCHCRAFT TRIALS IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

  Between 1400 and 1750 perhaps as many as 100,000 persons were tried for the crime of witchcraft in Europe and colonial North America. Approximately half of those alleged witches were executed, many by burning at the stake. Most of the trials, especially those after 1580, when the most intense period of witch-hunting began, took place in the secular courts, which administered justice in kingdoms, principalities, counties, and towns. Ecclesiastical courts had taken a major role in witch-hunting during the fifteenth century, and they continued to conduct some prosecutions after that time, but many of those trials were for practicing lesser forms of magic and superstition. Cases involving serious maleficia , such as causing the illness or death of a person, were usually held in the secular courts, which had a more clearly defined jurisdiction and greater procedural latitude.

  The records of witchcraft trials during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are both incomplete and difficult to use. Many records have been lost, and of those that have been preserved, few give a full account of the proceedings. the records nonetheless provide a wealth of information regarding the ways in which educated and illiterate Europeans understood the crime of witchcraft and how they perceived the threat it represented. When the records include the depositions of the witch’s neighbors, they delineate the circumstances in which the original accusations arose. the formal charges brought against the accused and the confessions adduced under torture show how these societies understood the nature of the crime. the records of the interrogations reveal how prosecutors were able to shape the testimony of the accused to conform to what they believed the parties had done. Those same records often reveal how witches were able to profess their innocence until the application of torture forced them to incriminate themselves. Torture also influenced the content of the witches’ confessions. References to the worship of the Devil, especially collective worship, and flight to the sabbath almost always appear in the trial records after torture had been administered.

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  Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

  • Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie (Vicky) Demos, Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie (Vicky) Demos, Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie Demos(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  In the end, Martineau made it clear that, though the incident was over, the costs were great. In more general terms it should be recognized that witch-burnings and persecutions within communities were neither new nor limited to Salem. Other instances occurred in Massachusetts and other colonial regions. These were preceded by similar occurrences in Europe over recent centuries. Most witch hunts involved conflicts along class, race, age, and gender lines. The community response within the context discussed above was in large part a rush to believe in the presence of Satan and in the bewitchment of the girls. An atmosphere of fear and anxiety, fed by unrelated concerns in daily life and in the colonial experience, developed quickly and did not abate for months. Figures in the community power structure became involved and sanctioned the quick dispense of accusation and punishment. Gender and ageism were elements: 13 of the 19 adults hanged were women; the first accused and hanged were older women of ‘cantankerous’ character. Historically, older women, particularly those who were single or widowed, were regarded with suspicion. But soon other younger women, highly thought of in the community, some of substantial means and status, were accused and imprisoned. The clergy and the magistrates who manipulated the court procedures and punishments were men. Court proceedings were irregular and often eclipsed by the urge to get on with the ultimate punishment. But as the months went on, with continuing hangings, some in the community began to have doubts about the girls’ accusations, about the SUSAN HOECKER-DRYSDALE 16 guilt of the accused, the extreme response to the accusations, and the fact that those who confessed were excused while those who would not plead guilty were hanged. Doubts were raised about the judges and the court procedures.

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  The Salem Witch Trials

  A Reference Guide

  • K. David Goss(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The revocation of the Massa- chusetts Bay Charter by the Stuarts and the subsequent appointment of the tyrannical Sir Edmund Andros as royal governor all contributed to the com- munity’s sense of ‘‘anxiety and terror . . . longer than could be borne’’ and ‘‘demanded a catharsis.’’ This psychological pressure manifested itself in an overwhelming desire on the part of the colonial community to purge their society of besetting Satanic powers and destroy the Devil’s minions in the process. To Starkey’s view, the victims of the trials were scapegoats—sacrificial lambs—whose deaths helped to release Puritan society’s mounting social tension, frustration, and anxiety. 4 Written shortly following the Nuremberg war crime trials and during the rise of the Cold War, Starkey’s analysis presages the McCarthy Era writings of playwright Arthur Miller by four years. She prophetically points out that ‘‘witch-hunts’’ could become commonplace occurrences in the twentieth century as well, intimating that ‘‘although this particular type of delusion 52 The Salem Witch Trials has vanished from the Western world, the urge to hunt ‘witches’ has done nothing of the kind.’’ Her theory about a public catharsis being resorted to by society has been only slightly altered in contemporary culture ‘‘by replac- ing the medieval idea of malefic witchcraft with pseudoscientific concepts like ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ and by substituting for theological dissension a whole complex of warring ideologies.’’ It is an ‘‘allegory for our times.’’ 5 It would be remiss to overlook the ideas of one of America’s greatest his- torians concerning the trials. Samuel Eliot Morison released in 1956 a revised edition of his classic study, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, which contributed his personal assessment of the Salem episode within the context of Puritan intellectual history.

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  Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography

  • J. Barry, O. Davies, J. Barry, O. Davies(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Once the mythology had been established, all individual deviations could be interpreted through it and so become evidence for it. 8 Such ideas regarding the fear of conspiracy have great dramatic potential, and were perceptively exploited in Arthur Miller’s famous portrayal of the Salem trials in his play The Crucible. Although Miller, according to the ideals of realism, claimed historical accuracy, the play is the work of an artist, not an academic historian, and should be read as such. It is relevant here, because it has profoundly influenced the popular conception of witchcraft in America, as have its Trevor-Roperian counterparts in Europe. One of the reasons for the vast publicity attracted by Miller’s play was obviously that it linked the Salem religious persecution to the ‘American’ identity, the declared basis of which had been the religious and ideological freedom sought by the Puritans. The play was also influenced by Miller’s own experience of the McCarthyite hunt. But it is also an investigation into the stereotypes of fear and hate, their psychology and their capacities for identity-building that were later examined by scholars like Cohn and Kurt Baschwitz, the German journalist and sociologist who fled Nazi persecution in 1931, and who wrote an influential German text on the witch trials in 1963. 9 Understanding the nature of the fear of conspiracy, furthermore, made it possible to show the terror of both the persecuted and the persecutor. In his introduction to an edition of his collected plays, for example, Miller highlighted how it was worse to ‘have nothing to give’ persecutors than to be able to relieve the collective guilt and fear by confessing. 10 Cohn’s view that witchcraft, and especially the Sabbat, represented an anti- society has been influential on subsequent witchcraft historiography.

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