CHAP ] LR 2

The Visible and Invisible!’Vorlds of Salem

Historians, we have seen, are in the business of reconsm~ction. Seventeenrl>century Virginia, with its worhl of slaves, indentured smwants, and tobaccobarons, had to be built anm~5 not just lifted intact fiom the record. It fi~llows,fl~en, tbat if historians are builders, they must decide at fl~e outset fl~e scale oftheir pro}errs. How much ground should be covered? A year? FlAy years? Sev-eral centuries? ttow will the subiect matter be defined or limited? ’]"he storyof slavery~ arrival in Virginia might be ranked as a moderateb, large topic. Itspans some siW years and involves O~ousands of hnmigrants and an entirecolony. Furthermore, the topic is large as much because of its content as itsreach over time and space. The genesis of slaveW snrely ranlo as a cen~-alstrand of the American experieuce. ~?~ understaud it adequately requires morebreadth of vision d~an, for instance, u~dersmnding O~e history of ~nericanhats during the same period. The lure of topics both broad and signi~cant istmdeniable, and there have always been historians willing m put! on theirseven-league boots, following in fl~e houorable tradi6on of Edward Gibbon’sDecl~e ~,~d Fall qf the Roma~ E~npire.

The gre~t equalizer of such grand plans is ~e twen~-fom--hour day. His-torians have only a limited amouat of time, and the hom~, they sadly dis-cover, are not expandable. Obviously, the more years covered, the less timeavailable to research the events in each. Conversely, fl~e narrower ~e area ofresearch, the mbre the historian can become immersed in a period~ details..A keen mind working on an apparently small topic may uncover relation-Ships and connections whose significance goes beyond ~e zubject matter’soriginal boundaries.

Salem ~Sllage in 1692 is such a microcosm~one familiar to most studentsof ~nerican history. That was the place and the time witchcra~ came toNew England with a vengeance, dominating the life of the village for tenmonths. Becat~se rbe witchcraft episode exhibited welbdefined boundaries i~

24

~oth nme at~d sl)ace, it shows well how an ot~-told stot~ may be transformed

by me lntenb,ve reseat ch techmques of small-sca e h stoo. > admonal y meoutbreak at Salem bas been v~ewed as au incident &vorced fi’om the cause-and-effect sequences of everyday village li[?. I~ven to label the eveuts as an"outbreak" suggests tbat they are best viewed as an epidemic, alien to thecorn numtys nornal ~ncUons. the gm ~s of bewitchment break ont sud-denly and inexplicably~agents, presumably of some invading disease.

Over fl~e past decades, however, bistoriaus have studied tbe tra~ naticexperiences of lo9z in great ~ ...... 1. n~ so doing d~oy h:~ve created a moresophis~cated model of the meutat world behind the Salem outbreak. Theyhave also suggested ways in which the witchcraft episode was tied to tbeevewday events of~llage life. The techoiqnes of small-scale histo,T, in otherwords, have provided a compelling psychologica! and social context tbr theevents of 1692.

,,’7" BEWITCHMENT AT SALEM VILLAGEThe baffling troubles experienced in Salem Village began during the winterof 169I 1692 in fl~e home of the village’s minister, Samuel Parris. There,Parrls’s ni~m-year-old daughcer Betq, and his niece Abigail Williams badtaken strangely ill, claiming that ~ey had been "bitteu and pinched by invisible agents; ~eir arms, necks, and backs turned d~is way and d~at wag andreturned back again.., beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or naturalDisease m effect." La ~er eraditions~not necessarily reliable~suggesred tha ~the afflictions catne after a group of girls met to divine what sort of men¯ dr fi~mre husbands mi0~t be, a subject of natural enough interest. Lacking a crystal ball, they used the next available substitute, the white of a rawegg suspended in a glass of watec At some point during these con~uringks,things went sour. One of the girls thought she detected % specter in the likehess of a coffin" in the glass~bardly an auspicious omen. Soon Bett)~ fl~eyoungest of the girls, began complaining of pinchiug, priclding sensations,lmffelike pains, and ~he fedJng fl~at she was bring choked. In the weeks r!~a~followed, three more girls e~ibited similar s~nptoms.

~atever fl~e cause of rt~e yotmg gMs’ symptoms, the Revm’end Parris wasat a loss m m~derstand O~e afflic~ons, as were several doctors and ministershe brought in to observe the strange beha~ors. ~aen one doctor hinted atthe possibiliw of witchcraft, a neighbor, MaW Sibley, suggested putOng to usea bit of New England folldore to reveal whe~er O~ere had been aW sorcery.Sibley persuaded two slaves IMng in ~e Parris household, John Indian andhis wife, Timba, to bake a "witch cake" made of we meal and urine giventhem by ~e girls. T~e cake was fed to a dog~Ne theotT of bewitchmentconfirmed, presumably, if the dog suffered torments similar to those of theaNivted ~rls.

T~i~ experiment seems to have t~igbtened O~e girls even *note, for ~eirs~pmms worsened. Thoroughly alarmed by the symptoms, Parris and sev-eral o~er adults pressed ~e girls for the identiv of ~e specters O~ey believed

AFTER THE FACF: THE ART OF HIS’FORIC~L DETECTION

were tormenting them. Wheu the girls named three women, a formal con>plaint was issued, and on February 29 &e suspec{s were arrested, for, indeed,seventeend>cenmry New Englanders conceived of witchcraft as a crime.If dm girls were being tormented, it was necessaW m punish whoever wasresponsible.

’l~vo of d~e xvomen arrested, Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne, were al-ready ~popular in the village. The ~ird accused was Parris’s Indian slave,Tiatba. Timba may have been purchased by Parris during a visit to theCaribbean and was perhaps originally from Sot~th America, Florida, or theGeorgia Sea Islands. Under examination hy village magistrates, Sarah Goodangrily denied the accusations against her, suggesti*~g instead that Sarah Os-bourne was gui!t)~ Osbourne denied ~e charges, b~t the d)mamics of thehearings changed abruptly when Tituba ccmfessed to being a witch. One ac-count of the trials, published eighe years later, reported vhat her admissioncame after an angw Reverend Parris had beate~ Tituba. For whatever rea-son, she testified that four women and a man were causing the afflictious ofthe young women. Good and Osbonrne were among them "They ht rt t ~echildren," Timba reported. "And they lay all upon me and ~ey tell me ifwill uot hurt the children, they will burr me." The tale con~nued, completewith apparitions of black and red rats, a yellow dog with a head like awoman, % thing all over haiw, all the face haiw~" and midnight rides mwitches’ meetings where plans were being laid to attack Salem.

Duriug New England’s first sevenW years, few witchcraf~ cases h~d cronebefore the courts. Those that had were dispatd~ed quidd)~ and cahn soon re-turned. Salem proved different. In O~e first place, Tituba had described sev-eral other witches and a wizard, though she said she was unable to identifythem. The villagers felt 0my could not rest so long as these agents remainedat large. Furthermore, dm yolmg women contim~ed to name ~lames~andnow not just communig; outcasts but a wide varie~ of ~llagers, somespectable church memhers. The new suspects ~oined Timba, Sarah Good,and Sarah Osbourne in jail. By fine end of April the hunt had led to no lessa personage than the Reverend George Burroughs, a former mi~ister of thevillage li~ng in Maine. Constables marched to Maine, fetched him hack, audthrew him in jail.

~ If someone confessed to witchcraft~ tbe matter of identification seemedsimple enough. But if ~e accused reused to admit ~ilt, then the magis-trates looked for corroborating proof. Physical evidence, such as voodoodolls and pins found among the suspect’s possessions, were consideredcriminating. Fur~ermore, if the de~l made a pact with someone, he suppos-edly required a physical mark of allegim~ce and thus created a "witch’s fit"where ¢i~mr he or his ~amihar, a likeness in animal form, might s~ck. Pris-oners in ~e Salem ~ials were often examined for any abnormal ~arks ontheir bodies.

it Aside from physical signs, the magistrates considered evidence thatwitch’s malice might have led to suffering on the part of fi~e victim.~ud of black magic--harm by occult menus--was aown as msleficis~.

lager Sarah Gadge, for example, testified that m~o years earlier she hadtimed Sar~t~ Good todgiug fi)r the night. According to Gadge, Good "fe~l tomutterillg and scolding extreamly and so told said Gadge if she would notlet her in she should give i~er something . . . and the next morning after, tosaid Deponents best remembrance, one of the said Gadges Cowes Died in aSudden terrible and Strange unusuall manet."

~a The magistrates also considered wbat they called "spectral evidence," atonce the most danming and dangerous kimi of proof. Spectral evidence in-volved the visions of specters--likenesses of the ~vitches--that victims re~ported seeing during their tormeuts. In an attempt to confirm the co*mectionbetween malice and injury, the magistrates kept the afflicted women in thecourtroom to observe their behavior while the accused were being examined."-\,Vhy doe you hurt these children?" asked John Hathorne, one of the mag-istrates, in a t}@ca] examination. "I doe not hurt O~e*n," replied Sarah Os-bourne. The record continues: "The children abovenamed being allpersonally present accused her face to face which being don, they ware allhurt, afflicted and tortured veW nmch: which being over and thay ont oftheire tilts thay sayd thai said Sarah Osburne did then Come to them andhurt them."

13 Tbe problem with spectra! evideuce was that it could not be corroboratedby others. Only the victim saw the shape of the tormentor. Such testfinony~vas normally controversial, for theologians in Europe as well as in NewEngland believed that spectral evidence should be treated witb caution.ter all, what better way for the devil to spread confl~sion than by assumingthe shape of an innocent person? In Salem, however, the magistrates consid-ered spectral testhnony as paramount. ~/Vhen they handed down indict-ments, almost all the charges referred onb~ to the spectra! torments exhibitedby accusers during the pretrial hearings.

Iq Throughotlt the spring of 1692 no trials of the accused had been held, forthe simple reason that Mtassachusetts was without legal govermnent. In 1684the Crown had revoked the colony’s original charter and set up a new andunpopular government known as the Dominion of New England. But in1689 YVilliam of Orange forced King James to flee England, and Newglanders took that opportunity to overtbrow the Dominion. In the ensuingconfusion, court cases had been brought largely to a standstill. The new gov-ernor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, at last arrived in May 1692 witha roDl charter and quicldy established a special invesdgatoW com-t of oyerand terminer ("to hear and determine") to deal with the witchcraft cases.

ts On June 2 the court heard its first case, that of a woman named BridgetBishop. Even before the Salem outbreak Bishop had been suspected ofwitchcraft by a number 91r villagers. She was quickly convicted and, eightdays later, hanged fi’om a scaffold on a nearby rise. The site came to beknown as Wqtch’s Hill--with good reason, since on June 29 the court ~gainmet and ~dnvicted five more women. One of them, Rebecca Nurse, hadbeen found innocent, but the court’s chief justice disapproved the verdictand convinced the jurors to change their minds. On July 19 Nurse joined the

other four women on the scaffold, staunch churchwoman that she was, pray-ing for the judges’ souls as well as her own. Sarah Good remained defiant tothe end. "I atn no more a witch than you are a wir~ard," she told the attend-ing minister, "and if yo*~ take away my life, God will give you blood todrink."

~t Still the accusations continued; still the court sat. As the net was castwider, more and more accused were forced to work out their response to thecrisis. A few, most of them wealthy, went into hiding until the furor subsided.Giles Cm7, a farmer whose wife, Martha, was executed as a witch, refitsed to"put himself on the country"~that is, submit to a trial by iur> The traditional penalty for such a refiasal was the lpeim fort el d~zre, in which the victimwas placed between two boards and had heavy stones placed on him until heagreed to plead innocent or guilty. Althoug~q that punishment had been out-lawed in Massachusetts, the court nonetheless carried it ont. CoO, wasslowly crushed to death, stubborn to the end. His last words were said to be,"More weight."

~} Solne of the accused admitted guilt, the most satisfsctow solution l’or themagistrates. Pt~ritans could be a remarkably forgiving people. They were notinterested in punishment for its own sake. If a lawbreaker gave evidence ofsincere regret for his or her misdeeds, Puritan courts would often reduce orsuspend the sentence. So it was in the witchcraft trials at Salem @nlil~e mosttrials in Europe, where confessing witches were executed). But the policy offorgiveness had m~foreseen consequences. Those who were wrongly accusedquic!dy realized that if they did not confess, they were likely to be hanged.If they did confess, the), could escape death but would have to demonstratetheir sincerity by providing details of their misdeeds and names of other par-ticipants. The temptation nl.ust have been great to confess and, iu so doing,to im.plicate other immcent people.

{~ Given such pressures, the web of accusations continued to groin Augustproduced six more ti’ials and five hangings. Elizabeth Proctor; the wife of atavern keeper, received a reprieve because she was pregnant, the court beingunwilling to sacrifice the life of an innocent child. Her husband, John, wasnot spared, September saw anotlaer eight victims hanged, More d~an a hun-dred suspected witches remained in bil.

l~’ Pressure m stop the trials had been building, however. One member ofthe court, Nad~aniel Saltonstall, resigned in protest after the first execution.More important, the nrdnisters of the province were becoming uneasy. Inpublic they had supported the trials, but privately the}, wrote letters cant!on-ing the magistrates. Finally in early October, Increase Mather, one of themost respected ministers in the colony, published a sermon signed by four-teen other pastors that strongly condenmed the use of spectral evidence.Mather argued that to convict on the basis of a specter, which everyoneagreed was d~e devil~,creadon, in effect took Satan at his own w~rd. That,m Mathers vmw, msl~ed &sasten !It were better that ten suspected ,attches.should escape than that one innocent person should be cd~emned " heaa lua d,

’~ Mather’s sermon com,inced Governor Phips that the trials had gone toofar, He forbade any more arrests and dismissed the court of o)~or andterminen The t5llowing January a new court met to dispose of the remaining cases, but this time almost all the defendants were acquitted. Phips im-mediately granted a reprieve to the three women who were convicted aud inApril released the remaining prisoners. Satan’s controversy with Salem wasfinished.

¯ ~ That, in outline, is the witchcraft stoaT as it has come down to us tbr somany years. Rightly or wrought, the story has become an h~delible part ofAmerican history. The startling fits of possession, the drama of the court examinations, the eloquent pleas of the inuocent condenmed--al[ make for a su-perb drama that casts into shadow the rest of Salem’s more pedestrian history.

:za- Indeed, the episode is marepresentative. ~vVitchcraft epidemics were not aserious problem in New England and were even less of a problem in otherAmerican colonies. Such persecutions were much more common in oldEngland and Fa~rope, where they had reached frightening proportions. ’[’hedeath of 20 people at Salem is sobering, but the anagnimde of the event di-minishes considerably alongside the estimate of 40,000 to 60,000 people ex-ecuted for witchcraft in early modern Europe. Furthermore, it can be safelysaid that the witchcraft affifir bad no lasting efI~ct on the political or reli-gious histoW of Alnerica or even of Massachusetts.

~ Now, a curious thing has resulted ftom this i[[umination of a single, iso-lated episode. Again and again the stoaT of Salem Village has been told, quitenaturally, as a drama complete unto itself. The workaday history that pre-ceded and followed the trials--the petW town bickerings, the argumentsover land and ministers all these elements were for maW years largelypassed over. Yet the disturbances at Salem did not occur in a vacumn. Theymay indeed have constituted an epidemic, but not the sort caused by somemysterious germ pool brought into the village over the rutted roads fromBoston. So the historian’s first task is to take the major strands of the witch-craft affair and see how they are woveu into the larger fabric of New En-gland society. Salem Village is small enough that virtually every one of itsresidents can be identified. We can find o~_ who owned what land, theamount of taxes each resident paid, what sermons people listened to on Sundays. In so doing, a richer, far more intriguing picture of New England lifebegins to emerge.

°~THE INVISIBLE SALEMParadoxicaliy, the most obvious facet of Salem life that the historian mustrecreate is also the most insubstantial: what ministers of the period wouldhave called the "invisible~,world." Demons, familiars, witchcraft, and magica!l shaped seventeenth-c~nmW New England. For most Salem Villagers, Sa-tan~w.as a living, supernatural being who might appear to people, bargainwith th~r~ even enter into agreements. The men and women who submit-ted to such devilish compacts were said to exchange their souls in return for

30 AFTER THE i;’ACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DSTEeTION

special powers or favors: mon%~ and good tbrtune, perhaps, or the ability torevenge themselves on others.

ag Most often, ordinary folk viewed witchcraft as a simple matter ofci’~¢¢t~.: Sarah Good, for e~:ample, being thought to have caused one of Sarah(~adge’s cows m die after a hostile encounter. The process by which certainpeople in a communit), gained a reputation ~hr wielding occult power wasdesccibed well in 1587 by George Gifford, a*~ English minister who washimself qui/e skeptical of the realitT of witchcraft:

Some woman doth fall out bitterly wid~ he~ neighbour: there folioweth somegrea~ hm’t... There is a suspicion conceived. YVithin few years after, [the samewoman] is in some jar [argstment} with another. He is also plagued. This isnoted of al!. G~eat fame is spread of the matter. Mother W is a witch. She hadbewitched Goodman B. Two hogs died strangely: or else he is taken lame.

%~ell, Mother W doth begin to he very odious and terrible unto many. Herneighb~urs dare say nothi~g but yet in their hearts the}, wish she were hanged.Shortly after, another [person] t:alleth sick and’cloth pine; he can hav~ no stom-ach unto his meat, nor he cannot sleep. The neighbonrs come to visit"¥Vell neighhour," sayeth one, "do }m not suspect some naughty dealing: didye never anger Mother ¥~Q" ’qi’uly neighbour (sayeth he) I hm,e not liked thewoman a long time."

Such suspicions of witchcragt were widespread in the early modern world.Indeed, the belief in ~nalejici~zm was only one part of a worldview filled withmagic and wonders--magic tlrat could be manipulated and pursued bysomeone with the proper ka~owledge. Fortune-tellers provided a windowinto the fumce; objects like horseshoes brought good luck; earthquakes andcomets warned of God~ judgments. People who possessed more than theusual store of supernatural lmowledge were kmown as "cunning folk"might be called upon in times of trouble to l!eal the illness of a sick villager,cast horoscopes tbr a merchant worried about a ship’s upcoming voyage, ordiscover what sort of children a woman might bear.

The outlines of such beliefs are easily enough sketched, but they conveythe emotions of witchcraft about as successfi~lly as a recital of the Apostles’Creed conveys d~e fire ot the Christia~ faith, it may seem a simple matter toimagine how a Salem Villager who believed iu such wonders might have be-haved, but people who hold beliefs foreign to ore" own do not always act theway that we think they should. Over the years, historians of the witchcraftcontroversy have faced the challenge of re-creating Salem’s mental world.

2g One of the first people to review Salem’s troubles was Thomas Hutchinson,who in ~750 published a history of New England’s early- days. Hutchinson didnot believe in x~qtchcraft; fewer and fewer educated people did as the eighteenthcentury progressed. Therefore he taaced an obvious question, which centeredon the moOvafiohs of the accusers. If ~e devil never actaa!ly ~enauted withvmyone, how were the accusers actions to be explained. Some 6f..~.}~tchinson seoi~temporaries argued that the bewitched were suffering from ’~gdily disor-ders ~hich affected their imaginations," He disagreed: "A little at*ention must

force conv cdon that the whole was a scene of fi’aud ant mposmrh’;’:begma byyoma~’~irls, who at ~irst perhaps ~oaght of noth~g more than being piOed andindulged, and confirmed by admit persons who were aft’aid of being accusedthemselves." Charles Upham, a n~ster who published a nvo~volume study ofthe episode in 1867, was equally hard on the yomxg women. "There has sek{ombeen better acting in a theatre than displayed in the presence of the astonishedand horro>s~icken rulers," he concluded tar~

-~’~ Indeed, the historical record does supply some evidence to suggest thatthe possessed were shamming. X~aen Elizabeth Proctor was accused of be-ing a witch, a friend o~hers tesdfied that he had seen one of the afflictedwomen cU out, "There’s Goody Proeter{"~ But when people in the roomchallenged the woman’s claim as mdently false, she backed off, saying onlythat "she did it for sport; they must have some sport."

8’a A month and a half aAer the hearings had beam, one of the tormentedyoung womeu, MaW ~arren, stopped having her fits. She began to claitu"that the af~icted persons did but dissemble"--that is, that they were sham-ruing. Suddenly the other accusers began to declare that Maw’s specter wasafflicting ~mm. Placed on the witness stand, MaW again fell into a fit "thatshe did neither see nor hear nor soeak." The examination record continued:

kftmwards she started up, and said I will speak and cited out, Oh! I am sorWt~)r it, I am sorry lbr it, and wringed her hands, a~d fell a little while into a fitagain and {hen came to speak, but immediately her teeth were set, and then shet~!1 into a violent fit and cryed out, oh Lord help me! Oh Good i,ord Save me!

And then affe~ard cryed again, I wil! tell I will tell and then fell into a deadfit againe.

And affe*~a,ards cryed I will tell~ they did, they did they did and then fell intoa violent fit again.

After a little recoveW she cryed 7~ will tell they brought me to it and then~lI into a fit again which fits continueing she was ordered to be had out.

SI The scene is tantalizing. It appears as ifNIary ~Varren is about to confesswhen pressure from the other girls forces her back to hm" former role as oneof the afflicted. In the following weeks the magistrates questioned MaW re-peatedly, witJ~ the result that her fits returned and she again ioined in the ac-cusations. Such evidence suggests that the girls may well have been acting.

:~a Yet such a theoU leaves certain points unexplained. If the girls were onlyacting, what are we to make of the many other wimesses who testified todeviltry? One villager, Richard Comans, reported seeing Bridget Bishop’sspecter in his bedroom. Bishop lay upon his breast, he reported, and "so op-pressed" him that "he could not speak nor stur, hoe not so much as m awakehis wife" sleeping next,to him. Comans and others who testified were notclose friends of the gi~s; there appears no reason why they might be con-sDring with each other. How does the historian explain their acti~tls?

1, Goody was short (or Goodwife, a te~m used for most married women. Husbands were ad&’essed asGood~mn. The terms M~ a~d Mrs. were resmwed for those of higher social standing.

3 2 /~WlER TiIE FACTI T}tE i~RT OF H~STORICAL DETEC~rlON

3~ Even some of the afflicted uromen’s behavior is difficult to explain as con-scious fraud. It is easy enough to imagine counterfeiting certain fits: whirlingthrough rl, e room crying "whish, whish"; being struck dumb. Yet other be-havior was truly sobering: being pinched, pummeled, nearly choked todeath; contortions so violent several grown men were retluired to restrainthe victims. Even innocent victims of the accusations were astounded bysuch behavior. Rebecca Nurse on the wimess stand could only look in astonishmeut at the "lamentable fits" she was accused of causing. "Do you thinkthese [afflicted] suf[~r voluntary or involuntary?" asked john Hathorne. "icannot tell what to think of it," replied Nurse hesitantl?< Hathorne pressedothers with similar results. \V}mt ails the girls, if not your torruents? "l donot know." Do yoa think they are bewitched? "I cannot tell." What do youthink does all them? "There is more thau ordinaw."

?.’] More than ordinary. Historiaus may accept that possibility without neces-sarily supposing, with Hathorne, the presence of the preternatural, Psychi-atric research has long established what we now take almost for granted: thatpeople may act for reasons they themselves do not folly understand. Evenmore, that enao~ona! problems *nay be the unconscious cause of apparentlyphysical disorders. The rationalistic psychologies of Thomas Hntchlnson andCharles Upham led them to reject aW middle-%ound explanations of moO-ration. The Salem women had not really been tormented by witches,Hutchinson and Upham reasoned; therefore they must have been acting voI-untarily, consciously. But given the attitudes d~at accompanied a belief indevils and witches, it is possible to understand the Salem episode not as agame of fraud gone out of control, but as a study in abnormal psychology" ona community-wide scale.

3.~ Scholars of the m, entieth century have been more inclined to adopt thismedical model as an explanation of Salem’s troubles. Indeed, one of the firstto make the suggestion was a pediatrician, Ernest CauIfield. The accused"were not impostdrs or pests or frauds," he wrote in 1943; "they were notcold-blooded malignant brats. They were sick children* in the worst sort ofmental distress--living in fear for their very lives and the well;are of their im-mortal souls." Certainly, the fear that gripped susceptible subjects must havebeen extraordinary. They imagined themselves pursued by agents of thedevil, iutent on torment or even *nurder, and locked doors provided no pro-tection. Anthropologists who have examined witchcraft in other culturesnote that bewitchment can be traumatic enough to lead to death. An Aus-tralian aborigine who discovers himself bewitched will

stand aghast .... His cheeks blanch and his eyes become glassy.... He attemptsm shriek but usually the sound chokes in his throat~ and all that one might seeis frod~ at his mou~. t{is body begins to tremble and the muscles twist invol-untarily. He sways/backwards and falls to the ground, and after a shoat time ap-

,.p,.e.ars to be in a swoou; but soon after he writhes as if in mortal agony.

.~]tm~ard the victim refi~ses to eat, loses all interest in life,:!.Nad dies. AI-t~lgh there were no documented cases of bewitchment death in Salem, the

anthr9pological studies indicate the reinarkable de 3th of reaction po~ssible ina co*ffmunity that believes in its own magic2

3~ Historian Chathxdck Hansen has cnmpared ~tie behaxOor of the bewitchedwith the neurodc syndrome that psychiat~is~s refer to as %onversion hysteria."A neurosis is a disorder of beh>,ior that funcfons to avoid or deflect intolerableanxiety. Normally, an allxious person deals with an emotion through consciousaction or ttmught. If the ordinaU means nf coping fail, however; the maconscious takes over. Hysterical patients w~ll convert their mental won’ies into phys-ical s3maptoms such as blindness, paralysis of various parts of the body, choking,faintly, or at*acks of pain. These symptoms, it should be stressed, catmot bela’aced m organic causes. There is nod~itxg wrong with the nervous system dur-ing an attack of paralysis, or ~xdth the optic neia~e in a case of blinduess. Physicaldisabilities are mentally induced. Such hysterica! attacks often occur in pa~ernsthat bear striking resemblance to some of the Salem afflictions.

TI Pierre Janet, the French phy’sician who wrote the classic lPlc~jorof Hysteria (1907), reported that a characteristic hysterical fit begins with apain or strange sensation in some part of O~e body, often the lower abdomen.From there, tie explained, it

seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it often spreads tod~e epigastrium [the region lying over the stomach], to the breasts, then to thethroat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for aveW longtime considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patim~t has the sensation of too big an object as it were, a ball rising in her throat and choldng her.

g 8 Most of us have probably experienced a mild form of the last symptoma proverbial "lump in the throat" that comes in times of sn’ess. The hysteric’slump, or gqobm" @~’te*’icz~.r, is more extreme, as are the accompanying convul-sions: "the head is agitated in one direction or another, the eyes closed, oropen with an expression of terror, the mouth distorted."

3~ Compare those symptoms with the oi~es experienced by Richard Comans,who (we have already seen) was struck down in bed by the weight of BridgetBishop’s specter and so frightm~ed, "he could not speak nor star"; or the titsof another tormented accuser, Elizabeth Brown, described duriug the S~’lemhearings:

When [the xvitch’s specter] did come it was as birds pecking her legs or prick-ing her with the motion of thayr wings and then it xvould rize up into her sta-mak with pricking pain as nayls and pins of which she did bitterly complaynand cry out like a women in travail and after that it would rise to her throat ina bunch like a pullets egg and then she would tern back her head and say witchyou shant choak me.

?’

2. The records hint that at least one bewitchment death may have occurred, however. DanielV~qlkins apparently believed that John YVillard was a witch and meant him no good. Willd~s sick-ened, and some of the afflicted girls were smnmoned to his bedside, where fl~ey claimed tixat the),saw Willard’s specter afflicting him. The doctor would not touch t]~e case, claiming it "preternatu-ral." Shortly after, ¼rllkins died.

l~TER THE FACT: rJ]Hg ART OF HISTORICAL DE~I’ECTION

A hysterical convulsive attack of one of the patier~ts in Salpgtri~re Hospitalduring the nineteenth century. J. M. Charcot, the physician in charge of the clinic,spent much of his time studying the disorder. Note tfie crossed legs, similar tosome of tee Salem girls’ ~ts.

q~ The diagnosis of hysteria, or at least of unconscious psychological pres-sures of one sort or another, has gained ground over the past decades. Yet theissue of fraud cannot be put so easily to rest. Bernard Rosenthal, a scholarwho has recen@ reexamined the Salem court records, argues that a closereading of the depositions suggests that fraud and hysteria were intermingled.Wt~at are we to ma, ke, for example, of the testimony given against SarahGood and another a~ccused, Lydia Dustin, regarding their "tormq~ts" of oneSusannah Sheldon?

Susam~ah Sheldon being at the house of ~,¥i’lliam Shaw she was tied h~r handsa cross i~a such a manner we were forced to cut the string before we could git

her hand loose and when shee was out of her fit she told us it~ I~as] (:~oody¯ ..pustin tl~at di~l rye t~er laands .after tha’c maaner, and 4 times sh~ hati~ been

tyed in this manner in rowe weeks dme[.] The 2 first times shee say*h it was

Goode Dustin and ihe 2 last times it was Sarah Goode that did rye her. ~Ve furder Cesdtie that when ever shee doth but touch this string shee is prese~{{!3~ bit.

qi It is one matter to have "fits" througb terror but another to have wriststied four times hy a specter who is then said to have bitten Sheldon if shetried to untie them. Unless we believe in invisible specters, the only reason-able explanation would seem to be that Susannah Sheldon had a confederatewho tied her hands. Similarly Deodar Lawson, a minister who dew)ut!y be-lieved in witchcraft, reported iu March 1692 that

Some of the afllicted, as they were striving in their fits in open court, have (byinvisible means) had their wrists bound fast together with a real co~’d, so as itcould hardly be taken off without cutting. Some afflicted have been found withtheir arms tied, and hanged upon an hook, from whence others have beenforced to take them down~ that they might not exl~ire in tha~ posture.

The conclusion, argqaed Rosenthal, must be similar: %!Vbether the ’afflicted’worked these shows out among themselves or had help from odaers cannotbe determined; but there is little doubt d~at such calculated action was de-liberately conceived to perpetuate the fraud in which the afflicted werevolved, and that theories of hysteria or hallucination cannot account forpeople being bound, whether on the courtroo*n floor or on hooks." Such ev-idence suggests a complex set of behaviors in which both hysteria and fraudplayed a part.

qa. As for the behavior of those acc~sed, what seems clear is the fldghteningdynamic unleashed by the magistrates’ decision to regard confession as worthy of pardon while viewing denials of witchcraft as a sign of guilt. Indeed,the magistrates appeared not to want to take no for an answer. John Proctorcomplained that when his son was e~amined, "because he would not confessthat he was Guilty, when he was inuocent, they tyed him Neck and Heels tillthe Blood gushed out at his Nose, and would have kept him so 24 Hours, ifone more Merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him." Once BridgetBishop was executed in June, the lesson was chilling and direct. Those whoconfessed to witchcraft like Tituba--avoided being hanged. Those whomaintained their innocence were Maded for the gallows.

~/~ Sarah Churchill, a young wo*nan of about seventeen, experienced thesepressures. She apparently succumbed to her fears and testified that she wasa witch. Soon, however, she had second tboughts, for she came crying andwringing her hands to an older fhiend, Sarah Ingersoll. "I asked her what sheailed?" reported Ingersoll.

She answered she had undone herself. I asked her in what. She said in belyingherself and offsets in sa, ying she had set her hand to the devil’s Book whereasshe said she never did. I told her I believed she had set her hand to the ~)ook.She a~q~s3vered crying and said no no no, Inaver, Inaver did. I asked then {vhathad made her say she did. She answered because they threatened her and toldher they would put her into the dungeon and put her along with Mr. Bur-roughs, and d~ns several times she followed [me] on up and dowu telling me

that she had undone herself in belying herself and others. I asked her why shedidn’t tell the truth now. She told me because she had stood out so long in itthat now she durst not. She said also that if she told Mr. Noyes [an investigat-ing minister] but once that she had set her hand to the Book he would believeher, but if she told the truth and said she had not set her hand to the book ahundred times he would not believe her.

qq Thus psychological terrors sprang fl’om more than one source. Thefrights of the invisible workl, to be sure, led many villagers to fear for theirlives and souls. But the refusal of the magistrates to accept the denials of thei~mocent led to equally terrifying pressures to belie oneself in order to es-cape execution. In a cataclysm involving hundreds of people in the commu-nity, either as accused witches, horrified onlookers, or active accusers, it isperhaps not surprising that individuals behaved in a wide variety of ways.

THE VISIBLE SALEMIt would be tempting, having explored the psychological dynamics of Salem,to suppose that the causes of the outbreak have been fairly well explained.There is the satisfaction of placing the symptoms of the modern hystericside by side with those of the seventeenth-century bewitched an.d ~eeingthem match, or of carelkdfy reading the trial records to distingmish likelycases of fraud from those of hysteria. Yet by narrowing our inquiW to themotivations of the possessed, we have left other important f~cets of theSalem episode unexplored.

qg In the first place, the investigation thus f:ar has dealt with the controversyon an individual rather than a social level. But step back for a moment. Forwhatever reasons, approximately 150 people in Salem and other towns foundthemselves accused. V~/qly were those particular people singled out? Doesany common bond explain why they, and not others, were accused? Only af-ter we have examined their social identities can we answer that question.

m, Aamther indication that the social context of Salem Village needs to be ex-amined is the nature of hysteria itself. Hysterics are notably suggestib!e, thatis, sensitive to the influence of their emdromnent. Scattered testimony in therecords suggests that sometimes when the young women saw specters whomthey could not identify, adults suggested names. "Was it Go6dy Cloyse? Wasit Rebecca Nurse?" If true, such conditions confirm the need to move be-yond strictly personal motivations to the social setting of the community.

q{ In doing so, a logical first step would be to look for correlations, or char-acteristics common to groups tllat might explain their behavior. Are the ac-cusers all church ’}nembers and the accused nonchurch members? Are theaccusers wealthy and respectable and the accused poor and disrel~htable? Thehistorian assembles the data, shuffles them around, and looks fox7 matchups.

qs Take the two social characteristics just mentioned, church membershipand wealth. Historians can compile lists from the trial recor&,of both theaccusers and the accused. With those lists in hand, they can be~in checldng

the cbm-ch records to discover which people on each list were church menabers.3V)r the?, can search tax records to see whose tax rates were hig~nest andthus which villagers were wealthiest. Land transactions were recorded, indi-cating which villagers owned the most land. Inventories of personal propertywere made when a member of the cominnnity died, so at least historianshave some record of an individual’s assets at death, if not in 1692. Otherrecords may mentiou a trade or occupation, which will give a clue to relativewealth or social status.q’I If you made such calculations fox" the Salem region, you would quicldyfind yourself at a dead end, a spot altogether too familiar to practicing his-torians. True, the first few accused witches were not church members, butsoon enongh the faithfld found themselves in jail along with nonchurchmembers. A similar case holds for wealth. Although Timba, Sarah Good,and Sarah Osbourne were relatively poor, merchauts and wealthy farmerswere accused as the epidemic spread. The correlations fail to check.8~ This dead end was roughly the point that had been reached when t~,o historians Paul Bovec and Stephen Nissenbaum, were inspired to take literallythe adxdce about going back to the drawing board. More than a hundred yearsearlier Charles Upham had made a detailed map of Salem for his own studyof the witcbcraft episode. Upham examined the old town records, paced theactual sites of old houses, and estabfished to the best of his knowledge the res-idences of a large majority of Salem Villagers. Boyer and Nissenbaum tooktheir list of accx~sers and accused and noted the location of each village resldent. The results were striking, as can be seen from the map on page 38.8"1 Of the fourteen accused witches in the village, twelve lived in the easternsection. Of the thirtT-two adult villagers who testified against the accused,thirty lived in the western section. ~’In other words," concluded Boyer andNissenbaum, "the alleged witches and those who accused them resided onopposite sides of the Village." Furthermore, of twemT-nlne residents whopublicly defended the accused in some waD twenty-four lived in the easternhalf of the village. Often they were close neighbors of the accused. It isments like these that make the historian want to behave, were it not for thestaid air of research libraries, like Archimedes leaping fl’om his fiabled bath-mb and shouting "Eureka["

,~a The discovery is only the beginning of the task. The geographic chartsuggests a division, but it does not at all indicate what that division is, otherthan a general east-west split. So Boyer and Nissenbanm began to explorethe history of the village itself, expanding their microcosm of 1692 backwardin time. They investigated a social situation that historians had long recog-nized but had never associated with the Salem witch trials: Salem Village’suneasy relation to its social parent, Salem Town.

6.? Salem "Ibwn’s settlerrjent followed the pattern of most coastal New En-gland towns. Original s’ettlers set up houses around a central location andearved.tl~eir farmlands out of the surrounding countryside. As a se~ementprosperd~t, the land in its immediate vicinity came to be completely taken up.As houses were erected farther and farther away from the central ~neeting

3 8 AFTER FI IE FACT: ~-IE ~P,T OF HIs’rORICAL DETECTION

"Tile Geography of Witchcraft" (afi:er Boyer and Nissenbaum, Sale~*’~ Possess~’d,Harvard University Press, 1974)

house, outlying residents fout~d it inconvenient to come to church or attendto other civic duties. In such cases, they sought recognition as a separate vil-lagu, with their own church, their own taxes, and their own elected officials.

_5-’/ Here the trouble started. The settlers who lived toward the center oftown were reluctant m let their outlying neighbors break away. Everyonepaid taxes to support a minister for the town church, to maintain the roads,and tO care for the poor. If a chunk of the village split off, revenue would belost. Fnrthermore, outlying settlers would no longer share the common burdens, such as guarding the town at night. So O~e centrally located settlersusually resisted any movement for autonomy by their more distant neigh-bors. Such disputes were a regular feature of New England life.

55 Salem ~lbwn had followed this pattern. Its first settlers located on a penin-sula extending into Massachusetts Bay, where they pursued a prosperouscolonial trade. By 1668 four outlying areas had already become separatetowns. Now the "Salem Farmers," living directly to the west, were petition-ing for a similar settlement, and the "Townsmen" were resisting. In 1672Massachusetts’s legisl’~ture allowed Salem Village to build its ow~ meetinghonse~*.but in other matters, the village remained dependent. Salem Townstill collected village taxes chose village constables and arrang~0 for xdllagel~a.~. The colonys records ~nclude pent,on after pennon friSin v~llagersco,@laining about tax rates, patrol dudes, boundaW rulings.

"Salem i~, 1692" (From Tt~e Pztrs-~dt qf Ll’be~3,: A Hi;to~y qf the A~nerb:a~ People, vol.I, by R. Jaclc~on ~’~ison, et al. Cop)q’ight 1966 by HarperCotlins College Publishen~.Reprinted by permissio~ of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.)

5~ l-lere, then, is one east west split bem~een the village and the town. Butthe line drawn on Boyer and Nissenbaum’s *nap is ~vithi~ the village, l/Vhatcause would the village have for division?

~5? Many causes, the records indicate--chief among them the choice of aminister. YVhen the village built its own meeting house, it chose James Bay-Iey to be its pastor in 1673. Soon enough, however, some churchgoers be~gan complaining. Bayley didn’t attend regularly to his private prayers.Church members had not been fully consulted before his selection. After aflurW of petitions and coouterpetitions, Bayley left in 1680, and GeorgeBurroughs was hired. Three years later Burroughs left in another dispute.He was succeeded by Deodar Lawson, who lasted through fuur more yearsof quarrels. Finally Samuel Parris occupied the pulpit after !688. His termwas equally storn~y, arid in 1696 his opponents finally succeeded in starvinghim out of the job by refusing to coliect taxes to pay his salary.

5-~ @he.maaneuverings that went on during the years of bickering seem be-wilderingly complex. But Boyer and Nissenbaum recognized that the churchrecords, as well as the petitions and counterpetitions, provided a key to io~cal divisions. When the lists from the different quarrels were compared,

Buyer and Nissenbaum found that the same names were being grouped to-gether. The people who supported James Bayley usually supported GeorgeBurroughs and then opposed the second two ministers. Conversel); the sup-porters of Deodar Lawson and Samuel Parris had been the peopte who com-plained about Bayley and Burroughs. And--here is the iink~t~e two listsfi’om those disputes coincide closely with the divisions in 1692 between ac-cusers and accused.g~ Suddenly the Salem witch trials take on an entirely new appearance. In-stead of being a dramatic disruption that appears out of nowhere in a villagekitchen and then disappears equally suddenly at the end of ten months, itcomes an elaboration of a quarrel that has gone on fur nearly twenty years!

¢~ lkq~at lay behind the divisions? One reading of clae evidence suggests thattl~e larger split bet~veen Salem Town and Salem Vi!lage was reflected in thevillage itself, s~dth the villagers on the east retaining enough iu common withthe town to continue their af~liation and the westerners favoring completeseparation. Buyer and Nissenbaum argtm that the division also went beyondthe simple geographical one to a difference in outlook and lifestyle. SaiemTown was enteriug into its own as one of the major commercial centers ofNew England. It boasted a growing merchant class whose wealth wouldsoon support the building of line mansions. By coutrast, the t:armers in thewestern portion of Salem Vi!lage were tied more closely to traditional agrar-ian life: subsistence farming, spartan daily lives, a suspicion of the commer-cia! habits of offering credit and making speculative investments. ~,7~Torse, theSalem farmers found themselves increasingly hard-pressed. The land avail-able in the village was dwindling. What land there was proved less fertilethan the hroad plains on the eastern side of the village and along ~e north-ern flats of Salem ’Pown.

’~l Look, too, at the occupatious of the accused witches and their defenders.Many lived along the Ipswich Road, a route that passed by the village ratherthan through it, a main thoroughfare for travelers and for commerce. Thetradespeople who had set up shop therd incIuded a carpenter, sawmili oper-ator, shoemaker, and miller, And of course there were the taverns, mainstaygof tl’avelers, yet aN~ays slightly suspect to Puritans. The people along theIpswich Road were not rich, most of them, hut their commercial links werewith Salem Town and with outsiders. They were small-scale entrepreneursrather than farmers. Out of twenty-one villagers who lived along or r~ear theroad, only two signed petitions linking them with the western faction; thir-teen signed petitions linking them with the eastern faction. Tavern keeperJohn Proctor was hanged as a witch; his wife Elizabeth barely escaped withher life; and Joshua Rein, another tavern keeper on the road, signed a peti-t.ion defending Good?/Nurse.

g’a Boyeji and Nissenbaum’s reconstruction of village factions thus ~uggestsan alternate way of looking at the Salem trials. T{’aditional accounts place.Sgmuel Parris and his supporters as leaders of the village, te~’~6rizing inno-~&t’~: x/,llagers and controllh~g the trials. Certainly Parris~s supporters hadtheir day in 1692, but from the longer perspective they appear to have been

fighting a losing battle, qff Boyer and Nissenbaum are correct, the. ~alem tri-als ~t’re an indirect yet anguished protest of a group of villagers whoseagratian way of ti[~ was being threatened by d~e rising commercialism ofSalem Town.{,3 The brilliance of Boyer alld Nissenbaum’s’ research was to place the indi-vidual dramas of Salem into a larger social context. But their maps are nottt~e only maps that cau be drawn, nor their connections the only connectionsto be made. Boyer and Nisseubaum I:ocused their attencio~ o*,, Salemlage. But as the witchcraft trials gained momentum, tbe fryer spread to a fewneighboring villages. In the summer of 1692, several of the possessedwomen of Salem were invited to Andover by concerned residents. The re-suiting rmmd of accusations led to the arrest of nearly forty Ba~dover vil-lagers. A month latex’, a smaller outbreak centered in the fishing port ofGloucester, where six people were arrested. Several more of the accusedfrom Salem had Gloucester ties. All these people were tried by the samecourt that dealt with the Salem cases.

Taking these additioual episodes into account makes it more difficult togeneralize about embattled farmers arrayed against a rising commercialism.Gloucester was a fishit~g port, while Andover, though it was )ust as ag~’ariauas Salem \~[lage, had rto commercial "parent" the likes of Salem Town. Butif rising conanaercialism was not the only, or primal35 social factor iufluenc-ing the Salem outbreak, what then?

Several historians, most recently iVia~Tg Beth Nos’ton, have explored theconnections bee~veen the trials and New E*~gland’s Indian wars. Memories ofKing Philip’s VCar of 1676 fingered in the region for many years, leaving in-habitants anxious and uneasy, especially along the frontiel; Theu came a newoutbreak of violence in 1689, which the settlers referred to as "r.he secoudIndian war." In JanuaU 1692, just as the witchcraft controversy was gettingstarted~ word came from York, Maine, that Indians had massacred residents¯ere. Indeed, a number of the accusers at the Salem trials experienced first-hand the horrors of the conflict. Mercy Lewis--one of the principal accus-ers-only two }mars earlier had seen her mother, father, sister, and brothermurdered in an Indian attack.

Analyzing the chronoloD! of the trials, Norton pointed out that the nmn-bet of witchcraft accusations rose sharply only in April 1692. It was at thispoint that Abigail I-tobbs was brought before tbe magistrates because of herreputation for being flippant about the spreading crisis. (She was "not afraidof auything," she supposedly boasted, because she had "Sold her selfe boddy& Soull to the old boy"--that is, to Satan.) During the late 1680s Hobbs hadlived for some time along the Maine frontier. Under hostile questioningfrom the magistrates, she admitted that she had covenanted there with thedevil--while "at Casko-bay." Having thus confessed, she quickly turned intoan enthusiastic prosecution witness. Before her confession on April 17 onlyten people had been dbarged with witchcraft. In the seven weeks(that fol-lowed, tire total jumped to sixty-eight. The spectral visions of Abigat! Hobbsand M&cy Lewis led to the indictment of a number of folk from Maine,

42 AJFTER THE FACT: TIlE !~RT OF HIS FORICAL DETECTION

chief among them the Reverend George Burroughs, who seemed the ring-leader of the devilish conspiracy, in the eyes of many. The anxieties spawnedby the frontier attacks, argued Norton, were what pushed the Salem hyste-ria bq~ond the bounds of the usual witchcraft trials of seventeenth<comfyNew England.

In addition to the fear of Indian "devils," did the accusers perhaps fear re-ligious demons? For years the colow’s ruling Congregationalists had wor-ried about the heresies spread by Quakers, members of the Society ofFriends. In the 1650s and 1660s, Massachusetts Bay hanged four Quakermissionaries on the Boston Commou. Other rnenthe~:s of this Protestant secthad been ~a&ipped, thrown into prison, or driven from the colony. TheQuaker belief that every person possessed his or her own divine inner lightseemed to Congregationalists to suggest the blasphemous notion that Godcould speak directly to individuals. Even more disquieting, Friends caughtup in their enthusiasm would "quake" when the holy spirit possessed them,behavior that seemed all too much like the fits of the Salem afflicted. "Dia-bolical Possession was the thing which did dispose and enc/ine men untoQuakerism," warned Boston minister Cotton Mather, the son of Increase, in1689.

By 1692, Congregationalists no longer had the power to persecute Quak-ers, for Massachusett’s nee charter guaranteed toleration to all Protestants.Yet many ordinmT folk continued to harbor suspicions, and within EssexCounty, the largest concentration of Quakers lived in Salem. Aside frolnSalem, the next largest group lived in Gloucester. In Andm, er too, Quakerconnections seemed to figure in the arrests. In most cases, hostility was di-rected not so much at the Quakers themselves as at Congregationalists whoestablished sodal ties with them. Rebecca Nurse, who was pious and well re-spected in other ways, had taken au orphaned Quaker boy into her t:amily‘John and Elizabeth Proctor, the tavern keepers, counted a large nunaher ofQuakers among Elizabeth’s family. Christiue Heyrman, the historian whoresearched these connections, concluded that the western farmers of Salemmay have worried less about how uear they lived to commercial Salem thanahont "the even shorter physical distance separating the residences of the ac-cused ~om Salem’s Quaker etmlave."

"WOMEN ALONE"Whereas Boyer, Nissenbaum, and other historians have pursued correla-tions based on the social geography of witchcraft, another striking connec-tion can be made~, That conneceion is the link between witchcraft andgender.. By a large maioriEy, the accused witches of Salem were women. Out of

178’:accused who can be identified by name, more than 3 out of 4 were fe-male. And it turns out that nearly half the accused men were h@ands, sons,~r::at~er relatives of accused wmnen. The gender gap widens ~ii}ther whenwitchcraft outside Salem is examined. Of !47 additional accused witches in

seventeenth<entreT New England, 82 percent were women, in those easesthat aetuafly came to trial (41}, 34 involved women and only 7 involved men.Of the women tried, 53 percent were convicted, Of the men, only 2 wereconvicted, or 29 percent. And of those people who were not only convictedbut executed, womeu oummnbered men 15 to 2.

\~\q~en historiau Carol Karlsen examined the trial records in mote detail,she f¢mnd that the authorities tended to treat accused women differendy fi’ommen. Magistrates and ministers often put pressure on women to confess theirBy!It. In New England cases (excluding Salem), when that pressure led awoman to con~ss a "famdiarity with Satau," she was invariably executed, inaccordance with the Biblical command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch tolive." But when men were accused, pressure was seldom applied to makeflaem confess. In fact, confessions from men were not always accepted. In1652 one John Broadstreet of Rowley admitted having familiarily with Satan.The court ordered him whipped and ~ned twenty shi!lings "fi)r telling a lie."In 1674 Christopher Bro~xm confessed to "discom’sing with.., the devil," butthe court rejected his statement as being "inconsistent with truth." HughCrotia admitted that he had "signed the Devi!Is book and then scald it. withhis bloud." A Hartford grand jmy refused to indict him.

Sueh evidence suggests that, by and large, most seventeenth-century NewEnglanders expected women to be witches, whereas men who confessedwere seldnm believed. But why should women be singled out for such atten-tion?

Part of the answer, Karlsen argues, lay in the cultural position of women.Like Mare:in Luther and other Reformation theologians, the Par!tans ex-alted the role of motherhood over the d~aste life of the convent; they sawwomen as partners and helpmates in marriage. Even so, Puritans retained adistinctly hierarchical conception of marriage. They viewed families asminiature c6mmonwealths, with the husbaud as the tnaler and his family aswilling subjects. "A true wife accounts her subjection [as] her honor andfreedom," noted Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts.

A wife’s unequal stares was reflected legally as well: she was known i~ lawas a ~rne cove~¢--one xvhose identity was "covered" by that of her husband.As such, she had no right to buy or sell property, to sue or be sued, or tomake contracts. Similarly, the patterns of inheritance ilx New England weremale dominated. A husband might leave his widow property--indeed, thelaw required him to leave her at least a third of his estate. But she was to"have and enjoy" that property only "during term of her natural life." Shecould not waste or squander it, for it was passed on to the family’s heirs ather death. Similarly, daughters might inherit property, but if they wereready married, it belonged to the husband. If a young woman had not yetmarried, property usually seems to have been held for her, "for i~prove-ment,", until she naarried.

Thus’the only sort of woman who held any substantial economic powerwas a widow who had not remarried. Such a woman was known as a~me sole,or "woman alone." She did have the right to sue, to make contracts, and to

Older ,aromen--especia!Iy those who were reputed to have medical imowIedge ofherbs and potions--often came i~nder suspicion of witchcraft both in ~hagland andin America. This English drawing of 1622 ponra},s the stereotypical wi!lfiil dlderwoman, a supposed witch by the name of Jennet Dibble. She was said to have beenattended for ~brty years by a spirit in the shape of a great black cat called Gibb,

buy or sell property. Even when remarrying, a widow could sometimes pro-tect her holdings by having her new husband sign a prenuptial contract,guaranteeing before marriage that the wife would keep certain property asher own. In male-dmninated New England, these protections made the f#.¢esole stand out as an anomaly--a woman alone who did not fit comfortablyinto the ordinatT scheme of things.

:~,( Given that women in Puritan society were ge~erally placed in subordit~ateroles, how does that fact help explain the preponderance of female witches?As it turns out, a significant number of accused witches were women whowere not subordinate in some way. In refusing to conform to acceptedstereotypes, they threatened the traditional order of society and were morelikely to be accused of subverting it as witches.

?~, A woman might stand out, for example, through a contentious, argumen-tative nature. If a wot~?~n’s duty was to submit quietly to the rule of men andto glory in "subjectior~," then quite a few witches refused to confom~ to theaceeptgd role. ~g!e have already seen how Sarah Good’s "muttering andscolding extreamly" were perceived by Salem Villagers to have caused thedeath of cattle. Trial records are filled with similar accusations.

"1} Often, more than short tenapers were at stake. A remarkably high per-cent, age of accused women werefemes sole in an economic sensd?Of the 124wi{~l~Zes whose inheritance patterns can be reconstructed frmn surviving

records, as many as 71 (57 percent) lived or had lived in families~with nomale~l~eirs. Aoother 14 accused witches were the daughters or granddai~gh-ters of witches who did not have brothers or sons to inherit their propertT,This figure is at least twice the number that would be expected, given theusual percentage ofii’~es.role in the New England population. Furthermore,of the women executed at Salem, more than half had inherited or stood toinherit their 6wn property. Such statistics suggest why witchcraft controver-sies so often centered Oll women.

TANGLED WEBSThe early modern world, including that of colonial New England, was uncertain, mapredictable, full of dnmce. Livestock, on which farm families de-pended, might die suddenly. The primitive knowledge of physicians provedall but useless in curing the ills of the poor and wealthy alike. Amidst so manyunpredictable tragedies, witchcraft offered an explanatiou.for misfortunesthat o~e*wise might have seemed inexplicable. Witchcraft made the unpre-8ictable predictable and the obscure sometimes all too terrifyingly clear.

~ Unlike diviners or witch doctors, historians have followed the example ofthe natural sciences in seeking testable, rational links between cause and ef-fect. Yet the longing fur a simple, coherent story remair~s sn’ong. FVe all wishto see the confusing welter of events lock together with a clarity that leadsus, like Archimedes, to cry Eureka--conversion hysteria! Or Eureka--thet~ressures of the new commercial economy! Or Eureka--fgr, ves sole/

?~ Instead, the discipline of small-scale, local history forces humility. As his-torians sift the web of relationships surrounding the Salem outbreak, mosthave come to believe that its causes are multiple rather than singular. "Irre-ducible to any single source of social strain," concludes Christine Heyrman.No single "governing explanation," argues Bernard Rosenthal, The vely factthat witchcraft outbreak did not recur elsewhere in New EugIand suggeststhat the magnitude of Salem’s calamity depended on an unusua! combinationof psychological and social [:actors.

,% Certainly, an agrarian faction in the village did not consciously devise thetrials to punish dxeir commercial rivals or Quake>loving neighbors. Norwas the male Puritan patriarchy launching a deliberate war against women.But the invisible world of witchcraft did provide a framework that amplifiedvillage anxieties and focused them. As the accusations of a small circle ofyoung women widened and as controversy engulfed the town, it was onlynatural that long-standing quarrels and prejudices were drawn into the de-bate. The interconneetions between a people’s rdigious beliefs, their habitsof commerce, even tl~eir dream and 5antasy lives, are intricate and fine, en-twined with one another like the delicate root system of a gro~ng plant.Hisf6r}ans who limit their examination to a small area of time and space areable, througb persistent probing, to untangle the strands of emotions, moti-vations, and social structures that provided the context for those slow pro-cessions to the gallows on Witch’s Hilh