sermons. He impeded scientific progress. A gifted medic, he understood more of healing than any man. He was the best scholar around. He too had a serious work ethic; agile and labile, he was always present, always recruiting. He knew everyone’s secrets. And he came to the job with six thousand years’ experience! As William Perkins, the early Puritan theologian, noted, he could cause you to believe things of yourself that were untrue. (A number of distressed Massachusetts residents asked themselves a related question in 1692, one that assumed greater urgency as spring turned to summer: Could I be a witch and not know it?) These ideas the New England settlers imported wholesale, derived primarily from the work of Glanvill, with whom Increase Mather corresponded, and Perkins, from whom Cotton Mather cribbed. When the colonists established a legal code, the first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,” read the 1641 body of laws, citing Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and bestiality.
While he was not cited in that statute by name, the devil was soon up to his usual tricks in New England. The first person to confess to enteringinto a pact with Satan had prayed for his help with chores. An assistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. That case turned on heresy rather than harm; the Connecticut servant was indicted in 1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Cotton Mather—who could not resist a calamity, preternatural or otherwise—disseminated an instructive account of her compact. Early New England witchcraft cases included no broomsticks, satanic gatherings, or convulsing girls. Rather they featured bewitched pigs and roving livestock, proprieties trampled, properties trespassed. They centered on the overly attentive acquaintance or the supplicant who, like Sarah Good, was turned away. Most involved some stubborn, calcified knot of vexed, small-town relations. Many charges had a fairy-tale aspect to them: spinning more wool than was possible without supernatural assistance, completing housework in record time, enchanting animals, inquiring too solicitously about a neighbor’s illness, proffering poisoned treats.
In the years since its laws had been codified, New England indicted over a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The flying, roaring, religion-resisting Goodwin children accounted for the most recent Massachusetts trial. The culprit in their case turned out to be the mother of a neighborhood laundress, whom the eldest Goodwin girl accused of theft. The older woman erupted in fury, upbraiding Martha Goodwin; the teenager’s fits began immediately. Within the week, three of her siblings heaved and screamed. On the stand, the accused was unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English, having learned it in Gaelic, the only language she spoke. A search of her house turned up poppets; through an interpreter, she offered a full confession, if one foggy on the devil. * (Years earlier the woman’s husband had accused her of witchcraft, establishing a role that would be reprised at Salem.) The Irish Catholic witchwas hanged on November 16, 1688, warning as she rode to the gallows that the children’s fits would not abate with her death. She proved right; they grew more severe. Martha continued to kick ministers and ride her aerial steed for some time.
Of late-seventeenth-century Boston, a Dutch visitor remarked that he had “never been in a place where more was said about witchcraft and witches.” Indeed the word “witch” got batted around a good deal there. So did witchcraft diagnoses. The first settlers had emigrated from England when that country’s witch craze was at its height; they came in large part from the most enchanted counties. Newly arrived in town, a stranger
While he was not cited in that statute by name, the devil was soon up to his usual tricks in New England. The first person to confess to enteringinto a pact with Satan had prayed for his help with chores. An assistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. That case turned on heresy rather than harm; the Connecticut servant was indicted in 1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Cotton Mather—who could not resist a calamity, preternatural or otherwise—disseminated an instructive account of her compact. Early New England witchcraft cases included no broomsticks, satanic gatherings, or convulsing girls. Rather they featured bewitched pigs and roving livestock, proprieties trampled, properties trespassed. They centered on the overly attentive acquaintance or the supplicant who, like Sarah Good, was turned away. Most involved some stubborn, calcified knot of vexed, small-town relations. Many charges had a fairy-tale aspect to them: spinning more wool than was possible without supernatural assistance, completing housework in record time, enchanting animals, inquiring too solicitously about a neighbor’s illness, proffering poisoned treats.
In the years since its laws had been codified, New England indicted over a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The flying, roaring, religion-resisting Goodwin children accounted for the most recent Massachusetts trial. The culprit in their case turned out to be the mother of a neighborhood laundress, whom the eldest Goodwin girl accused of theft. The older woman erupted in fury, upbraiding Martha Goodwin; the teenager’s fits began immediately. Within the week, three of her siblings heaved and screamed. On the stand, the accused was unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English, having learned it in Gaelic, the only language she spoke. A search of her house turned up poppets; through an interpreter, she offered a full confession, if one foggy on the devil. * (Years earlier the woman’s husband had accused her of witchcraft, establishing a role that would be reprised at Salem.) The Irish Catholic witchwas hanged on November 16, 1688, warning as she rode to the gallows that the children’s fits would not abate with her death. She proved right; they grew more severe. Martha continued to kick ministers and ride her aerial steed for some time.
Of late-seventeenth-century Boston, a Dutch visitor remarked that he had “never been in a place where more was said about witchcraft and witches.” Indeed the word “witch” got batted around a good deal there. So did witchcraft diagnoses. The first settlers had emigrated from England when that country’s witch craze was at its height; they came in large part from the most enchanted counties. Newly arrived in town, a stranger
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