Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2017 Fear Thy Neighbor: Spatial Relations in 17th Century New England Witch-Hunt Trials Sedona Georgescu Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut, sedona.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.edu/theses Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Georgescu, Sedona, "Fear Thy Neighbor: Spatial Relations in 17th Century New England Witch-Hunt Trials". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2017. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.edu/theses/628 Fear Thy Neighbor Spatial Relations in 17th Century New England Witch-Hunt Trials Sedona Georgescu Trinity College History Senior Thesis Advisor: Thomas Wickman Spring, 2017 Table of Contents Acknowledgements.3 An Introduction to Spatial Relations and Witch-Hunt Historiography.4 Chapter I: “Infiltrating Intimacy” Conflicts Across Local Spaces.14 Chapter II: “Pushing the Boundaries” Movement in Colonial Witch-Hunts………….37 Chapter III: “The Witching Hour” The Formal and Informal Records of Witches in New England.67 “Hung in History”.86 2 Acknowledgements Choosing to write a honors thesis was an easy choice for me. Chalk it up to being naive and not quite realizing what a significant undertaking it would be, it seemed like the natural next step as a history major.
However, at the time I did not realize that those who you surround yourself with play an enormous role in the process. I can wholeheartedly say that my thesis process would not have been the same without the support I received from my mentors and peers. First and foremost, I want to thank my three advisors that I have had over the course of my academic career. Steve Hilsabeck who first sparked my love for History, Professor Gary Reger who showed me that I could accomplish anything if I put my heart into it, and lastly Professor Thomas Wickman for giving me the confidence to push past any intellectual barriers that I placed on myself.
I am grateful for having a thesis advisor who trusted me enough to be creative and bold in my work while also provided me guidance and support. My gratitude extends to the entire Trinity College History department. In particular Professor Scott Gac who challenged me to think beyond the texts in front of me and provided a fresh perspective for my work, as well as Professor Sean Cocco for allowing me to present my arguments and think through some of my key terminology. I would also like to thank the professors that serve on the Guided Studies faculty, who gave me a boot camp in college writing and critical thinking.
Each class I have taken at Trinity brought me one step closer in preparing myself for my senior thesis, and without the professors I would not be half the student I am today. I would also like to thank Professor O'Donnell and the entire Writing Center staff for promoting an intellectually curious, thought provoking, and supportive community. Similarly, I would like to thank Elly Worsley for being my sounding board not only through this entire thesis process, but also over the course of the last four years. And of course, I must thank my roommate Julianna Maisano for encouraging me everyday.
Finally I would like to thank my family for giving me the support and the courage to pursue a history major and complete a thesis. This is especially true for my dad and grandfather who listened to my persistent deliberations on my topic and always encouraged me to follow my passions. For my mom. Thank you for a childhood full of hocus pocus.
3 An Introduction to Spatial Relations and Witch-Hunt Historiography On May 25, 1669, Katherine Harrison awaited the court’s final decision. The widow, who was now almost eighty years old, had faced a number of witchcraft accusations over the years. Rumors of her harming cattle, defying social norms, fortune telling, and, in the form of animals, afflicting her Wethersfield neighbors, was used as evidence against her. Was it her husband’s death and subsequent exclusion from society that led to these accusations? Or was she really a “cunning woman,” a dangerous teller of fortunes, whose mystical powers frightened her neighbors? Either way, Harrison had little hope that she would escape the accusations –the evidence seemed stacked against her.
However, the jury returned with an inconclusive verdict. While Goody Harrison was, no doubt, highly suspect in the eyes of her neighbors, she escaped indictment, saving her from imprisonment or execution: The court “remov[ed] her from Wethersfield which that will tend most to her own safety and the contentment of the people who are her neighbors.”1 Harrison’s banishment did little to resolve her neighbor’s suspicion. After her trial, she made her way to Westchester, New York. She was met by uproar, as the rumors of her past traveled with her.
Although New York authorities tended to be more lenient when it came to witchcraft accusations compared to their New England brethren, Harrison’s new neighbors were not accommodating, and essentially drove her out of town. While Katherine Harrison embodies certain traits of a suspected witch, widowed and marginalized, her case was isolated and does not fit into a specific wave of “panic” that a few towns erupted into. The town of Wethersfield had a problem and they relied on their judicial system to root it out. However, the manner in which Wethersfield dealt with Harrison’s case was in no way the universal practice.
The outcomes of 1 “Harrison Verdict,” in Court of Assistants Records (Connecticut State Library). Cited in David D., Witch- Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638-1693, 2nd ed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) 184. 4 witchcraft cases in the Northeast varied by design, but the witnesses’ testimony for witchcraft trials remained eerily consistent. Belief in witchcraft is best to be understood as a grounded set of fears among everyday accusers, rather than a mass hysteria that haunted early colonial settlements.
While some periods of witchcraft belief proved to be more intense than others, through the 17th century the belief remained constant and a perpetual source of tension. The historiography of magic and witches has a long history rooted in both religious and secular authority, as well as amongst the public in Europe and New England. There are few comparable points in history, as witchcraft terrorized both mind and body –it was both a tangible and intangible threat. The fear of witches was genuine.
Witch-hunts were ordinary, as they remained a common part of puritan society.2 Witch- hunts are best understood through relationships, whether that is neighborly, familial, spatial, or environmental. Understanding social tensions across colonial space is imperative when trying to piece together witchcraft trials because it demonstrates the ordinary and everyday concern of witchcraft. While most scholars place Salem as the culmination of the witchcraft epidemic, this thesis works against the teleological understanding of the witch-hunts; rather it will first look at witch-trial testimony as isolated cases and then compare it to others to uncover the dimensionality of hunts. This approach removes Salem as the center of the conversation.
By looking at the cases themselves reveals a greater complexity that addresses the common concerns of the community, rather than an approach that looks at more superficial commonalities in rhetoric. In the same vein, most scholars tend to use the testimonies to fill the narrative, while main arguments are drawn from the colonial elite. While theory of witchcraft, proposed by 2 Colonial New England scholars no longer capitalize this term “puritan” in order to emphasize the difficulty of definition, the fluidity of membership, and the centrality of reformed thinking to English society. 5 ministers such as Increase Mather, is needed to understand the theology of witchcraft, relying on this source material exclusively does not account for the discrepancies between the common beliefs and the learned.
Furthermore, while religion was ubiquitous in colonial understanding of witchcraft, 3 the court cases reveal that witch-hunts were not directly inspired by theological debates. Rather, witch-hunts remained tied to the relationships in everyday life. Hall’s anthology of witch-hunt case trials not only provides a bottom-up context for the elites’ ideas, but the documents themselves allow alternative themes of witch-hunts to come forth. The everyday accuser’s concerns are reflected in these documents.
Much of Hall’s documents come from the Wyllys Papers. Samuel Wyllys (1631-1709) was a Connecticut magistrate and public official who served from 1654 to 1684. The collection, covering the period from 1638 to 1757, is split between the Connecticut State Library and the Brown University Library. While the collection pertains to Indian affairs, colonial wars, civil and criminal cases, the documents centering on the witchcraft trials are of particular interest.
Hall similarly included local town histories and magistrate records. Much of what these testimonies convey centers on either a lack of, or a need for, control. Colonists sought power to influence the situation at hand, which was increasingly necessary as they had just made their way to an unknown land and sought stability. The possibility of witches threatened material and spiritual stability.
A discussion of control brings about a question of 3 In David Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989), it is suggested that puritan conviction spread into the everyday relationships of colonists. Colonial settlers saw God’s prominence was “embedded into the fabric of everyday life.” However, nowhere was this more certain than in the meetinghouse, which served as a spiritual structure. Everyone from, farmers to housewives, left the service with a better understanding of themselves; they continued to read sermons after returning home. As Hall pointed to, they were empowered by their literacy colonists were able to make their own judgments on sermons.
The physical structure of the meetinghouse was threatened after large population increase. In the 1640s, Thomas Hooker noted that the numbers of church member were dwindling and many went unbaptized. The questioning of practices of baptism was tied to the new generation of settlers who also became those members who ventured into other lands. A concept explored in Chapter II of this thesis.
Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England, 1st Harvard University Press paperback ed (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990) 152. 6 authority and its role over society. Some scholars argue that the function of the courts was to impose social control over its residents through witchcraft trials; anyone who threatened authority could be accused as a witch.4 The “difficult” people were deemed witches as a way to root out problems. However, understanding control as something that could be desired by both authoritative persons as well as the masses is imperative for a bottom-up examination of witch- hunts.
Witchcraft not only threatened community as a whole, but also individual institutions, such as the home and agricultural practices. It cannot be assumed that witch-hunts were used as an authoritative means to maintain order, as perception and fear of witchcraft was ingrained into society. Tensions between neighbors existed even without the facilitation of the authority. These tensions arise from interpersonal conflict, usually dealing with land, occupation, animals, and family.
The stresses on these early colonies made relations strained. A relational history provides an alternate understanding of trial proceedings. Colonists were impacted by the world around them, which tended to encompass a larger territory than just their family or even their community. New scholarship, such as Katherine Grandjean’s American Passage (2015) demonstrates both inter and intra colonial communication growth in 17th century New England.
The increasing number of settlers in the colonies only led to swelling tension as well as movement into uncharted lands, which threatened the nucleated community.5 While those accused of witchcraft often exhibited odd behavior outside of the accepted norm, they were not always considered outsiders. Even after they were accused, the judicial 4 Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed; the Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974). 5 While a structured road system was not in place until much later (and most roads were constructed between houses not towns), Grandjean does believe the concept behind a road system, i.