David D. Hall

David Hall's "Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England: 1638-1692" collects all the primary sources for witch trials that happened between 1641-1692.

Did you know that there were SEVERAL witch trials in New England long before Salem? That the Salem Witch Trials were not the largest, but rather it was the Hartford Trials in Connecticut? That the punishment could be whipping, banishment, hanging OR house arrest?There's around 30 cases included before Salem in 1692.

The first person to be executed in New England was Alice Young in Hartford, Connecticut. The majority of these cases were petty squabbles between neighbors. It's never JUST "witchcraft" obviously, there's always an underlying behavioral or societal reason for it. Women accused women, men accused men, but some cases were originally defamation suits, which evolved into a full witchcraft trial.

We learn that Widow Marshfield of Springfield won her suit, as did Mary Staples in Fairfield and Jane Waldord in Portsmouth. Nicholas Bayley and his wife were banished for sowing discord and gossiping, and Alice Lake was hanged for infanticide. Some cases include the classic shapeshifting, animal familiars and witches marks, but not all. Mary Parsons of Northampton was suspected of all three, and yet was acquitted. John Bradstreet was whipped for bragging about his magical powers and John Godfrey was loathed by everyon The oddest case though was Lydia Gilbert of Windsor. She was accused of causing the accidental gunshot wound that killed Henry Stiles, three years after the fact. She was hanged in 1654. The Greensmiths of the Hartford Trials were even forced to undergo the infamous swimming test! Evidence ranges from invisible dogs, to spoiled milk or cheese, poltergeist activity, shapeshifting,apparitions, paralyzing victims, visions of birds, bees and bears, cats climbing up the walls, pinching and difficult labor.

However, this book did not include accusations of witchcraft against those of other religious sects. Quakers were loathed by Puritans, and were hunted down and hanged. Also, any reference to Native American religious practices needed more thorough notation/explanation, etc. Still a great resource for any paper or writing project.… (mehr)

Introduction

This is a study of popular religion, but in defining popular religion as a faith of the people Hall is not cordoning this off from the religion of the ministerial class. Unlike Europe, there was no great divide between the aristocratic clergy (and their bourgeois allies) ranged against a superstitious populace. Heirs of the Reformation, the protestants of the middling sort that came to New England were not of a separate social order from their clergy. Nor were the clergy averse to incorporating much of the magical into their cosmology. Enriched by the leaven of near universal literacy, the New Englanders - lay and clergy alike - partook of a print culture that set them apart from the divisive world of Europe. Social, cultural and economic homogeneity was the cause for this unique set of conditions.

In this world of "middling sorts," clergy authority was always checked by lay involvement. Though not to say that the people were consistently "insubordinate", it was through contest and negotiation that leadership was shaped and accommodated the views of the people. Much of what happened was driven by the fact that those who came to the New England colonies were dissenters who believed generally in the value of a liberal market economy, as opposed to the mercantilism of the mother country. And this meant a more contested ecclesiastical authority as well.

In defining popular religion, Hall also wants to avoid being constrained by what happens within the meeting house. Instead, he tries to include "horse shed Christianity," or the less perfect observance of religious practice that took palace outside the bounds of formal practice. Above all, Hall argues for the pervasiveness of religious values in the popular culture a culture in which the meanings which people assigned to sacred events were not always derived from official clerical dispensation.

A World of Wonders

The colonists lived in a world where the supernatural intervention of both God and the devil were seen all around. The colonists came from an England where broadside ballads, chapbooks and pamphlets, as well as more weighty volumes called folios, spoke of "wonders" such as "[t]ales of witchcraft and the Devil, of comets, hailstorms, monster births, and apparitions." (p. 72) Thomas Beard's Theater of Gods Judgment, William Turner's Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, and Stephen Batman's The Doome warning all men to Judgmente all used stories and images drawn from the same world as the broadsides and chapbooks. Learned and unschooled, all drew their lessons from these "wonder books," not least of which was the Bible itself.

The impact of the ancients was still ever present, especially as related to the meteorology of the Greeks and Romans. Elizabethans took very seriously the predictions of the weather in medieval and renaissance almanacs. With the coming of the Reformation, the resurgence of apocalyptic prophesy was added to the source of wonders. And as the men of learning wrestled with "monstrous births" and other phenomena under the rubric of "natural history," they found signs from heaven for the punishment of sin or apocalyptic warnings. Above all, however, the main source of wonders was God's Providence. In this way, the language of wonders was a universal one that all could speak.

This lore of wonders passed to the new world via the trans-Atlantic book trade. Along with the books came a mentality of wonders. Increase Mather's Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providence was firmly in the wonder book tradition, as were histories by Edward Johnson, William Bradford and John Winthrop. The notebooks of ministers and students also recorded wonder stories, such as the story of a baby at 30 weeks telling his nurse that "this is a hard world". Increase Mather heard of such tales and included them in the sermons he delivered and they made it into his written works. Colonists also believed in the prophetic power of dreams, in the presence of shape shifting dogs and the power of white magic to combat the Devil's black magic -- all of which drew heavily on the culture of folk religion from England. Tales included in Mather's Essay drew heavily on folk wisdom and lore.

And God's justice was also meted out in the form of providential wonders. John Winthrop recorded the intervention of the almighty in the drowning of drunkards, the special acts of providence that revealed murders' identities, the death of people who had worked on the Sabbath. But God's Providence worked to protect the righteous. As the minister at Roxbury, John Eliot, recorded - though two wayward servants who went to gather oysters were drown, a deacon's daughter who sustained a grievous head wound was healed. In an insecure world wracked with violence, the interpretation of wonders gave some semblance of meaning and order to life.

As in Reformation Europe, so Wonders were also caught up in the political struggles of the colonists. Anne Hutchinson, the prophetess eventually expelled form Boston and exiled to Rhode Island, was preaching against the local divines for teaching "works." A woman turning prophesy against the men in power, her wonders were interpreted as having been inspired by the Devil. Hutchinson and those who followed in her wake all used the language of wonders to undermine and attack political authority. "Crossing and recrossing a line that was difficult to fix, the radicals played on ambiguities intrinsic to the role of the prophet." (p. 98)

Ambiguities were also exploited by others to their own ends as well. Fortune tellers, healers and magicians all played upon this aspect of the world of wonders. Witchcraft trials took place, then, in a world of wonders where contexts over the meaning of wonders were also political contests. This was a world suffused with folk belief in the power of horseshoes and the ability to stop the evil power of a witch by making a cake of her urine. The leading elites, threatened by the use of magic for political ends which undermined their authority, moved to declare all prophesy off limits. Thomas Weld's report on the still births of Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson cast them as two instances of monstrous births among thirty and Hutchinson's prophesy was declared by the magistrates to have originated with Satan. Referring constantly to the Anabaptists and Thomas Muenster in Germany, the ministers of Boston decried the dangers of unregulated and uncontrolled interpretations.

As political events proceeded through King Philip's War, witchcraft trials to the dissolution of the charter government, further wars on Indians, the ministers of New England sought to interpret portents in ways that furthered their own agendas for reform. Among the most skillful in this art was Increase Mather, who sought to reinforce the special "covenanted" mission of New England through the interpretation of wonders. As contest over the meaning of wonders increased, Mather fought for control and sought to contain dissent. In so doing he became increasing selective in the wonders that he credited, participating in the more general "reform of popular culture" of the later 17th C. Separating themselves from the world of wonders, they also separated themselves from the popular culture as well. Increase's son Cotton continued along this path, shoring up the secular authority of the ministry by reasserting this group's claims to the exclusive ability to interpret wonders.

Increasingly the printers of chapbooks and broadsides began to diverge from the moral message contained in earlier published works. Nathaniel Crouch (penname R. Burton), for instance, published books meant to sell. Learned treatises, according to Couch, had been the undoing of many a printer. Instead, his publications in the 1680s aimed at the broadest possible audience. Couch dropped the moralizing of earlier works and focused on the entertainment value of wonders.

Other Readings:

See the University of Colorado at Boulder Plymouth and Puritan Historiography Site

Pekarek points to a number of interesting articles in his annotated bibliography of Puritanism in New England. His summary of David D. Hall's WMQ article "On Common Ground" is particularly helpful in understanding the flow of Puritan historiography up to 1987 and helps contextualize Hall's work on "Wonders."

(See also David D. Hall, "Religion and Society: Problems and Reconsiderations," in Greene and Pole, eds., Colonial British America.)

Francis T. Butts' "The Myth of Perry Miller" (AHR 1982) is also helpful in understanding the context of today's interest in a broader range of religious life and experience. Butts recounts the attacks by scholars directed at Miller as straw man, his "narrative of declension," as a supposed opponent of social history, and as one who denied change over time in the evolution of the Puritan mind. Butts seeks to rescue Miller from the attacks of the distortions of Robert G. Pope (in his denial of "declension') and the more genteel "distancing" of David D. Hall (in his claim that Miller denied change over time). As scholars have more recently pointed out, Miller was probably right about "decline" in New England -- but probably not about decline everywhere else. As Jon Butler points out, the American colonies were "awash in a sea of faith".… (mehr)

From the Introduction to Seventeenth-Century New England (David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen)

This collection of essays comes out of a conference held to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Massachusetts. Amongst the most significant issues addressed at the conference were issues of continuity and change in the transition from European to American societies. Work in the 60s and 70s on colonial New England pointed to discontinuities, with local studies showing changes in post-Revolutionary America which represented a break with the traditional values of rural England. For instance, one thinks of Phillip Greven's study of Andover, MA. As an outgrowth of the Revolution and the social forces unleashed society became less hierarchical. The revisionists, reacting against the "consensus history" of the 1950s, often erred on the side of over-emphasizing change and ignoring continuities. The debates seem to have stalled, become less than fruitful. We have moved on from the arguments over family structure, these debates seem dated ... The new organizing paradigm reflected in this volume is the impact of market forces on the New England Colonies. The new question is how integrated were the New England colonists in a market economy?

Another trend in the historiography was the attack of the 1960s social history on intellectual history of the 50s. Darrett Rutman's Winthrop's Boston was a response to Perry Miller's New England Mind, which essentially argued that the complex theology of the Puritan Divines had little to do with how ordinary people thought and acted. The new synthesis coming out of the 70s and 80s posited the porousness of boundaries between the theology of the ministers and the world of common folk. Bringing religion back into the social history, the new approach is probably best seen in the work of David Hall (World of Wonders). The religious elite incorporated many popular beliefs in their writings and sermons and the common people were hardly as irreligious as posited by the social historians of the 1960s. Religion had regained its interpretive force as a major element in New England Society.

Climate and Mastery ...

It is the argument of this paper that in the final two decades of the century, a dramatic deterioration in the weather combined with other events to create the profound disillusionment and self-doubt among the colonists which many other historians have described. To discuss this period without understanding the weather conditions faced by the colonists is to omit a crucial part of the picture. (p. 30)

New Englanders were faced in the 17th C with harsher weather in the New England colonies than they had anticipated. Kupperman argues that the colonists saw the hand of Providence in the weather, as in everything else, and it was in this light that they interpreted weather as a sign of God's approval or punishment for their misdeeds. Several of the winters of the 1630s and 40s were extremely harsh, binging the Puritans face to face with the reality that New England was colder than it should have been given its similar latitude to that of England.

Fretting over the prospects for future colonization, the New England promoters sought to assuage concerns in England by pointing to abundant firewood and stressing the fact that with hard work, sturdy houses could be built in which all could be comfortable. Native maize grew well, but this wasn't enough for the promoters who wanted to prove that English plants grew well in New English soils. Therefore they planted barley, oats and rye - all of which seemed to do well in New England's soil. By the 1640s prospects looked better that English agriculture could prosper in the New World.

There was a belief that the technology of Europe would transform the land and the climate. By improving the land, they would make it fruitful and even change the climate in so doing. As the harsh winters of the 1630s and 40s gave way to milder winters in the 50s - 70s, the colonists saw proof of their belief. The harsh winters of the 1680s-90s gave rise to a good deal of self-doubt and introspection.

The period of self-doubt in New England began with King Phillips's War 1675-6, which corresponded with the first bad winter of the latter half of that century. By allowing Indians to attack them, God was punishing the colonists. This was followed by King William's War 1689, when settlements were again attacked. Following on King William's War, the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter was revoked. Yet another cause for anxiety... Now the government of England increased taxes to pay for the colonial wars and this could not have come at a worse time. Due to the harsh weather the harvest yields were down and the colonists could barely feed themselves. The colonists suffered from the dual burdens of heavier taxation and famine. In this context, the weather was surely a sign from God that they had strayed from their special mission.… (mehr)