The Penguin Book of Witches - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherine Howe is the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass. She is a lecturer in American Studies at Cornell University. She is also a direct descendant of three women accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, one who was hanged and two who survived. Her books have been published around the world in 23 languages to date.

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Contents

English Antecedents

   •  Witches in the Bible
   •  Trial of Ursula Kemp, St. Osyth, England, 1582 
   •  Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, 1584 
   •  George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, 1593 
   •  King James I, Daemonologie, 1597 
   •  William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 1608 

The Early Colonies

   •  Joan Wright, Chesapeake Region, Virginia, 1626 
   •  Jane James, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1646 
   •  Margaret Jones, Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1648 
   •  Ralph and Mary Hall, Setauket, New York, 1665 
   •  Eunice Cole, Hampton, Massachusetts, Later New Hampshire, 1647–1680 
   •  Mary Philips, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1659 
   •  John Godfrey, Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1659–1665 
   •  Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith, Hartford, Connecticut, 1662 
   •  A Tryal of Witches, Bury St. Edmunds, England, 1662 
   •  Katherine Harrison, Weyersfield, Connecticut, 
   •  and Westchester, New York, 1669 
   •  Possession of Elizabeth Knapp, Groton, Massachusetts, 1671–1672 
   •  Rebecca Fowler, Calvert County, Maryland, 1685 
   •  Goodwife Glover, Boston, Massachusetts, 1688
 
Salem
 
   •  Warrant for the Apprehension of Sarah Good, and Officer’s Return, Monday, February 29, 1692 
   •  Warrant for the Apprehension of Sarah Osburn and Tituba, and Officer’s Return 
   •  Examinations of Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba, Tuesday, March 1, 1692 
   •  Two Examinations of Tituba, as Recorded by Jonathan Corwin 
   •  The Suspicion of Martha Cory, Monday, March 21, 1692 
   •  The Accusation of Rebecca Nurse 
   •  Warrant for the Apprehension of Rachel Clinton, with Summons for Witnesses, and Officer’s Return, Tuesday, March 29, 1692 
   •  Deposition of Thomas Knowlton Jr. Versus Rachel Clinton 
   •  Bridget Bishop, Tuesday, April 19, 1692 
   •  The Notorious Giles Cory 
   •  Examinations of Abigail Hobbs in Prison, Wednesday, April 20, 1692 
   •  Susannah Martin and Her Poor Reputation 
   •  Statement of Elizabeth Hubbard Versus 
   •  George Burroughs, Monday, May 9, 1692 
   •  Establishing the Court of Oyer and Terminer for Suffolk, Essex, and Middlesex Counties, Friday, May 27, 1692 
   •  Martha Carrier, Queen of Hell 
   •  Statement of Sarah Ingersoll and Ann Andrews Regarding Sarah Churchill, June 1, 1692
 
After Salem
 
   •  The Apology of Samuel Sewall, January 14, 1697 
   •  The Apology of the Salem Jury, 1697 
   •  Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, 1700 
   •  A Case of Poisoning in Albany, New York, 1700 
   •  John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, 1702 
   •  The Trial of Grace Sherwood, Princess Anne County, Virginia, 1705–1706 
   •  Mob Justice in the South, 1712 
   •  Littleton, Massachusetts, 1720 
   •  Boston, Massachusetts, 1728 
   •  New York, New York, 1737 
   •  New York, New York, 1741 
   •  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1787 
   •  Moll Pitcher, Lynn, Massachusetts, 1738–1813 

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

Copyright  © 2014 Katherine Howe 


Introduction

Marblehead, Massachusetts, is a bedroom community in suburban Boston, a comfortable seaside enclave of historic houses. It has good public schools, intermittent bus service, and a weekly newspaper that is read mainly for the juicy names-naming police log. It is not the sort of place where one would expect to find a witch.

But a witch did live there, though she is not buried there. Wilmot Redd, or sometimes Reed, was one of the more than one hundred people who was accused during the Salem witch crisis of 1692, and, like the other condemned witches, her body was thrown into a shallow ditch at the base of a rocky ledge to the west of Salem Town after being cut down from the gallows. At that time, the area at the foot of the hill where the gallows stood was flooded with brackish water at high tide, and so Wilmot Redd, after resting uneasily in the rocky earth of coastal Essex County, was most likely carried out to sea. Today the ditch she was thrown into is hidden under a pharmacy parking lot.

Redd, like the other North American witches who have left impressions—sometimes lasting, sometimes glancing—in the historical record, presents something of a conundrum. How can the English colonists who settled North America, who were relatively literate compared with their European cousins, who were reasonably thoughtful and self-examining, who lived in tightly interconnected communities dependent on collective effort for success, have believed in witches? And not just believed in witches, but also put them to death? The historical fact of witchcraft weighs uneasily in our current culture, particularly given how much symbolic, nation-building weight the colonists are required to bear in the realms of popular history.

Histories of witchcraft have often revealed more about the time in which the historian was writing than about witchcraft itself. Within each all-encompassing theory of witchcraft in the English Atlantic world came a new set of contemporary biases and prerogatives, obscuring the fact that, to the individual living in the early modern world, from the sixteenth through the middle part of the eighteenth centuries, witchcraft was a legitimate, but dangerous, category for explaining reality. Witchcraft intersected, contained, and sometimes overwrote other important social questions—most notably of gender, class, inequality, and religion—but to treat it merely as a proxy for those other ideas, because those other ideas have persisted into our own time while witchcraft has not, strips away the explanatory power that witchcraft held for the people who were touched by it. An idea, even today, does not have to be empirically verifiable for it to matter.

A surer way to access the meaning and function of witchcraft in the early modern world is to peel back the layers of popular myth and academic historiography and to look with fresh eyes at the...