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Essex County Witchcraft
Mary Beth Norton
| SALEM witchcraft is, in a word, bewitching. No one knows that better than Bernard Rosenthal, a professor of American literature, who set out in the 1980s to write a book about the events that inspired so many authors of fiction and who, more than two decades later, is still involved with the subject as the general editor of the forthcoming Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Or take me, for example. As part of a larger project on the relationship between women and the public realm in early America, I decided in the mid-1990s to tackle the witchcraft crisis, in which women took such a prominent public role. More than five years after publication of In the Devil's Snare, I am still writing, teaching, and speaking about the topic. And it is not just scholars who are intrigued. I have learned to expect self-identified witch descendants in nearly every audience I address, and many people with no familial connections to Salem witchcraft appear just as interested in the subject.1 |
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Historians of Salem witchcraft, whether or not they agree with the interpretation in Salem Possessed, owe a great debt of gratitude to Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. Their 1974 book sets forth what has continued to this day to be the prevailing interpretation of the events in 1692 Salem Village. Only time will tell how historians will react to this Forum's critical analyses of that book by Richard Latner and Benjamin C. Ray, which I find persuasive. But in the 1970s, Boyer and Nissenbaum offered a revelatory approach that emphasized the economic, social, and political context of the witchcraft crisis, helping to broaden historians' perspective by looking beyond the personalities of accused and accuser or the conduct of the trials. I incorporated their ideas into my teaching and later drew on them for the earliest editions of my coauthored textbook, A People and a Nation.2 |
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Yet after I had reread the book several times prior to leading discussions on it in my classes, I began to question some of the authors' key arguments and uses of evidence. There were the petitions and that tax list dating from 1695, three years after the crisis began. Did signatures on a 1695 petition accurately reflect the positions people took in 1692? Could one tax list tell us all we needed to know about the relative economic positions of accused and accusers? Thanks to Latner's meticulous research, I now know the answers to these questions: yes to the first, and no to the second.3 |
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On one rereading I noticed what my subsequent students have called the infamous footnote, the one in which (as Ray points out) Boyer and Nissenbaum declare that they omitted the "afflicted girls" from their famous map because they concluded that those youthful accusers were not "decisive shapers of the witchcraft outbreak as it evolved."4 In his essay Ray attributes that omission to the age of those accusers. I would instead attribute it to their gender. Boyer and Nissenbaum, developing their interpretation prior to the rise of women's history, simply assumed that women and girls residing in particular households would reflect in their witchcraft accusations the economic or other concerns of the male heads of those households without thinking to ask what familial dynamics might produce such a result. It also did not occur to them to consider whether the women of Salem Village might have accused each other of witchcraft for reasons that had little or nothing to do with men's affairs but that arose from their own interactions. And they largely excluded from their account household servants such as Sarah Churchill, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mercy Lewis, who in my (eventual) opinion proved crucial to the development of the crisis. |
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