The Penguin Book of Witches

by Katherine Howe

  REBECCA AND NATHANIEL GREENSMITH, HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, 1662

  1.Hall, Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 151.

  2.Transcribed from Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684) in George Lincoln Burr, ed., Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases 1648–1706 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 3–38.

  3.Samuel Stone, a minister in Hartford, Connecticut.

  4.Hooker was a minister in Farmington, Connecticut.

  5.Haynes was another minister in Hartford.

  6.Rebecca Greensmith.

  7.Puritans did not observe Christmas, believing it to be a pagan festival.

  8.The same passage on the swim test appears in Hall, Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 151, only with the line about the swim-test victims’ escape having been expunged. That Increase Mather mentions the subjects of the swim test making their escape suggests that they might not have been the Greensmiths, though it’s hard to confirm.

  A TRYAL OF WITCHES, BURY ST. EDMUNDS, ENGLAND, 1662

  1.Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), 443.

  2.Transcribed from A tryal of witches at the assizes held at Bury St. Edmonds. Originally published in London. Printed for William Shrewsbery, 1682. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003& res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:173121. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/tryalofwitchesat00cull. The physical document is located at Huntington Library, San Marino, California, call number 148069.

  3.The courts of assize were secular criminal courts established on a periodic schedule in the countryside of England and Wales. The assizes were occasions to hear the most serious charges, which were passed on to them by the quarterly courts, which met four times a year.

  4.Ninth of Charles the Second, or the ninth year of Charles II’s reign, 1657/8.

  5.The Bury St. Edmunds trial offers another example of the interconnectedness between witchcraft, gender, and representations of motherhood.

  6.Swooning. This trial follows a fairly typical relationship between cause and effect. A disagreement happens between two women around a matter of health and child care. One of the women has a poor reputation. Shortly after the disagreement, the child of one of the women falls ill. Correlation and causation are jumbled in the early modern mind, the one taken to imply the other.

  7.This “Doctor Jacob” was most likely a cunning man. He offers a countercharm against the magic thought to be afflicting the swooning boy.

  8.The suggestion of this anecdote is that Amy Denny had sent her spirit out in the shape of the toad. Because of the belief in correspondences, Amy’s burn would be explained by the burning of the toad.

  9.This slippage of opinion/prediction echoes the same kind of misunderstanding seen in John Godfrey’s trial. Amy could be suggesting that the child looks so sick it might die soon—that is, expressing an opinion or concern. But her reputation, combined with the heritage of ill feeling between Amy and her listener, turns the comment into a prediction, and therefore a suggestion of responsibility.

  10.The court is asking if she was lame because of her menstrual period.

  11.This is an example of the touch test, popularly used in English communities both to treat a bewitched person and to diagnose the witch responsible. A suffering person keeps his or her eyes closed, and then the suspected witch is brought to the afflicted’s bedside. The act of bewitching someone was thought to create a correspondence between the bewitcher and the bewitchee, which could be broken by touching.

  12.Begging and then going away grumbling or muttering will reappear in North American witch trials. It was bad enough to beg alms from one’s neighbors, but to do so with insufficient humility or an excess of anger was much worse. See Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 108–10.

  13.A young dog or puppy. See OED, 1923.

  14.Defined as a historic term for “a medicinal substance; spec. a cathartic, a purgative. Also: medicines generally.” OED, 2006. A doctor of physick is a medical doctor.

  15.This kind of spectral evidence is a common feature of early modern witch trials and will play a large role in the Salem panic a century later.

  16.Pin vomiting is a phenomenon in early modern witch trials that is hard to explain. Malingering and fraud is the most likely cause. However, a mental illness exists called “pica,” which describes the tendency to consume inedible objects, most commonly dirt or pins. See “Section II, Diagnostic Criteria and Codes, Feeding and Eating Disorders: Pica,” DSM V.

  17.This physical acting-out of the afflicted children would also resonate with the Puritan theologians at the beginning of the Salem panic, when trying to understand the fits that seized the girls in that situation.

  KATHERINE HARRISON, WEYERSFIELD, CONNECTICUT, AND WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK, 1669

  1.Demos, Entertaining Satan, 87.

  2.Transcribed from a document in Witchcraft Collection, unbound manuscripts, #4620. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

  3.Pleurisy, an inflammation of the lungs, or possibly pneumonia.

  4.That is, refusing to give her charity.

  5.Possibly an archaic use of “loving,” which in this context is a figurative reference to the sticky qualities of mud, so “clinging, adhesive.” See OED, 2008.

  6.Testimonies.

  7.Mary Haile has likely testified that she saw Katherine Harrison’s head on a dog.

  8.It’s not clear what William Warren accused Katherine Harrison of, but here she is calling him out for accusing her of something she is supposed to have done seventeen years in the past.

  POSSESSION OF ELIZABETH KNAPP, GROTON, MASSACHUSETTS, 1671–1672

  1.Demos, Entertaining Satan, 102.

  2.Transcribed from Samuel Willard, A briefe account of a strange & unusuall Providence of God befallen to Elizabeth Knap of Groton, in Samuel A. Green, ed., Groton in the Witchcraft Times (Groton, MA, 1883). Full text available via the Hanover Historical Texts Project, http://history.hanover.edu/texts/Willard-Knap.html.

  3.Most colonists shared their sleeping arrangements. Even men stopping at an inn for the night would often sleep two or three to a bed.

  4.Elizabeth accuses a neighbor of bewitching her in this instance, even going so far as to identify her distinct riding hood. It’s rather remarkable that this accusation didn’t flower into a witch trial. However, Willard explains why not by saying that Elizabeth and the neighbor prayed together, and Elizabeth admitted that the Devil must have deluded her. One wonders what would have happened if the neighbor had been a quarrelsome or irritating person, rather than a woman of “sincere uprightness before God.”

  5.Tergiversation is defined as “the action of turning one’s back on, i.e. forsaking, something in which one was previously engaged, interested, or concerned; apostasy, renegation.” OED, 1911.

  6.A servant girl’s desires poignantly appear in this account of what the Devil promised Elizabeth if she would sign his covenant: money, clothes that sumptuary laws would have held as being above her station, “ease from labor,” and “to show her the whole world.”

  7.The Devil tempting Elizabeth to drown herself in the well by showing her beautiful images in the water echoes the myth of Narcissus, who was so drawn to his own reflection in a pool of water that he couldn’t tear himself away and so he died.

  8.By “a solemn day,” Willard probably means that a company of people prayed with Elizabeth for her recovery.

  9.The Devil.

  10.Conversation or negotiation.

  11.Elizabeth’s actions with the stick are curious. They certainly allude to the common folk belief at the time (scien
tifically explained by King James I, in fact) that witches were able, with the Devil’s help, to fly up a chimney while riding on the back of a stick. But Willard’s description, and even the imagery of the folk practice, is decidedly sexual.

  12.Again an attempt to identify the witch responsible is undertaken, including a variation on the touch test, whereby the afflicted girl is asked to identify her tormentor by touch alone. Elizabeth makes a mistake in her identification, however, and so her potential witch is spared suspicion.

  13.The onlookers have decided that Elizabeth is truly possessed by Satan and not by a lesser demon.

  14.Puritan belief held that Satan was most certainly real, but was made and permitted to exist by God. Therefore, no matter how great his power seemed, it was less than the power of God. One of Elizabeth’s onlookers is reminding Satan that God is more powerful than he is.

  15.The first question about Elizabeth Knapp, considered here, is whether she was faking her symptoms for attention. Minister Samuel Willard, her closest chronicler, judges her feats of strength to be beyond what she would be capable of if she were not truly afflicted by possession.

  16.Assuming she isn’t faking, Willard posits, is the cause of her behavior organic or diabolical? Is Elizabeth suffering from a physical illness or a spiritual one? He inclines to believe the latter.

  17.Willard notes that she didn’t seem ill, as her body isn’t wasting, and in fact seems to be “gathering flesh.” Of course, if she had been employed as a servant and was now being put to bed, fed well, and relieved of hard chores, her health and weight might improve. Important to note, however, is Willard’s reasoned evaluation of Knapp’s situation. He is operating within an intellectual and spiritual system that holds demonic possession to be a legitimate explanation for Knapp’s suffering.

  18.Ultimately, Willard despairs of being able to know for sure whether Elizabeth has signed her soul away to the Devil. Instead, he offers her as an example of God’s might, in the hope that apprehension of the spectacle of her suffering might inspire greater fervor of belief in his audience.

  REBECCA FOWLER, CALVERT COUNTY, MARYLAND, 1685

  1.Debra Meyers, Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives: Free Will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 35.

  2.Excerpted from Raphael Semmes, Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938), 168.

  3.Mount Calvert Hundred refers to the original tract of land surveyed in 1657, and which served as the original county seat of Prince George’s County, Charles Town, beginning in 1683. Rebecca Fowler lived on this manor during her witch trial, though occasional sources call her Elizabeth. See Earl Arnett et al., Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), 108.

  GOODWIFE GLOVER, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, 1688

  1.Demos, Entertaining Satan, 71.

  2.Excerpted from Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. Originally published in Boston in 1689. Images of the original document held at the Harvard University Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft _id=xri:eebo:image:49306. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/narrativesofwit00burriala.

  3.Accusations of witchcraft often cropped up across the generations. Goody Glover the laundress had a mother who had been spoken of as a witch in their community, even by her own husband.

  4.Catalepsy is defined as “a disease characterized by a seizure or trance, lasting for hours or days, with suspension of sensation and consciousness.” OED, 1889.

  5.Astonishment in this usage is defined as “loss of physical sensation, insensibility; paralysis, numbness, deadness.” OED, 1885.

  6.Goody Glover was Irish, and English would not have been her first language. Also, she would have been Catholic in a predominantly Protestant community that regarded Catholicism as diabolical and perverse. That she could not recite the Lord’s Prayer in English might then not have been much of a surprise. But then again, neither would the reactions of her Puritan examiners.

  7.The court endeavors to make sure that Goody Glover isn’t insane.

  8.Upon examination they determine that Goody Glover does know the Lord’s Prayer—she has just memorized it in Latin.

  9.Goody Glover apparently doesn’t deny the accusations of witchcraft levied against her. And yet she had to have men present at the trial to translate the Irish for her. Her questioner admits that he doesn’t understand what she’s saying, and his lack of comprehension is perhaps the most important detail. It’s not his job to understand her. It’s her job to be identified as different and to be punished for it.

  10.The account of Goody Glover’s guilt admits a slippage between the idea of “saints” and “spirits.” Puritan theology rejected the intercession of saints, instead encouraging a believer’s personal relationship with Christ. Mather is encouraging Glover to repent and, as he sees it, to reject the Devil. But in her understanding, he is urging her to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, which she says she cannot do without the leave of the saints to whom she prays.

  11.Defined as “a mischievous, tricksy imp or sprite; another name for Puck or Robin Goodfellow; hence, a terrifying apparition, a bogy.” OED, 1898.

  SALEM

  1.Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World (London: 1700).

  2.Charles Upham, Salem Witchcraft, with an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects (Boston: Wiggin and Lunt, 1867).

  3.Linnda R. Corporael, “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?” Science 192, no. 4234 (Apr. 2, 1976): 21–26; Mary K. Matossian, “Views: Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair: An Outbreak of a Type of Food Poisoning Known as Convulsive Ergotism May Have Led to the 1692 Accusations of Witchcraft,” American Scientist 70, no. 4 (July–August 1982): 355–57.

  4.Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston: 1693), 13.

  5.Benjamin Ray, “They Did Eat Red Bread Like Man’s Flesh,” www .common-place.org, vol. 9, no. 4 (July 2009); accessed September 1, 2012.

  WARRANT FOR THE APPREHENSION OF SARAH GOOD, AND OFFICER’S RETURN, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 1692

  1.Transcribed from an image of the original document in the Univer- sity of Virginia’s online Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/archives/ecca/large/ecca1004r.jpg.

  2.One interesting side note about Sarah Good is that she was a typical witch in that she was an impoverished woman of middle age. Yet she is also typical of mythological witches, in that her representation in popular culture is often as a hag. Bernard Rosenthal quotes several early historical sources that characterize Sarah Good as a “crone,” “an old [woman] of dubious reputation,” and so forth, often in the same breath as they mention that she was condemned along with her four-year-old daughter and with a “sucking child” who died in prison. Sarah Good, like Eunice Cole, is an example of myth colliding with historical fact. See Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story, 87–88.

  3.The Salem episode took place before the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian in the English Atlantic world in 1752. The Gregorian system was a Catholic reform, and Protestant nations hesitated to adopt a papal scheme. Under the Julian system the new year began on March 25, which means that dates for the first three months of the year are often denoted as they are here, with a slash.

  4.Abbreviation for “masters.”

  5.Thomas Putnam was a wealthy landowner in Salem Village, father of afflicted girl Ann Putnam Jr. and husband of afflicted woman Ann Putnam Sr. Edward was his brother. Bother and Nissenbaum identify Thomas Putnam as being at the center of the affiliation group of powerful village men who were on the side of Samuel Parris, the beleaguered minister in town. See Pau
l Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).

  6.Elizabeth Parris was about nine years old, the daughter of village minister Samuel Parris, and the first girl who was “afflicted.” Abigail Williams, rather than being the nubile seventeen-year-old minx of Arthur Miller’s fevered imagination, was a kinswoman of Parris’s (she is often described as his niece, though such a term had more general use in the seventeenth century), eleven years old, and working as a servant in the Parris household. Elizabeth Hubbard, however, was seventeen and an indentured servant of Dr. William Griggs, the man whom most historians agree was the first to diagnose the girls as being under an evil hand rather than suffering from a physical disease. See Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare (New York: Knopf, 2003), 22.

  WARRANT FOR THE APPREHENSION OF SARAH OSBURN AND TITUBA, AND OFFICER’S RETURN, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 1692

  1.Transcribed from an image of the original document in the University of Virginia’s online Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/archives/ecca.xml.

  2.Tituba’s ethnicity has been the subject of much debate and analysis, particularly given that since the advent of Arthur Miller she has morphed from being “an Indian woman,” as she was described in the primary sources, to a woman commonly represented as African American in popular culture. Marion Starkey further racializes Tituba by alluding to her (entirely made up) expertise in “voodoo.” See Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (New York: Knopf, 1949), 30. In some respects Tituba’s constantly changing physiognomy is a perfect approximation for the use of Salem as a prism through which historians view their own times.

  3.Masters.

  4.Sarah Osburn was about forty-nine when the witch trials began. Alexander was her second husband, and her marriage had scandalized her community, as he was a young servant whose indenture she had purchased. See Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, 22.