 Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I think we'll start. I'm Gigi Barnhill, past president of the Historical Society. And today, I'm delighted to welcome Michael Thurston, who is the William R. Keenan Junior Professor and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Smith College. He has served as director of the American Studies Program from 2010 to 2014 and is the author of several books and over a dozen articles on 20th century poetry. In the spring of 2016, Michael taught an enormously popular course on witches, witchcraft, and witch hunts in literature and culture. And today's presentation is drawn, I tell you, from that course. In their influential analysis of the Salem witch crisis, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum offered events in Northampton as a telling counter example to the rash of witchcraft accusations in the Eastern Bay Colony, where residents of Salem Town and Salem Village interpreted the visions and behavior of young women as evidence of the invisible world, they argued. Residents of the Western Town understood similar phenomena as evidence of the Nissen's awakening of enthusiastic Christian faith. But was the Connecticut River Valley really free of what Cotton Mather called the devil's juggles and what are juggles? This talk surveys the appearance of witchcraft in the 17th century history of valley towns and villages pointing out familiar patterns of accusation and interrogation. And just as events in Salem were re-enacted and re-narrated by writers in the 19th and 20th centuries, we will see that events in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut, too, were transformed by later writers to serve those writers on purpose. So please join me in welcoming you. Thanks, and thanks for coming out on a beautiful day. It's warmer in here than it is out there, and I'm going to assume that that's why you're all here. Everybody knows about Salem, and so I'm going to say very little about Salem, except that I think Boyer and Nissenbaum are absolutely wrong when they start talking about Western Massachusetts. And it's because they do this anachronistic sleight of hand. So Salem versus Northampton, to make the point that they make that what turns into a sort of community destroying paranoia in Salem is evidence of the great awakening in Northampton, also requires a fast forward of close to 100 years. So they're comparing 18th century Northampton to late 17th century Salem, which is not a fair comparison. When you compare 17th century Salem and 17th century Connecticut Valley, the picture is really different. And in fact, and I'm going to come back to this at the end of the talk, the biggest witch panic in the New England colonies before Salem happens in Weathersfield, Connecticut. Happens in Weathersfield, Connecticut in the 1660s for reasons I can try to suggest. So we always think Salem, the pattern that we're familiar with from Salem, accusations typically focused on relatively powerless, marginal, single women, widows, or women who had never been married, women who didn't own property, as the sort of acting out of some other sort of social strife or struggle, that's a pattern that I think applies as much to the Connecticut Valley as it does to Salem in those 1690s. And so we'll come back to that too. Juggles, so that I can gloss that term from the beginning, comes from Cotton Mather's account of the demonic possession, he thinks, of a young woman in Boston named Mercy Short. Mather is involved in something like the attempted exorcism of this demonic possession. And writes in his account, I think the devil half-gutted his juggles here. The devil is tricky. And this is one of the things that undergirds all of these New England assumptions about witches. And I'll come back to this later too. But the notion that the saints who had settled the New England colonies were constantly in battle, not only with enemies that they could see, natives here, for example, but also with enemies they couldn't see, Mather writes about the wonders of the invisible world. And the sense that the saints, the Puritans, are embattled by the invisible world is what motivates a lot of these witch parrots. I'm going to start with two close to home examples. Although I should have had that up when I was talking about witchcraft and say, this is what we're all familiar with. This is what we get less familiar with as we move closer to home. There was an art exhibit at Historic Northampton two years ago, paintings based on the case that I'm going to tell you a little bit about. This is the big Northampton example. And then I'll move across the river and move it closer to where we are. The best-known instance of witchcraft accusation in Northampton is Mary Bliss Parsons. If Parsons is a familiar name to you, if you're interested in local history, it's the same family. The Parsons House, which is now part of the historic Northampton campus, belongs to that family. There is, to this day, a Parsons Family Foundation in the area. Mary Bliss Parsons, part of that family. She's married to her husband, Cornette Joseph Parsons in 1654. Joseph is a fur trader. He's a merchant. He worked with the Penchon family in Eastern Massachusetts. That's a name that might be familiar to you from American literary transformations of witchcraft stories. Judge Penchon is the sort of hanging judge type in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables. Mary Bliss Parsons is involved in a slander trial in 1656 in Northampton. And so early on seems to have gotten herself into some disagreeable relationships with members of the community. What this produces in 1674 is an accusation of witchcraft. She's accused. She's tried in Northampton. And she's acquitted. This one has a happy ending. And there are going to be three happy endings. This is happy ending number one. Parsons is a slightly unusual case. Most of the accusations, especially the early accusations that we know from other witch panics and Salem is a good model for this, are single women, like I mentioned, and women who are marginal in their community. Mary Bliss Parsons is married. She's prosperous. She's a member of a powerful local family. That might be a factor in her acquittal. She's got friends in high places. And this seems important because there are repeated rumors and repeated accusations. And two last things I want to say about this case. One, people are still talking about it. There's another talk at the Stewart North Hampton about the Mary Bliss Parsons case this month. And two, it's not the first case and it's certainly not the worst case of Connecticut River Valley witchcraft accusations. One that has a much more complicated happy ending, but one that people also are still talking about happens on this side of the river, about a half a generation later. And this is the case of Mary Reed Webster, more commonly and colloquially known as Half-Hanged Mary. Does anybody familiar with the story of Half-Hanged Mary? If you know the folklore podcast, Lore, there was an episode of the Lore podcast about Half-Hanged Mary. And if you're familiar with the Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood is a descendant of Mary Reed Webster and wrote this poem, two parts of which I'll show you briefly, about these events. Hadley doesn't come off very well in this story. Any Hadley citizens? I apologize. The account is in Mathers memorable provinces. Sorry, memorable provinces. It's like a tongue twister. The trial actually happens in North Hampton. And she's acquitted in the trial, but that is not where the story ends. It's the typical sort of thing. There are accusations that she levitated. There are accusations that she stocked cattle carts with a word, that she made cattle go into the river. And remember, livestock are wealth. And to lose cattle into the Connecticut River in the 1680s is to lose your livelihood or a big chunk of your livelihood. She's accused of overturning with a word, a load of hay. According to Mather, she gets involved in a dispute with a deacon of the church and a member of the general court, a guy named Philip Smith. And she bewitches him. She brings about through some sort of spell or curse an illness on him in January. And he cries out in delirium in what Mather describes as various language of feigning of pains and pins being stuck into him. That should sound familiar if you've read anything about Salem, right? Witches are always sticking pins into their victims. Mather writes, there was also a strong smell of musk of which no cause could be rendered. There's a noise of ticking that surrounds Philip Smith when he's lying in his sick bed. He has convulsions that seem like somebody's beating his head against the bed post. And finally, he dies. Because there had been this disagreement, this big public loud disagreement between Mary Reed-Webster and Philip Smith, suspicion turns to her. So she's accused, Mather, upon the whole that appeared unquestionable that witchcraft had brought a period unto the life of so good a man. Mather always thinks it's unquestionable that witchcraft is involved in whatever it is that's going on. The villagers agree. So after she's tried and acquitted, a number of them go, take her out and do some local vigilante justice. They hang her from a tree. And they cut her down and they bury her in a snow bank. Remember, this is happening in January. And the next morning, she comes walking into town. It's half-hand buried. And she lives for 14 more years. So what I've got for you here are just a couple of excerpts from Atwood's poem. And what Atwood does is she sort of narrates in the poem the progression of events over this night. And what she does, because I'm a literature professor and a poetry scholar, I can't do a talk without one slight moment of talking about a poem. And so what's cool about this poem is that the sentences are complete. The grammar is correct. The punctuation is there early in the poem. This is early in the night as events are just beginning. My throat is taut against the rope, choking off words and air. I'm reduced to knotted muscle. Blood bulges in my skull. My clenched teeth hold it in. I bite down on despair. By the time you get to 3 a.m., the punctuation disappears. The sentences are incomplete. The grammar's incorrect. This is the mind in some ways being loosed from the body during its struggles of strangulation or partial strangulation. When seeds in the leaves around me, the tree exudes night birds. Night birds yell inside my ears, like stabbed hearts by heart. Stutters in my fluttering cloth. And so it's a, I think, powerful evocation of this near-death struggle that results in something like a figurative resurrection and Mary, you know, limping back into wintertime Hadley later in the morning to then live unbothered for another 14 years. And after she dies, she's buried in the cemetery that now is the one that you take the shortcuts that I take back over to Northampton. She's in that cemetery. I'm, I should say, indebted both to that lore podcast for turning me on to this story and to a UMass student a few years ago who, when I was teaching my course at Northampton, or at Smith, alerted me to this story. A young woman named Emily Khan. So actually, the research here is hers. Trying not to steal it by giving her due credit. But I want to get to Weathersfield. And we're gonna get to Weathersfield through the Connecticut Valley. And on the way to Weathersfield, I just want to make clear that the witchcraft stuff happens all over the place. So it's up here above the map in Northampton and Hadley. And it's down where I'm gonna send this for most of the rest of this talk in Hartford and Weathersfield. But there are accusations in the colony down around New Haven. There's accusations in Saybrook, in Bridgeport, in all kinds of towns that are down along the coast. In fact, one of those accusations that led to an execution is of a woman named Goody Bassett. This is in Bridgeport. And there is this stuff leaders right into the present day. There is, to this day, an ice cream shop in Bridgeport. It's called Goody Bassett's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Shop. You know it's Old Fashioned because it's shoppy with me. So why is it that everybody is so worried about witches? What is it that produces these anxieties? What you've got to remember, and this I think gets harder and harder for us to remember as we get farther and farther and farther from this, this is a time that in the words of the historian William Manchester, is still a world lit only by fire. So when it gets dark, you've got the glow from the fireplace or maybe a little taper and that's about it. And on a moonless night in still heavily forested New England, especially when you've got far from the towns, the dark seemed really solid and menacing and it was full of stuff that was going to kill you. That all is complicated by recent history. So there have, by the time you get to the 1640s in the New England colonies, there have been conflicts with natives. When the first Connecticut River Valley accusation and execution that I'm aware of happens in the 1640s, you're only 10 years or maybe slightly less than 10 years past the Pequot War on the East Coast. You're on the way toward what's gonna be the explosion of warfare between settlers and various tribes that comes to be called King Philip's War in the later 17th century. So there's that ongoing sense of combat and struggle and recent history. And you've got internal worries in these Puritan communities. 1620, the establishment of the Plymouth colony. In the 1620s, the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay colony. You've got this sense that we, the saints, the dissidents, separatists who have left England are here and we are establishing what John Winthrop calls a city on a hill. Within 15, 20 years, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth colony is writing in his history of the colony about the disintegration and the dissolution of the purity of that community. As both a second generation is growing up in that community and hasn't yet had the testified experience of the presence of the divine that gives them full membership in the church and full membership because this is a theocracy. Full membership in the church also means full citizenship. So you have a bunch of people who are in but not completely of the community and you've got a bunch of indentured servants and others. You've got merchants and others who have come there who don't share the Puritans' beliefs but are there either out of necessity or to make money. You've got transported criminals who are part of the community. So there's a lot of anxiety starting in the 1640s about how we are falling apart as God's chosen people are. When the English Revolution that results in the execution of Charles I and the Puritan rule of England for about 15 years, when that ends and there's the re-establishment of monarchy in England, that's seen as a big setback to the forces of the people who thought they were the chosen people. All of these I think produce anxieties that then require the nomination and the handling of a scapegoat figure. Out of all these anxieties, and I'm giving you all this background because I think it matters for weather seal, out of all these anxieties, you get the sort of thing that happens in weather speed to make it more specific to get down to there. Why Hartford and Weathersfield in the early 1660s? The early 1660s you have the dissolution of the community that Bradford has been worried about for 20 years. Bradford's no longer around but he starts worrying about it in the 1640s. You've got difficulties over attempts like we have coming out of Northampton later in the 17th century, attempts to grant citizenship and membership of the church community to people who haven't had that testified experience of the presence of the divine. This is the halfway covenant, if you're familiar with that. I'm not gonna get into the halfway covenant. We can talk about it later if you like. We have a specific controversy in Hartford in the early 1660s that's around these questions of church authority, the relationship of church authority, the civic authority, the relationship of church membership to civic membership. There's a contest for leadership of the church in Hartford that begins in 1656. There's a lot of local resentment as happens, right? The losing side isn't satisfied with the settlement of that controversy. There's anxiety about the restoration of the English throne to Stuart Monarchs in the 1660s itself. Put that together with the river floods every once in a while, outbreaks of illness every once in a while, starvation that happens or the near starvation that happens when you're living in a subsistence farming economy and the conditions are ripe for the explosion of witchcraft accusations that happens in Weathersfield in the 1660s. For example, you get a couple. It's not uncommon that couples end up being accused together and you get a couple named Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith in Weathersfield. The Greensmiths are tried and executed both in Hartford, part of this rash of accusations that racks Weathersfield. They're socially marginal. Nathaniel Greensmith had been convicted of theft before. He's still a hoe. He'd been convicted of perjury. He'd been convicted of battery. Rebecca, his wife, is described by John Whitey, who's the minister of Hartford's first church as, and this is a quotation, lewd, ignorant, and considerably aged, right? So exactly, I mean, we can laugh, but this is exactly the kind of woman who gets accused early on in Salem. Bridget Bishop, who's a tavern keeper on the Ipswich Road in Salem, gets described as, in terms of lewdness and age. So this is something that we're gonna become all too familiar with. The accusations arise from the same sort of circumstances that we're very familiar with. Young girl got sick in the community. She had fits. She complained that somebody was tormenting her. She points at the Greensmiths. She channels voices that couldn't have been her own. She spoke in a heavy Dutch accent, according to the description of this, when there were no Dutch people around from whom she would have heard this Dutch accent. This is a young woman named Anne Cole, by the way. And when Rebecca Greensmith is charged with this in questions she confesses, saying the devil had first appeared to her in the form of a talking fawn. And that she and the fawn devil had met frequently. And the fawn devil had frequent use of her body with much seeming, but indeed horrible, hellish delight to her, that's her opinion. That's not me, that's the document. So she seals her fate pretty early on. And then she said, out of love to her husband's soul, and though it was much against her will, she had to confess that he, too, had been familiar with the devil. And this also is a dynamic that we see over and over again. One accusation leads to another accusation leads to another accusation. And so Nathaniel gets accused by Rebecca in these terms. This is a long quotation, but it's kind of fun. About three years ago, as I think it, my husband and I were in the woods, several miles from home, and we're looking for a sow that we lost, and I saw a creature, a red creature, following my husband. And when I came to him, I asked him what it was that was with him, and he told me it was a fox. Another time when I drove our hogs into the woods beyond the pound that was to keep young cattle several miles up, I went before the hogs to call them, and looking back, I saw two creatures, like dogs, one a little blacker than the other. They came after my husband pretty close to him, and one did seem to me to touch him. I asked him what they were, and he told me he thought foxes. I was still afraid when I saw anything, because I heard so much of him before I married him. So he's got a bad reputation, right, fact, perjury, battery. I have seen logs that my husband had brought home in his cart that I wondered at it, that he could get them into the cart, being a man of little body and weak to my apprehension. And the logs were such that I thought two men, such as he could not have done it. So if you're a weakling, but you have feats of strength, that's grounds for accusation. And if you remember George Burroughs and Salem, George Burroughs, who was a minister, who had been a minister in a community on what's now the main post along Casco Bay, that's part of the accusation of Burroughs. He's too strong. And in fact, the same sort of evidence, too strong because he can throw logs around. The Greensmiths end up spreading this web of accusation. So eight more accusations that lead to trial in 1662 alone. So predating Salem by a generation. The Hartford-Weathersfield Panic leads to all these accusations and four executions. Are any of these accusations to people who would accuse them in kind of a roundabout way? Yeah. So somebody gets accused by Rebecca Greensmith and then says, well yeah, but Rebecca Greensmith was, as she just told you, part of this witches' sabbath that happened on Christmas. And yeah, there is that community turning against itself and everybody turning against each other. John Taylor, a 19th century writer who has a book called The Witchcraft Delusion in Connecticut concludes, it must be clearly borne in mind that all these men, he means the magistrates and jurors in Weathersfield, in this, as in all other witchcraft trials in Connecticut, I'm sorry, were absolute believers in the powers of Satan and his machinations through witchcraft. And the evidence then adduced to prove them and trained to such credulity by their education and experience and by their theological doctrines and by the law of the land in old England. So it's worth remembering that these are people who still think of themselves as English people. The English king at the turn of the 17th century, King James I, who had been King James VI of Scotland, writes a book about witches and witchcraft, believes completely in witches and witchcraft. There are witch panics in rural England, especially in rural Northern England, throughout the 17th century. And these people are familiar with that. Put that together with the puritanical belief that you're a war within an invisible kingdom. And of course, when stuff starts to go badly, you're going to turn to this notion of witchcraft. I wanna end, by the way, we can go back and talk about any of the stuff you want, but I wanna get to my favorite story because this one is the especially fun one. I wanna end with one more happy ending. The Greensmiths, not so happy. Four, two other executions in the Hartford-Weathersfield area. A lot of those Southern coastal or accusations that I mentioned lead to executions. That string of accusations that we see happening in Hartford and Weathersfield happens down in Bridgeport as well. I always wanna point at the screen, but that's not gonna be good. My favorite in Weathersfield is a woman named Catherine Harrison. And Harrison's case loops us back to Mary Bliss Parsons in some ways. It's kind of similar. She's pretty well off. She's not a marginal person. She had inherited a good deal of wealth upon her husband's death though. And so she's well off, but that sense that maybe she got it in some malevolent way is something that has caused her suspicion. Suddenness with which she comes by her wealth provokes some resentment in the community. She more importantly had a history, this is also like Mary Bliss Parsons, a history of litigious relationships with her neighbors, some suing and some countersuing. She gets acquitted. I'll give the happy ending away in advance. And I think that happy ending is why when we get into the 1950s and Elizabeth George Spear writes a book called The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which is set around Weathersfield, Connecticut, things end happily for the accused witch figure there. I'm gonna come back to The Witch of Blackbird Pond in a minute, but I think the happy ending of the Mayor Harrison's case, Catherine Harrison's case, is part of why Spear is able to imagine a happy ending. Unlike Parsons, Harrison practiced folk medicine with herbs and plants, and this might be part of what's behind the witchcraft charges. Her case went on for two years. There are more than 30 witnesses who testify against her. And this long duration of the trial probably saved her life. Because it enabled the magistrate, John Winthrop, not the same John Winthrop, who was the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, but related, who was away when the trial began, gave him time to get back. And when he gets back, he makes an important change in witchcraft law that is the significance of the Harrison case. First trial ends with no verdict. The second trial gives us a bunch more testimony, and this is the one that the historian, John Taylor, waxes enraged about in his account of what he calls the witchcraft delusions in Connecticut. He calls it drivel, the travesties of common sense, the mockeries of truth, which fell from the lips of the witnesses. For example, a guy named Thomas Bracey blames Catherine Harrison for his repeated failures properly to sew a jacket. He kept getting the sleeves wrong, and had to keep ripping them apart, and it was her fault. I'm not making any of this up. Richard Montague says he encountered Harrison, and she told him that a swarm of her bees had flown over a neighbor's lot, and into a meadow, and finally across the river, but she had fetched them back again. And he said, this seems strange, and unlikely and impossible, and so there could have been no lawful means for her to do so, she must be a witch. Jacob Johnson's wife claimed that Harrison was responsible for her nosebleed. Mary Hale woke up one November night after hearing a noise, and found a creature had fallen upon her legs, quote, was such violence that she feared it would have broken her legs, and then it came upon her stomach and oppressed her, so as if it would have pressed the breath out of her body, and this ugly shaped thing like a dog had a head that Hale, quote, clearly and distinctly knew to be the head of Catherine Harrison, who was at that time in prison, so it had to be a spectral appearance. The depositions go on and on like this, and what's great is the documents give us Harrison's rejoinders, as well as the accusations, and she's fantastic. I want somebody to make a movie about the trial of Catherine Harrison, because for example, when Mary Hale says I woke up on this November night, and there was a dog-shaped thing on my chest, and I knew that the face was the face of Catherine Harrison, she says, to Mary Hale's testimony, I say there is no truth in it so far as I am mentioned in it, and I desire it may be considered how any person can affirm that by a small firelight. They can clearly and distinctly know my head on a dog. I know not the meaning of these things. Besides, and here's the really good part, I cannot but look at it as an accusation against me, and I do not know that I ever was in that house but once, and that was when I went to demand a debt due to my debt. So Harrison is getting at the real reason for this accusation is because these people owe me money. This goes back and forth for a while, it gives Winthrop an opportunity to get back to town, and the great thing about when Winthrop gets back to town is he says, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We've been convicting people on what's called spectral evidence. The only evidence that people have that witchcraft has happened is one person claims to have seen some demonic act, some malevolent act, some appearance of a specter. And we as law-abiding people, we as people who pay attention to legal procedure can't convict people on that sort of grant. And so they make an important change in witchcraft law. And that is spectral evidence where there's no physical evidence, where all you have is spectral evidence. This is ghosts, spirits, dreams, visions in the absence of a body, that's hearsay. And as hearsay, it's unreliable. And as unreliable, it can't convict. And so a bunch of them get together and they say we've got to rewrite the law so that convictions aren't possible on the basis simply of spectral evidence, which is hearsay, a guy named Gersham Bultley, who is an important reverend in the community, writes, if proof of the fact do depend wholly upon testimony, then there is a necessity of plurality of witnesses to testify to one and the same individual fact. And without such plurality, there can be no legal evidence of it. So Gersham Bultley, the local minister, with Winthrop, rewrites the witchcraft trial law to require corroboration. If you're dependent on spectral evidence, two people have to have witnessed the same spectral occurrence in order to convict. Two things I wanna say about this. One, this doesn't help anybody in Salem. Because, and this is the law by the time we get to Salem, because the accusers all corroborate each other, right? All the young women who originate the accusations back each other up. I saw that too. That's all it takes to get 20 odd people hanged in Salem. Number two, Elizabeth George Spear in the witch of Blackbird Pond makes Gersham Bultley a character. He at the end, it's a weird historical sleight of hand she does. She sets it more close to Salem than to the events in Weathersfield. So you get no mention of the fact that there are actually witchcraft accusations and executions in Weathersfield. But we're in Weathersfield. There's a local woman who kind of like Mary Harris. I keep calling her Mary. Kind of like Catherine Harrison does folk medicine with herbs and things like this. She's the titular witch. She's the one who gets accused along with the young woman who is the heroine of the novel. They get saved by the benign presence of Gersham Bultley who is working not only as the local minister but as the magistrate who is the voice of reason. And this I think is Elizabeth George Spear writing for a young audience in the late 1950s that the anti-crucible. Arthur Miller looks back at Salem in the midst of the McCarthyite anti-communist inquisition of the 1950s and says, yep, that's us. This is what we do. We make accusations that have no foundation and we destroy people's lives and reputations. Elizabeth George Spear is saying, what is us is the voice of the grownup who comes in to this world of accusation and reinforces the rule of law, requires actual civil procedure, calms everybody down. And this is what I think she and the Newberry committee that gives that novel the Newberry Award think is socially necessary for young audiences at that moment. That our past as a nation with witchcraft can mean multiple things and gets deployed to mean different things at different moments in our history or different competing things at the same moment in our history. But Wethersfield, just like Salem, lives on in the cultural memory. Salem via Arthur Miller and the movie that's made of the Crucible, the continuing productions of the Crucible. If you haven't seen the YouTube clip of the Crucible with Ted Cruz when he was a student at Harvard, I highly recommend looking at that one. But also the history of Wethersfield via Elizabeth George Spear and a book like The Witcher Blackbird Project. I'm going to stop there. And questions? Yeah. Are you doing your witchcraft course again this morning? Yes. Are you a high college student? Yeah. Yeah, hello. And most of this was not in that one because I learned about it since then. I had this idea we were going to do a field trip to Salem when I taught that course the first time because I thought, you know, 20, 25 people said that. It was 95 of us. So instead I had to go to Salem on this really cold day and take a bunch of photographs to bring back the show. But I think we might do a quick field trip over to that cemetery if I can find so that we can go and visit the grave of Cappain here. Yeah. Why did the witchcraft trials and stuff in Salem take? Why did that seize the modern historical? It's bigger. It's just bigger. I think it's bigger. And it's reach. You know, it starts off, well, let's see. I think there's a bunch of reasons. And I'll try to give the couple that I think are most important. One, Salem is just a more central location for the colony than a place like Wethersfield. It's a port, so it's a place where the colony is involved in international trade and affairs and communication. It's closer to Boston, so it's closer to the seat of colonial power. So that's one reason why it takes hold. The other is it just goes out of control and gets much bigger. So you've got eight or nine accusations, a smaller number of trials, four executions, one important escape, and a couple of acquittals in Wethersfield. In Salem, 20 odd executions, over 100 who were accused and imprisoned at some point. And more than that, by the time it all ends, and what maybe brings it to an end, is the accusations are flying fast and furious, not only between Salem Town and Salem Village, but down to Boston. So they start accusing people like the wife of the colonial governor. And saying, I saw the wife of the colonial governor who flew from Boston to attend to Wiches' Sabbath in Salem. And at that point, the colonial government is like, we are shutting this down. It's okay, it's not okay with him necessarily, but the colonial government, before that, is like, you guys take care of it. And Mather goes and things he can bring some sort of reason to it. But Mather is also a true believer in Wichita. And Hale goes and things he can bring some reason there. And it's just crazy times in Salem. And I think it's crazy times. Boyer and Nissenbaum's argument is that it's economically fueled. It's the town versus the village. It's the farming community versus the port. The port is where all the money and the power are. There's real resentment by the farming community. And a lot of the accusations, they have this great map in the book where they plot a lot of the accusations is coming from one side of the boundary, just over at targets on the other side of the boundary. Steve was a historic consultant for a GBH production. Three sovereigns for... Three sovereigns for Sarah. Sarah. I don't know if that's available anywhere, but that's kind of a fascinating look. And you mentioned the financial part of the three sovereigns. That's the plot there. It's all about land ownership. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yes. I have a question. How were these executions done? Now, I heard I come from Europe on the visitor here that most witches were burned at the stake. I think this happened in Salem and in other places too. Hangings. Hangings. It wasn't a public entertainment, was it public? Did people come and look on them? They were public, yeah. And it was public as a sort of instruction to the community. And similarly to the burning of witches associated with a sermon would often be preached with this as an object lesson. This is the nature of the evil in our midst. This is what we do to protect ourselves as a community. Don't be like her. And disposable of those hanged bodies were, what was it? Typical... We did the burning. Since they didn't burn them, obviously. They didn't. They buried them, yeah. And buried them sort of in marginal places, not in the prominent places in the local church yard. Yeah. With the case of Half-Hanged Mary, what was the community's reaction when she just walked back into the family? Would it be like, oh, you're definitely a witch now? It's not really recorded, and that's what's fascinating is, did these guys clear out? Because they knew now that the witch was in town and they weren't going to be able to conquer her. The documents kind of go quiet after she comes back to town other than she looked for another 14 years. Yeah. She used her five-year ordeal. Yeah. I suppose that would be the analytical way to think of it is you've got this notion of trial by ordeal. This is that famous thing, you know, if you throw a witch in the water, if she floats, she's a witch. If she drowns, she was probably innocent. And in this case, by surviving the hanging, she survives the fallible judgment of the community and demonstrates her innocence. Yeah. Although the documents don't say that, but I think that's the right reading of the community's response. That's my older tradition. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. That was my question. But I also, how does this compare to the witches in Europe at an earlier time? They, I don't know, I've heard that mostly they were the old women who had the herbal secrets. They could actually heal people legitimately, but they were some kind of a threat to the church. And that's why they were burned, or this seems like a very different thing than what happened here in England. Different with some similarities, I think. So the historiography of European witchcraft is really rich and fascinating. And you've got a couple of competing accounts. One is that there's the church authority, which is systematic and hierarchical and traces, you know, everything back to Ronald ultimately. In conflict with local nature wisdom that tends to be in the hands of local women and that is seen as an affront to the hierarchical order of the church and has to be, especially during the acquisition, has to be extirpated as heretical. You also, you have an account. And the name of the woman in the 1920s who publishes a really briefly influential book that takes those local communities of women with natural herbal sorts of knowledge and folk medicine and turns them into a whole sort of competing institution. So it's not just that there's a Nona here and another here, but that you've got a whole continent-wide network that is in fact like a shadow church and the reason why, and is older. So it's a women's priesthood of this natural religion that goes back to before Christianity that has lasted through the 15th centuries of Christianity at that point and for that reason poses a big threat and has to be extirpated by the church. That gets pretty quickly discredited, but it's really popular. How is it similar to what happens in the colonies? I think you've got an anxious and beset hierarchical, male-focused authority that has, from early on, had to withstand challenges to its authority, often from women. So if the Massachusetts Bay colony can be really sort of shaken to its foundations by somebody like Ann Hutchinson and the Antinomian controversy that sort of royals around her, then whatever sort of church authority we have is really fragile and vulnerable and the fragility and vulnerability are both kind of exacerbated by the fact that the threat can be located in women but then containable by the fact that the threat can be located in women because they're easier to manage, because they're marginal, nobody's going to stand up for them. And that's a real similarity, I think, across the Atlantic. Is there an economic component to this? To me, when you keep saying whether you're talking about herbalist women or women who've inherited a large, it seems to me that those women are becoming powerful in their communities either by influence or by actual money and certainly if you're going to a herbalist you're probably renumerating them in some way and they're probably running a little economy of this network of, so they're also powerful, gaining their own power from their own work. Yeah, I think absolutely. They're gaining their power from their own work and there's not like a medical establishment that they're threatening because they're not doctors really and that an autonomous woman able to support herself without a husband, without taking care of a family, that's destabilizing and dangerous. And that she does so through this arcana that we don't understand, that seems to be able to do things that we can't do, that all makes it even more destabilizing. Men ever accused of being witches? Yes. How did the accusations of men accuse in Europe? Not men, but it happens and what usually happens is, I mentioned couples, so the greensmiths or the proctors in Salem, the men usually get dragged in as trailing spouses. And so you have whole family executions, which is in Europe. That doesn't happen anywhere that we've found in the Commons. But there's a great book about 30 years ago called My Road to the Stake that follows a specific I think it's maybe in what's now the no, it's not the Netherlands. It's some German principality. And there's this witchcraft accusation in trial that ends up encompassing a whole family mother father and a couple of children who are tortured in front of this. I think the difference between Boston Salem and the Plymouth is that Bradford and other officials in Plymouth from the very beginning had to deal with the Billington family. So here was this family of drunkards, reprobates, first murderer in the colonies. But they were the ones who survived that firstly, like no other family. Only the good are young. So they had this unsightly element right from the beginning that had a vigor of its own and survived. And they had to manage it. They needed those secular people who had crafts, skills that they could not do without. They also were fortunate in the appearance of a sort of unifying external enemy in the shape of Thomas Morton. So Plymouth both has its internal dissenters that they find ways to manage without killing them. Because they need every living body to continue living. And they have Morton you know actually kind of a hero but he's an unscrupulous trader who wants to make money in this new English canon and he's willing to buy off the natives and he's the one who sets up a maypole and teaches the natives to dance around it and the pilgrims have to go and chop down the maypole and imprison Morton. But that brings them all together because they have him as the external enemy. He's also a defrocked Anglican priest and he represents everything they hate. But Plymouth already has Atherton. Yeah. Plymouth is lucky that there's a lot that keeps them sort of together and internally focused. It's also another 50 years go by before Salem, right? So everything has gotten big and prosperous and the communities are big enough now to turn against each other. What about in Canada Canada communities? I don't know. My expertise ends at the Canadian border. You know it's a good question. I don't know. My suspicion is probably unlikely to have a whole lot of it because those are communities that are really built on trade and their motives for some from the beginning are different from those in the New England parties. And so they don't have this we are saints and chosen people thing to get all anxious and upset about, right? We just want to kill as many beavers as we possibly can. And Wishcraft has nothing to do with it. I think. I have a question about midwives. In Europe they said that many women were midwives because in those days birth was given with the help of a midwife. But then the importance of assuming that all the medical power of the hands of men created another possible reason for declaring a woman which because she was a gifted midwife who also probably knew by her knowledge how to do abortions which was a great sin that probably needed people Carlo Ginsberg links midwifery to the Wishcraft accusations in Europe. One of the accused women in Salem may have done some midwifery in that community. That seems to be about it. It doesn't seem to be the same sort of factor in the colonial accusations that Ginsberg at least argues it is in a lot of the New York Indians. Well, thank you ever so much.