The Witches: Salem, 1692 (55 page)

Buccaneering Massachusetts governor Sir William Phips, who absented himself from the trials, to wail afterward that “some who should have done their Majesties and this Province better service” had acted precipitously, a criticism aimed squarely at his deputy governor. The witchcraft stymied all official business; Phips’s enemies exploited it, he complained, to undermine his fledgling administration.
(Courtesy of Cory Gardiner)

Margaret Sewall, the wife of court recorder Stephen Sewall, “that pearl of yours” in Cotton Mather’s estimation. As a much younger woman, Mrs. Sewall took in Betty Parris, whom the devil followed, promising the enchanted nine-year-old anything her heart desired.
(Peabody Essex Museum)

An early list of witnesses against Sarah Good, the first deposed witch. Tituba and Abigail Williams appear; though included in the original complaint, Betty Parris does not. The last name is that of a forty-four-year-old Salem town man. The trial list would include William Good, the defendant’s husband.
(From the records of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, 1692, property of the Supreme Judicial Court, Division of Archives and Records Preservation. On deposit at the Peabody Essex Museum)

Convulsions and contortions as illustrated for an 1881 study of hysteria, prefaced by the artist’s mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot. The pioneering French neurologist suggested a connection between trauma and hysterical symptoms, on which Freud would build.
(From
Etudes Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Epilepsie,
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)

An indictment against Reverend George Burroughs for having “tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and tormented” Ann Putnam and “also for sundry other acts of witchcraft.” The Procters’ servant, the doctor’s maid, and Ann’s cousin Mary testified to the afflictions, observed at Burroughs’s May hearing.
(MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum)

Detail from a seventeenth-century German engraving of a witches’ Sabbath, a more symphonic production. The Puritan preoccupations are missing but certain notes chime: male and female participants fly to a clearing; winged lions and monkey-goblins join them; frogs drop from the air. A woman tumbles from her uncooperative mount, as did the little Swedish girl and the elderly Ann Foster.
(Walpurgisnacht, by Michael Herr: akg-images)

Fifteenth-century French fliers. Among the earliest depictions of witches on brooms, the two are heretics rather than sorceresses—ironically, proto-Protestants from a sect that held that laypeople, of either sex, could preach. While enchanted brooms turned up in Salem, they conveyed no one through the air.
(akg-images)

From a 1670 illustration of Sweden’s witchcraft epidemic, to play a defining role at Salem. Families travel here as they did in Essex County; women did not elsewhere load broomsticks with their children. “Several have confessed against their own mothers,” observed a minister in the Salem court-room, marveling that girls of eight or nine accused mothers of coercing them to sign diabolical pacts.
(National Library of Sweden)

Reverend Parris’s account of his prison visit with Martha Corey. He found the self-described “gospel woman” obdurate and imperious, reluctant to pray with him. He pronounced her an excommunicate; she hanged eight days later.
(Courtesy Danvers Archival Center)

From Martha Corey’s deposition six months earlier. “Tell us who hurts these children,” ordered Hathorne as the girls convulsed around her. “I do not know,” she replied. She had no acquaintance with witchcraft. “You speak falsely,” a court reporter chided, leading Corey ultimately to ask, “Can an innocent person be guilty?” Parris recorded her testimony for the court.
(MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum)

In 2008 David D. Hall observed that his decades in the seventeenth century had convinced him that the past remains eternally open to fresh questions; he could hardly have suspected that someone might read that line as an invitation. Patiently, incisively, and all too frequently, he has fielded queries ranging from the elementary to the insane. It is a pleasure at last to acknowledge a gratitude equaled only by my admiration for his work. I owe an immeasurable debt as well to John Demos, who has made the seventeenth century a more congenial place than it could have been even on the sunniest, cider-soaked afternoon. There are not that many people who happen to know whether, if you were flying on a pole just above the treetops, heading southeast from Andover, in 1692, you would be able to glimpse the ocean in the distance. I am hugely grateful to Danvers town archivist Richard B. Trask, who does.

I have leaned, heavily at times, on the following experts: J. M. Beattie, Elizabeth Bouvier, Richard Godbeer, Evan Haefeli, Hendrik Hartog, Richard R. Johnson, David Thomas Konig, Eve LaPlante, Kenneth P. Minkema, John M. Murrin, Daniel C. Richman, Bernard Rosenthal, David Grant Smith, Roger Thompson, Douglas Winiarski, and Michael P. Winship. For help with and around archives, I am indebted to Kent Bicknell, Robin Briggs, Carolyn Broomhead, Nicholas Cronk, Rebecca Ehrhardt, David Ferriero, Amanda Foreman, Jonathan Galassi, Malcolm Gaskill, Birgitta Lagerlöf-Génetay, Paul LeClerc, Marie Lennersand,
Krishnakali Lewis, Maira Liriano, Megan Marshall, Scott McIsaac, Stephen Mitchell, Oliver Morley, Robert J. O’Hara, Eunice Panetta, Caroline Preston, Kathleen Roe, Rob Shapiro, and Abby Wolf. For archival assistance and for permission to quote from manuscript collections, I should particularly like to thank Irene Axelrod, Sidney E. Berger, Kathy M. Flynn, and Catherine Robertson at the Peabody Essex Museum; D. Brenton Simons, Bridget Donahue, Timothy Salls, and Suzanne M. Stewart at the New England Historic Genealogical Society; Barbara S. Meloni at the Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library; Amy Coffin at the Topsfield Historical Society; Inga Larson and Carol Majahad at the North Andover Historical Society; Kris Kobialksa at the First Church of Salem; Dana C. Street at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum; Richard B. Trask at the Danvers Archival Center, Peabody Institute Library; Peter Drummey, Elaine Grublin, Elaine Heavey, and Brenda Lawson at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Elizabeth Watts Pope, Ashley Cataldo, and Kimberly Toney Pelkey at the American Antiquarian Society; Barbara Austen at the Connecticut Historical Society; Justine Sundaram and Andrew Isodoro at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library; and Elizabeth Bouvier, head of archives at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Matthew J. Boylan, Ella Delaney, Kate Foster, the indefatigable Mary Mann, Rachel Reiderer, David Smith, Tim Wales, and Andy Young supplied research and fact-checking assistance. Tom Puchniak expertly tracked down images. Anne Eisenberg, Lis Bensley, Ellen Feldman, Patti Foster, Harry G. Frankfurt, Shelley Freedman, Laurie Griffith, Mitch Katz, Charlotte Kingham, Souad Kriska, Mameve and Howard Medwed, Carmen Marino, Ronald C. Rosbottom, Robin Rue, Andrea Versenyi, Will Swift, Strauss Zelnick, and William Zinsser provided various seventeenth-century interventions. Elinor Lipman read these pages in their earliest incarnation and improved every one. Eric Simonoff and Alicia Gordon are the most inspired—and patient—of agents.

It has been a privilege to work again with the impeccable Michael Pietsch. I am indebted to him for many things but especially for his consummate skill with an erasable blue pen. He could have used ballpoint.
Across the board, the Little, Brown team—in particular Reagan Arthur, Amanda Brower, Amanda Brown, Victoria Chow, Heather Fain, Liz Garriga, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Marie Mundaca, the visionary, possibly wizardly Mario J. Pulice, Tracy Roe, and Tracy Williams—continues to astonish. Households suffer when women disappear into the archives too; if there is a way to thank Marc de La Bruyère and our children for thriving in my absence, I intend now to find it.