January 30, 2019 • 50 mins
Our interview with Jane Kamensky, professor of American history at Harvard University and author of Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Our guest today is Jane Kamensky, Professor of history at
(00:05):
Harvard University. She's also the director of the slushing Er
Library on the History of Women in America at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. She's a historian of the
Atlantic World and the United States, with a particular interest
in the histories of family, culture and everyday life, you know,
the stuff that makes history feel more real. I had
(00:25):
a chance to sit down with Professor Kaminski this past
summer and we had a wonderful conversation. So, without further delay,
let's get on with the show. This is the Unobscured
Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey. Hi, I'm
(01:12):
Jane Kamensky. I teach history at Harvard University, and I'm
also the director of the Lessinger Library on the History
of Women in the United States. I'm gonna start us
off with a really well, deceptively simple question, but it's
pretty complex. I'm sure what was a witch in um?
Which was somebody who made unexpected things happen? Puritans lived
(01:36):
in a world of portents and wonders and almonds. They're
always watching the sky, They're watching their earth Um there
you know, Uh, God speaks to them. And I think
a which was somebody who made almonds and portents and
signs happen in ways that um seemed to reside in
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a appropriately in a human form, which is in purit.
New England were not thought to wear black pointy hats,
although they sometimes did ride around on brooms. Um. And
they acted in a whole manner of inappropriate ways or
were present at times when inexplicable things happened. Um. Small
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harms you know, milk curdling sour side or going sour. Um.
Big harms. Uh you know, somebody saying, oh, what a
pretty child that is, and the child soon sickens and dies. Um.
Women who spoke out of turn, uh you know who
whose tongues went on like fishwives in ways that um
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really seemed to sort of stick out of the fabric
of conversation at the time. Um. People who said things
that later seemed to be ominous. Um. It's a world
in which, you know, science is quite primitive, and a
great deal of what unfolds in any given season is inexplicable. Right.
(03:09):
Crops fail, animals die, um, And sometimes in the search
for supernatural explanations UM, which included God and the devil Um,
which is as the handmaidens of the devil um were
were faulted. It's hard to see looking backwards whether there
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were individuals who cultivated that reputation UM, who had sort
of family businesses in curative arts that flirted with the
edge of of the supernatural. You know, there there are
some instances in Salem where UM women are found with
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poppets that seemed to be a little little cloth dolls
that seemed to be used in UM in some kind
of ritual. One thing that's quite different in UH in
the early New England witchcraft cases than in a lot
of more ancient witchcraft cases is that Puritans are very
concerned with the idea that some which is consort with
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the devil um. You know, there's a there's a black
mass that surfaces in accounts of Salem that's not typical
in run of the mill witchcraft cases UM, where it's
where it's really more about livestock or about what we
would now think of as a nightmare. I woke up
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with a sensation of somebody pressing on my chest, and
I thought of my neighbor, and it must have been
her um bewitching me um so, a whole range of
unexpected happenings that didn't have an easy narrative cause that
could fasten on somebody who, for whatever reason um stuck
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out in a fabric of society that was supposed to
be smooth, very which brings us to the idea of gender,
because when you talk about smooth society, there's orders and rules.
There's a quote from George Webb who said the tongue
is a witch. What did he reveal about women's voices,
(05:18):
how they were understood in in the seventeenth century society
when he says that the tongue as a witch? Like,
what does that mean? Um? So? George Webb is an
Anglican cleric uh and um. He's one of a host
of people at that time, Reformed Protestants of one kind
or another um writing about the power of speech, um
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and uh, and often about the power of women's speech
in particular. This is what my first book, Governing the
Tongue was about. Um. Puritans are famously people of the
word uh. They are, you know, devotees of the Bible
and vernacular language. They take utterances very very seriously. They're
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over a hundred kinds of speech crime policing the boundaries
of proper speech. In Puritan New England, everything from a
child cursing a parent was technically a capital crime because
it was a violation of the Fifth Commandment UM. Speaking
against authority in various ways slander, defamation, UM, scolding, railing,
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and UH, and a significant number of speech in fractions UM.
Ways of speaking out of turn hung on women. In particular,
the idea of of the scold as a female figure
UM the railer as a female figure UM was was
old in England and was highly salient in early New England.
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So UM when I was when I was doing my
research on speech in New England society, UM, I focused
on cases not just in Salem, but in the long
run of New England witchcraft from the sixteen parties forward,
where UM some of what neighbors said about people accused
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of witchcraft was UM ways in which they had spoken
out of turn. UM. Women who were women who were
saying things that they shouldn't have or in places they
shouldn't have, in tones that they shouldn't have. UM. A
woman's role in Puritan society was a vitally important role UM.
But it was a vitally important role in a in
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a marital partner, in a marital partnership, um as a
help meet. UM. You know a uh, it's what what
would now in evangelical rhetoric be called a complimentarian philosophy. UM.
Uh you know, the sort of uh yen to the
husband's yang. Women who weren't married were anomalous. UM. You know,
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there's a there's a significant number of women accused in
Salem who are either um postmarried or unmarried in uh
in some way, so helpmate who was a crucial partner
in a marriage and in a household, but also the
junior partner, the non speaking partner, the partner who didn't
serve on juries or vote. Um. Because male house headship
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was thought to cover everybody in the house um, and
that interest was assumed to be indivisible. Um. There are
definitely suspects in Salem who rise to community notoriety because
the husband and wife are fractious against each other. UM.
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So uh there were I guess the channel for the
virtuous woman um was a pretty narrow channel. UM. At
the same time, and this is something other scholars have
dealt with as well. UM. Women had enormous generative power
in society. Right that if you're if or a uh,
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if you're a society that's unraveling mysteries, the mystery of
birth is is profound right um, and is the the
sort of root stock of society. UM. So one thing
that which is are often accused of is processes that
UM that interrupt generation in one way or another UM,
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things that are supposed to come to fruition that misfire UM.
Another scholar, Carol Carlson out at University of Michigan, found
UM that a significant number of suspects in New England
witchcraft cases were women who had unusually direct lines to
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property holding, either because they didn't have living husbands, or
they didn't have sons, or they didn't have brothers. Some
unusually direct relationship to property in Land. UM. John de
Moss and his great work enter Attaining Satan tracked the
number of female witchcraft sub suspects who were post menopausal,
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who were through their childbearing years, so who had completed
their great function in Puritan society UM, but nevertheless persisted
in ways that were UM uncomfortable or could get uncomfortable
for UM for their fellow townsfolk. About four out of
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five witchcraft suspects in New England was female, so way
outscale for the proportion of the population. And when we
look at the percentage tried and the percentage executed, um,
the predominance holds. I'm thinking of the story of Mary
Webster and Hadley in the I think the sixteen eighties.
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She was accused of witchcraft, taken to Boston. It was
a quit and brought back. But you know, the complaints
were what you'd expect. She was, she was cranky, she
spoke out for herself, she wasn't religious. Um. And And
there's a one of the themes that's popped up in
all of the interviews we've been doing is that there's
this what seems to be the tight normal focus on suspects.
At the start, you know, the the typical other Sarah Good,
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Sarah Osburne um and obviously a slave Titsuba Um. You know,
Sarah Good was as you said, she was a mumbler.
She was she would she would mutter things under her breath,
corn cob pipe exactly right. She didn't fit those norms,
and that bothered people. But but then that circle starts
to get wider, and you you start to get people
like Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, And do you have
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your own view on why that circle started to move
outside of the normal others and move on to people
you wouldn't expect. I mean some of these were covenant
members of the church, um, and it starts to spread
in a way that you wouldn't expect. Does that seem
to still follow these rules of women should be behaving
one way but now they're not? Or I you know,
I think one of the reasons we keep going back
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and back and back to Salem um which um, I
don't have the numbers at the tips of my fingers,
but I think it's it's under ten percent of the
people who are accused of witchcraft in the in the
seventeenth century in New England. Right, it's a it's a
spasmodic incident. It's not the only uh, it's not the
only spasm there's uh, there's one in hard for their
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other you know, there are other clusters. But the reason
we keep going back and back and back to Salem
is because of the ways that it jumps the tracks. Um,
it goes outside of the normal abnormal witchcraft suspects. UM.
There are a higher proportion of men suspected and UH
and tried and even executed in Salem than there are
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elsewhere at other times in the colonies. And it goes
up and up and up the social spectrum, touching eventually
even the governor's wife herself. UM. And that's one of
the reasons that people have looked so intensively at the
structure of that community. UM. The instability in church headship
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that we see both in Salem Town and Salem Village,
where that covenant community is fervent in the way that
many New England towns are, but is also repeatedly rocked
by ministers coming and going. UM. Some of the military
upheaval and economic upheaval that we see in the sixteen eighties,
the political upheaval UM around Massachusetts's response to UH England's
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overreaching the dominion of New England that results in the
revocation of the first Charter. So UM, it's an it's
a a volatile place at an unstable moment um. We
know from Marybeth Norton's work that there are also particular
UH familial connections between the traumas that are inflicted by
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the Indian Wars, the the sort of backcountry frontiers of
Britain's Imperial Wars. UM in the northeast. It's it's overdetermined
the reasons why, um, that community would be at risk
in various ways. UM. And yet still uh, there's enough,
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there's enough mystery in it, right, you could do a
control Well what are all the what are all the
places that have similar instability? And um? And why does
you know? Why aren't you know why isn't there a
massive witch hunt in New Haven at the same time?
Or um? Uh, it's certainly not that people in Salem
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are less learned than they are other places. Um. Their
leadership is um is lacking right that that they have
hindsight is always um. You know, looking back, if you
had had a minister unlike Samuel Paris who had chosen
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to preach on peace and love and quiet the flames
rather than to um poor, it wouldn't have been gasoline
for them. But you know, pine tar on a on
a smoldering set of embers. Um you could have had
you could have had a different outcome. You can think
of people who could have intervened all along the way
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to say, but wait, isn't this God telling us to
love one another or UM. You know, isn't this a
call for um? The greatest of these is love or charity? UM?
Should we look to this scripture instead of that scripture
to guide us? UM. I don't think even Samuel Paris
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thought from week to week. Oh, if I do this
this week, in two weeks, it's really gonna get going. UM.
It's a It's an interesting instance of how UM, without
I think, without any concerted malign action, UM, good people
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failing to um to to step up can result in
a kind of conflagration UM. A conflagration only related to
its time and place. Right, It's it's hundreds of people,
not thousands of people who are drawn into its web.
Although UM, that conflagration is large enough and is late
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enough in the history the long history of European and
Anglophone witchcraft that it sticks out almost immediately right that
by three UM, you have people knowing that Salem is
a is a black eye UM. For for the whole
New World experiment, that New England is going to be
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called New witch Land is one of the first things
that's UM that's said ex post facto about it, and
UM people continuing to write about it in the you know,
in the seventeen forties, in the era of the American Revolution.
It very quickly enters the domain of metaphor. Why was
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why was the slave woman Titsuba's testimony so powerful to
this community? I would have, I mean, my my, looking back,
you know, twenty one century attitude is was she She
seems to be so far of an outsider that she
shouldn't have voiced at all, and yet here she is,
and it seems to matter so much. Why do you
think that was? I think, um, I will answer your question,
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particularly about Tichiba. I think what you've just said hangs
over the whole of Salem in general, right, like, why
are the most powerful men in the West tern hemisphere
listening to these girls in their teen years, in their
early twenties. There's a whole flipping of whose word counts
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and who's doesn't. I think Tichubus speech, at least as
we have it come down to us, you know, through
a court clerk's hand, whose um probably uh to some
degree over exoticizing her dialogue, her dialect um. It's just
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incredibly vivid, right, you know that she uh, she decides um.
You know, possibly tactically in some way. Oh you want
a witch. You know, here's you. You've told me to
sing like a canary. I Am going to sing in
the Song of the Tropics. It's gonna have it had
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just if you just look through Tichubus speech for the
color um. You know, the the birds, the tawny man,
the uh. It's a scholars have studied UM. Here seems
to be some fusion of what she must have picked
up of um New England lore, which in Paris's household
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she would have had abundant access to. UM. She must
be hearing him walk around practicing his preaching even before
he's doing it UM, and what she's brought with her,
we think from Barbados. UM. So you know, you could
have called central casting for somebody to make the riveting
intervention in a drama and not have conjured up somebody
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who could do so with more alan than she winds
up doing UM. At other points in New England jurisprudence,
I think it would have been quickly relegated to the
side like just just uh, it doesn't follow, it doesn't
follow conventions, right, um. Uh, there's a lot of leading
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the witness, um is there this. Yes, there's that, and
let me give you a little more. Um. She plays
her role very well. And UM, it's it's interesting, I
think unknowable ultimately. UM. One of the things that happens
in Salem is the conventions of witchcraft trials and jurisprudence
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flip to some degree. So UM, in sixteen sixty in Boston,
if you had made a heartfelt confession of your involvement,
uh in witchcraft, that would have perhaps yielded you absolution
in the world beyond. But what it would have yielded
you in this world is death. UM. In Salem, confession
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liberates people from the news. And UM, she can't know
that yet when she's testifying, she's testifying too early. UM.
You know, maybe that what she says is so narratively
compelling that she begins to set that pattern in motion. UM.
But that's one of the many things that goes topsy
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turvy in Salem. We're listening to people were not supposed
to listen to. Um, And kinds of utterances that would
get you killed ten years before. UM make you a
sort of star of the confessional circuit in well, and
you mentioned the girls, the you know, the afflicted accusers
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who are there at the front of the meeting house
and they're you know, going into convulsions, and and that
it's odd that they too are being listened to, you know,
as opposed to the grown adults in the room. Right.
Is there a nuance to that or is is it
just more of the same. It's just more of the
conventions being flipped on its head, you know. I think
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that is to me the great mystery of the Salem
proceedings is how in a world that devalues women's utterances
and that tends to keep um, maybe especially young women
within their channels. Uh, this group of UM adolescent that's
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anachronistic term, but UM, women in their teens and early twenties,
UM come to be this this sort of star witness
coterie UM is completely ineffable. UM. I think there is
pretty convincing evidence that they are to a certain extent,
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coordinating with each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. UM.
This is what the scholar Bernard Rosenthal believes that UM. Uh,
you know, you can't A pin doesn't come out of nowhere, right, UM,
it's a there's a kind of stagecraft to what they're doing.
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UM that in the normal run of Puritan punishment and
social sanction, UH should land them in the stocks UH
in either private or public shaming right UM, either chastening
in their families or by their congregations UM, or punishment
for scolding and raillery and speaking against their betters, right
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the speaking out of fifth commandment order the younger against
the older, UM, women against men, women against ministers in
some cases UM with George Burrows. So how that happens?
You know, it seems like a moment where UM, the
normal sources of authority holds so poorly, and the need
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for answers to questions that seem profound UM feels so
urgent that UM people begin listening. Two unexpectedness is who
say they have answers. It's so out of it's so
out of the ordinary. When you have magistrates, you know,
the judicial rulers who are also the business rulers, and
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they're from families that have been cultural and social patriarchs.
But they're the leader in every aspect of life. And
yet they're deferring to these children in a sense, you know,
tell me, tell me the truth, right, I mean, they
wouldn't have seen themselves as deferring right, they would have
seen themselves as using these female youths as the conduit
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to UM, you know, scouring into the marrow of God's justice. UM.
But if you look even a handful of years before UM,
there's a possession case in Massachusetts, the case of Elizabeth Knapp,
which John de Moss writes about at length. She's a
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young female servant in a minister's house, and UM undergoes
many of the same kinds of UM traumatic manifest manifestations
that the afflicted accusers do in Salem, including UM, you know,
saying vile things to the to the minister, maybe even
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speaking in a voice that sounds like UM, a voice
not her own. And you know, the the seal is
put on the box really fast. You know she is.
She's possessed, UM, not afflicted, not a witch herself. And UH,
we're gonna we're gonna get her cured, and nobody's gonna
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listen to her. For Heaven's sake, you know, nobody is
going to listen to her. We're going to get her
the help that she needs, UM, which in our time
would be some kind of psychiatric intervention, and in their
time is a religious one. UM. That's that's a moment
and a happening that extremely close in both time and place. Right,
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it's not I think it's not a full ten years before.
I think it's the sixteen seventies. I think it's actually
sixteen seventy two. It's Willard, right, we're talking. I think
it's twenty years before. But Willard has his own connections
to Salem as well. Yeah, but Willard is a skeptic.
I mean Willard is a thorough going skeptic. UM. I
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think Willard is one of the people who represent a
kind of um secularizing is too strong, but who represent
a kind of cosmopolitan urbanity UM that is nibbling at
the edges of Salem. I I did a piece of
work at one point that I never published, UM about
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the image of the Devil's Book in the Salem, which trials,
you know, what does it look like? Oh, it's it's
you know, it's small and they hide and it's red.
It's not read. Um and looking at the book trades
in New England at the time where um, you know,
this is a moment in the late sixteen eighties and
early sixteen nineties where small secular print materials, um, you know, histories, geographies, satires,
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joke books, playing cards, UM are coming into the bookstores
in the ports cities, and UM are undermining the kind
of unitary authority that ministers who had less of the
urbanity that Willard uh happened to have UM had experienced before.
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UM at the same time increasing Cotton Mather, UM, who
were fundamental to Salem unfolding the way it did. We're
also part of that urban world. You know. Cotton Mather
was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UM. You
know was it was a fancied himself, a scientist of
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international connection. UM. So it's not education or intellect that
explains where people came down and and how because Cotton
Mather at the same time would publish works collecting supernatural
occurrences and treat them in that sort of scientific and
(28:26):
historian minded view of well, here's this thing that happened.
Let's let's not do that, right. Well, I mean this
is a world in which UM, science and religion and
UM ghost stories all are are very much of a piece. UM.
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I've been reading in the last week or so the
first volume of Deborah Harkness is All Souls Trilogy, which
is called a discovery of which is Um. I started
reading it, you know, I thought, I had thought, these
are books about which is in vampires? This is not
something I'm going to read. And I did a panel
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with her a couple of weeks ago. She's an early
modern historian of science, and she said that the conceit
of the books was what if the world actually works
the way that people thought it did in the fifteen
and six and much of the seventeenth century. And I thought,
that's a great conceit. Um. You know, they had they
had a particular cosmology, parts of which we believe we
(29:30):
have proved wrong. Um, we also have a cosmology right
that there are certainly things in our conceptions of science
are totalizing conceptions of science that people in two hundred
or three hundred years will wonder, how on earth did
they believe that? How did they think? You know, this
(29:51):
is something that we're already starting to question. How do
they think that bombarding the body with poison was going
to cure cancer? Right? I mean I one of the
things that we can take from a Salem into the
present day are what are the things that we believe
ardently and with the backing of all of our um
(30:13):
scripture and science and uh and learning that are just
going to be revealed as wrong. So yes, science and
magic and almonds and portents and a message in every
eclipse would have been true for mother, you know, who
(30:33):
lives on the edge of the world of Newton. Absolutely
side note. What I love about Elizabeth knapp story is
that she moves on and she marries a man named
Samuel Scripture. Well, how can I redeem my name as
best as I can? His last name is Scripture. I
think he was the slave next door. In your book
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Governing the Tongue, you argued that which hunting was in
part of policing of speech. Well, young me said that
I don't know whether old me would say that, so,
um was witch hunting in part of policing of speech?
I mean I think that, um, the ways that social
(31:16):
norms are policed is that there are a set of
consequences when um, when people overstep or um or misspeak
and um. The you know, most witch hunting is informal, right, UM,
so saying to a neighbor UM or complaining in church
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or taking to court an accusation that um that somebody
has done something to make you very uncomfortable, and that's
something gets the name of witchcraft. UM is a way
of enforcing norms. I want to shift over to the courtroom,
the meeting house at least this. You have this unique
thing happening in the first examination with Sarah Good and
(31:58):
Sarah Osborne. How they're husbands are brought in and give
testimony against them, um. And it might be coerced out
of them, they might be freely giving it. I'm not sure.
But how would their testimony against their wives have have
matched up with I guess expectations for the Puritan husband,
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you know, the type of role that they're supposed to have,
you know, with this kind of testimony against a spouse
have been unusual in a courtroom. UM. I think that
the goal of puritan a goal of parent religion, and
a goal of jurisprudence in a place like Massachusetts where
it's an inquisitorial system not an advocacy system. UM. So
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the goal of a proceeding is to get to the truth,
not to defend one side against the other. UM. I
think those are instances where the charges at hand and
the testimony of neighbors had made people questioned the behavior
of those they lived with intimately, and it would have
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been expected in the community that they would come forward
with their doubts. Um. You know there's UM, there's a
unity of husband and wife as a UM, as a
political person, as an economic person. UM. But I think, UM,
you know, in spiritual manners like that, if there UM,
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if there is a need to delve into error, UM,
you know they I think they don't realize at that
moment that they're on the leading edge of a mortal
battle that's gonna encompass scores and then hundreds of people
and and bring all the towns around it. Um. You
would have joined the court in uh, trying to get
(33:51):
to the bottom of a search for error. UM. In
a perfect world, I mean in a you know, UM,
I haven't done the research to be able to say
husbands in x percentage of cases would demure when asked
about about their wives in discretion. But UM, in theory,
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that's the way jurisprudence in an inquisitorial system should work.
And and when brought before magistrates or whether we're talking
you know, the meeting house kind of village trial, or
we go to oy or in termin or where things
get very serious, is there a difference in gender with
how people are represented. Just thinking about about the dynamics
(34:36):
of gender. When a suspect or accused is brought into
the courtroom, is it different for a man or a woman. Well,
I think, Um, the situations in a place like seventeenth
century Massachusetts where a woman would have been called upon
to speak publicly and officially for herself are are extremely few. Um.
(35:01):
Uh you know, there's a pretty lively debate in Puritan
meeting houses about whether women should narrate their own conversions.
Um you know when they're when they're uh you know,
when they're describing how they experienced in dwelling grace to
become full members of the congregation. And um some uh
(35:22):
as I recall dimly when I did this work on
seventeenth century New England. Um, some ministers preferred to take
those narratives in longhand um or in chambers in some
way to having a woman come in and profess openly. Um,
you know, famously in New England and Hutchinson in sixteen
(35:44):
thirty six, not all that long ago, right from sixto
uh is banished from the colony for um preaching to
mix audiences. Um. You know, women, women in uh can
enticles that did Bible study, woman on woman, UM, women
(36:05):
in birthing chambers, women in household working groups would have had,
you know, very free speech in front of each other.
But the number of times that you would call a
female speaker to depose herself in any official proceeding would
be UM would be you know, pretty rare. A defendant
(36:27):
in a court trial, UM, a witness sometimes in a
court trial, a jury person, never a preacher, never UM,
a political candidate or giver of a political opinion, never UM.
A poet on occasion. Right, Ann Bradstreet has published her
poetry in England and it has come back and been
(36:50):
republished in New England by the same time that Salem
breaks out and Um speaks in those poems. Got those
beautiful poems mostly on the combination of domestic and spiritual matters,
but takes up even in poetry the question of um
(37:11):
am I obnoxious to each carping tongue who says um,
a woman's hand better needle than a pen fits UM.
So this this, you know, this question of speaking out loud,
writing out loud, beyond the domestic context, it would have
been an extraordinary scene. Well, you know, it's interesting. We were, um,
(37:31):
we were at the Pvody Institute library and Damer's talking
to Richard Trusk and he has a number of things
in the vault, one of which is the he has
the Minister's notebook, which you can watch things such as
the handwriting of Samuel Parris Degrade over eight months, you know,
from Neaton Clean to he's just trying to get everything
on the page. But there's the church notebook as well.
(37:54):
And evidently after Reverend Green came in and took over
for forever in paris Um and Putnam, one of the accusers,
one of the afflicted accusers, wanted to become a member
in the church and had to confess, you know, and
apologize because so many people in that congregation been affected
by her words. And so there's this large book that
(38:16):
we can still open up. And he opened up the
page right to us, and and her confession has been
written out by Reverend Green, not by her, it's but
it's been it's been recorded, Longhand like you said, and
then there's her signature, that's hers, it's in a different hand.
So he just hands her the pen and she she
signs her name. Well, she probably couldn't have written anything
(38:38):
of that degree of elaboration, right, So UM, reading and
writing are separately taught skills at the time, UM and uh.
Women in in Puritan New England have an unusually high
level of reading literacy UM because it's thought to be
so important for everybody to be able to read the
(38:59):
Bible and for mothers to be able to read the
Bible to their children. UM. But they have a pretty
low level of what's called sign literacy. UM. So she
can sign her name. She has some rudimentary UM written literacy,
but probably not the fluency to write an entire document.
I guess one of the things that I find fascinating
(39:19):
about that um uh post hoc confession around Salem. I mean,
uh so people remember, right how what a what a
terrible uh scar on the community it's been in her
role in it. UM. But she's kind of able to
sew it up and resume a normal life, if I
(39:39):
recall correctly, she goes on to Mary's. UM. You know,
you would think that you would have um a sort
of lifelong staying on your reputation and on the informal
um economy of the marriage market. UM. You know, social
life ability to speak kindly to your neighbor and vice versa.
(40:05):
Um and um, you know, I think some of them
remain unmarried, but not in a not in an extreme proportion. Um.
So the ability and and this is Puritanism as it's
supposed to work, to write, the ability to make a
heartfelt repentance and um and go on in forgiveness no
(40:27):
matter how big the no matter how big the mess
up was. We tind to look back at Salem and
kind of snicker at them for their obsession over witchcraft
and things like that. But Monty Python, yeah right, yeah, Um,
but how different are we today? Well, I mean we're, um,
(40:50):
we're at a moment where I think we're looking for
others under every rock, right. Um, We're we're acutely sensitive
to um uh to threats from the outside to American civilization,
whatever that is. Um. I think we're uh, we're an
extremely tribal moment in American politics and public life. Um uh.
(41:17):
I'm you know, I think we're at a moment where
it's pretty easy to see how the wheels come off
the bus of society, right um, and to begin wondering
about questions like how does the community heal after a
period of UM mutual recrimination, profound upheaval UH shifts in
(41:42):
the dynamics of power that seem unpredictable and anomalous in
the UH. In the span of history that you can
look at closely with the tools that you have to
look UM, you know what will our UM confessions and
uh UM reconciliation look like. UM. I think one of
the things that makes Salem so perennially interesting UM that
(42:05):
brought hundreds of thousands of people to UM, the sort
of makeshift UM memorial that was created for the three
anniversary in UM. I hope one of the things that
brings them is a humility around how close to the
surface such moments of spasmodic intolerance are. It's easy to
(42:29):
feel smug, right, you know, how do I know she
was a witch? She turned me into a new UM?
I got beta right, UM. It's it's easy to um
UH to put them in high hats and UM shoes
with buckles and and put it in the back then. UM.
I think one of the reasons that we come back
and back and back to it after three centuries is
(42:52):
because UM the idea of of such of the danger
of society tearing its helpful part um being so close
to the surface. Um is it's a perennial absolutely. If
there's one thing that you hope people can walk away from. UM.
Sort of the takeaway, you know, as as you learn
(43:14):
about the whole experience, what is there a lesson every Yeah?
I mean I the the um. The lesson that I
think a lot of popular history misses and that calls
for humility and empathy in all of us, is that
many of the accusers, especially as um uh, many of
(43:35):
the accused, that many of the accusers, as the conflict
ripples from beyond Salem Village eventually to bring in the
great minds of of Boston and New England. Um. These
are the best minds of their generation, right. Um. These
are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists. Um. Uh,
(44:00):
the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and
ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically
in their universe. Um. They cannot be laughed off. Um.
You know they are the smartest, uh, most privileged people
(44:24):
of their times. Confronted with uh, something that is awful
to them, and they act in ways that come to
seem even within a couple of years. Um, almost miraculously,
terribly Um. And yet they do it with the best
of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If that doesn't
(44:45):
encourage a kind of radical humility um. And uh second
guessing and um uh you know, checking in with each
other about who's doing what to win who why? Um,
I don't know what does. So that's that's the thing
I think is easiest to miss. Hey, folks, it's Aaron here.
(45:13):
I hope that today's interview helped deepen your understanding of
everything involved in the Salem witch trials. But we're not
done yet. We've got more interviews to share with you,
so stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear
a preview of next week's interview. I'm Stacy Chiff. I'm
(45:34):
the author of The Witches, um in narrative history of
what Happened at Salem, to which I came because I
was surprised by how little most of us really know
about what happened in Um Salem, which trials seemed like
a shorthand, but none of us really understands to what
it is a shorthand. UM. I had written a book
about Cleopatra before this and it was the same kind
of dynamic of just a name that a name brand,
(45:55):
something that everyone recognizes without really having any grasp of
the actual history. Well, when you talk about the misunderstanding,
I think the place to start here is almost the
most obvious question, what was a witch in Salem? And
you're right, that's the question over which we stumble because
our definition, the twenty one century definition of a which
is not the seventeenth century definition of a witch. So
(46:17):
so which at the time witchcraft is a Biblical construct
and which at the time has a concrete reality because
she's mentioned in he or she has mentioned in the Bible,
and which is understood to be any figure male or female,
but primarily female, who is in league with the devil,
and who works his or her magic by means of
little imps or a menagerie of little animals who can
do his or her bidding. Um. And that was something
(46:39):
that was imported to the colonies from England. It was
an extremely rampant It was extremely common concept in in
the Old World and actually throughout the Old World, although
by the idea of witchcraft has pretty much fallen out.
Um in Europe, the colonies are in a little bit
of a time work of their own, and they haven't
quite got the message that this this the witchcraft concept
(47:02):
is a little antiquated by now, Um, but you see
it throughout the colonial record there, which is really from
the very beginning of New England. And the only difference
with two is that um is the prosecution, is that
you get this um feverish set of accusations and you
get a real onless prosecution. In earlier cases, UM, there
had been tremendous leniency. Often someone who brought in a
(47:24):
charge of witchcraft was accused of lying and was sent
home with a whipping. Um. Things were not necessarily taken seriously.
In obviously the opposite happens. Going back to these differences
in our perception, there's how we imagine it to be
and there's the reality of it. How do some of
the common symbols of witchcraft that we have today, like
flying on a broomstick or black cats, connect with the
(47:44):
sale which trials or do they? One of the one
of the most interesting to meet pieces of this is
how the flight gets into um, the entire panic, the
entire delusion in there had not been um, there had
not been flying, which is in New England for um,
and it would see and they were not flying, which
is an English witchcraft either. So this is really an
(48:06):
import from the continent. And it would seem that we
get that idea UM from a narrative that cotton Mouth,
by one of the most influential ministers at the time,
includes in an earlier text of his, and he writes
about a Swedish witchcraft epidemic in which a little girl
UM is on her way to a satanic meeting to
two young children in fact set off this witchcraft crisis,
(48:27):
and a little girl falls off her broomstick. He writes
about all these wonderful details which we will then see
transpost to Massachusetts. But he writes about things that had
never before happened in New England, a satanic meeting UM
in a meadow at which people signed satanic pacts into
which they fly on sticks. Um. And that is really
there were French flight French flying, which is before six
nine two there had never really been English flying witches.
(48:48):
So that's pretty pretty much seems to be where that
aspect of it comes from. Black hats. I spent a
lot of time I live with a black cat, so
I spent a lot of time on black hats, and
they seem to have been the devil since in Quddy.
They've we've had a bad wrap all along. And if
you look at the Salem testimony, the court testimony, you
see a tremendous number of cats. They're translucent cats, they're
(49:09):
gleaming cats, they're black cats, they're red cats. They're all
over the place. And it does it does seem to
be it's a seductive creature. It's a female seeming creature
in many many people's minds, and a black cat will
detach itself from the darkness without any warning, and it's
a cat is unpredictable. So there's that sense that you
can caress a cat and be rewarded with scratches, and
(49:29):
all of those things seemed to add up to something
that people are very uncertain about and often taken aback by.
So there are many number of theories as to how
black cats get get wrapped up in the witchcraft, but yes,
that is a constant from day one. This episode of
(49:50):
Unobscured was executive produced by me Matt Rederick and Alex Williams,
with music by Chad Lawson and audio engineering by Alex Williams.
The Unobscure website has everything you need to get the
most out of the podcast. There's a resource library of maps, charts,
and links to Salem document archives online, as well as
(50:10):
a suggested reading list and a page with all of
our historian biographies. And as always, thanks for supporting this show.
If you love it, head over to Apple podcasts dot
com slash Unobscured and leave a written review and a
star rating. It makes a huge difference for the show's growth,
and as always, thanks for listening.
Our guest today is Jane Kamensky, Professor of history at
(00:05):
Harvard University. She's also the director of the slushing Er
Library on the History of Women in America at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. She's a historian of the
Atlantic World and the United States, with a particular interest
in the histories of family, culture and everyday life, you know,
the stuff that makes history feel more real. I had
(00:25):
a chance to sit down with Professor Kaminski this past
summer and we had a wonderful conversation. So, without further delay,
let's get on with the show. This is the Unobscured
Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey. Hi, I'm
(01:12):
Jane Kamensky. I teach history at Harvard University, and I'm
also the director of the Lessinger Library on the History
of Women in the United States. I'm gonna start us
off with a really well, deceptively simple question, but it's
pretty complex. I'm sure what was a witch in um?
Which was somebody who made unexpected things happen? Puritans lived
(01:36):
in a world of portents and wonders and almonds. They're
always watching the sky, They're watching their earth Um there
you know, Uh, God speaks to them. And I think
a which was somebody who made almonds and portents and
signs happen in ways that um seemed to reside in
(01:59):
a appropriately in a human form, which is in purit.
New England were not thought to wear black pointy hats,
although they sometimes did ride around on brooms. Um. And
they acted in a whole manner of inappropriate ways or
were present at times when inexplicable things happened. Um. Small
(02:23):
harms you know, milk curdling sour side or going sour. Um.
Big harms. Uh you know, somebody saying, oh, what a
pretty child that is, and the child soon sickens and dies. Um.
Women who spoke out of turn, uh you know who
whose tongues went on like fishwives in ways that um
(02:45):
really seemed to sort of stick out of the fabric
of conversation at the time. Um. People who said things
that later seemed to be ominous. Um. It's a world
in which, you know, science is quite primitive, and a
great deal of what unfolds in any given season is inexplicable. Right.
(03:09):
Crops fail, animals die, um, And sometimes in the search
for supernatural explanations UM, which included God and the devil Um,
which is as the handmaidens of the devil um were
were faulted. It's hard to see looking backwards whether there
(03:31):
were individuals who cultivated that reputation UM, who had sort
of family businesses in curative arts that flirted with the
edge of of the supernatural. You know, there there are
some instances in Salem where UM women are found with
(03:53):
poppets that seemed to be a little little cloth dolls
that seemed to be used in UM in some kind
of ritual. One thing that's quite different in UH in
the early New England witchcraft cases than in a lot
of more ancient witchcraft cases is that Puritans are very
concerned with the idea that some which is consort with
(04:16):
the devil um. You know, there's a there's a black
mass that surfaces in accounts of Salem that's not typical
in run of the mill witchcraft cases UM, where it's
where it's really more about livestock or about what we
would now think of as a nightmare. I woke up
(04:37):
with a sensation of somebody pressing on my chest, and
I thought of my neighbor, and it must have been
her um bewitching me um so, a whole range of
unexpected happenings that didn't have an easy narrative cause that
could fasten on somebody who, for whatever reason um stuck
(04:58):
out in a fabric of society that was supposed to
be smooth, very which brings us to the idea of gender,
because when you talk about smooth society, there's orders and rules.
There's a quote from George Webb who said the tongue
is a witch. What did he reveal about women's voices,
(05:18):
how they were understood in in the seventeenth century society
when he says that the tongue as a witch? Like,
what does that mean? Um? So? George Webb is an
Anglican cleric uh and um. He's one of a host
of people at that time, Reformed Protestants of one kind
or another um writing about the power of speech, um
(05:40):
and uh, and often about the power of women's speech
in particular. This is what my first book, Governing the
Tongue was about. Um. Puritans are famously people of the
word uh. They are, you know, devotees of the Bible
and vernacular language. They take utterances very very seriously. They're
(06:01):
over a hundred kinds of speech crime policing the boundaries
of proper speech. In Puritan New England, everything from a
child cursing a parent was technically a capital crime because
it was a violation of the Fifth Commandment UM. Speaking
against authority in various ways slander, defamation, UM, scolding, railing,
(06:21):
and UH, and a significant number of speech in fractions UM.
Ways of speaking out of turn hung on women. In particular,
the idea of of the scold as a female figure
UM the railer as a female figure UM was was
old in England and was highly salient in early New England.
(06:46):
So UM when I was when I was doing my
research on speech in New England society, UM, I focused
on cases not just in Salem, but in the long
run of New England witchcraft from the sixteen parties forward,
where UM some of what neighbors said about people accused
(07:06):
of witchcraft was UM ways in which they had spoken
out of turn. UM. Women who were women who were
saying things that they shouldn't have or in places they
shouldn't have, in tones that they shouldn't have. UM. A
woman's role in Puritan society was a vitally important role UM.
But it was a vitally important role in a in
(07:28):
a marital partner, in a marital partnership, um as a
help meet. UM. You know a uh, it's what what
would now in evangelical rhetoric be called a complimentarian philosophy. UM.
Uh you know, the sort of uh yen to the
husband's yang. Women who weren't married were anomalous. UM. You know,
(07:53):
there's a there's a significant number of women accused in
Salem who are either um postmarried or unmarried in uh
in some way, so helpmate who was a crucial partner
in a marriage and in a household, but also the
junior partner, the non speaking partner, the partner who didn't
serve on juries or vote. Um. Because male house headship
(08:18):
was thought to cover everybody in the house um, and
that interest was assumed to be indivisible. Um. There are
definitely suspects in Salem who rise to community notoriety because
the husband and wife are fractious against each other. UM.
(08:39):
So uh there were I guess the channel for the
virtuous woman um was a pretty narrow channel. UM. At
the same time, and this is something other scholars have
dealt with as well. UM. Women had enormous generative power
in society. Right that if you're if or a uh,
(09:01):
if you're a society that's unraveling mysteries, the mystery of
birth is is profound right um, and is the the
sort of root stock of society. UM. So one thing
that which is are often accused of is processes that
UM that interrupt generation in one way or another UM,
(09:23):
things that are supposed to come to fruition that misfire UM.
Another scholar, Carol Carlson out at University of Michigan, found
UM that a significant number of suspects in New England
witchcraft cases were women who had unusually direct lines to
(09:44):
property holding, either because they didn't have living husbands, or
they didn't have sons, or they didn't have brothers. Some
unusually direct relationship to property in Land. UM. John de
Moss and his great work enter Attaining Satan tracked the
number of female witchcraft sub suspects who were post menopausal,
(10:09):
who were through their childbearing years, so who had completed
their great function in Puritan society UM, but nevertheless persisted
in ways that were UM uncomfortable or could get uncomfortable
for UM for their fellow townsfolk. About four out of
(10:30):
five witchcraft suspects in New England was female, so way
outscale for the proportion of the population. And when we
look at the percentage tried and the percentage executed, um,
the predominance holds. I'm thinking of the story of Mary
Webster and Hadley in the I think the sixteen eighties.
(10:52):
She was accused of witchcraft, taken to Boston. It was
a quit and brought back. But you know, the complaints
were what you'd expect. She was, she was cranky, she
spoke out for herself, she wasn't religious. Um. And And
there's a one of the themes that's popped up in
all of the interviews we've been doing is that there's
this what seems to be the tight normal focus on suspects.
At the start, you know, the the typical other Sarah Good,
(11:16):
Sarah Osburne um and obviously a slave Titsuba Um. You know,
Sarah Good was as you said, she was a mumbler.
She was she would she would mutter things under her breath,
corn cob pipe exactly right. She didn't fit those norms,
and that bothered people. But but then that circle starts
to get wider, and you you start to get people
like Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, And do you have
(11:42):
your own view on why that circle started to move
outside of the normal others and move on to people
you wouldn't expect. I mean some of these were covenant
members of the church, um, and it starts to spread
in a way that you wouldn't expect. Does that seem
to still follow these rules of women should be behaving
one way but now they're not? Or I you know,
I think one of the reasons we keep going back
(12:04):
and back and back to Salem um which um, I
don't have the numbers at the tips of my fingers,
but I think it's it's under ten percent of the
people who are accused of witchcraft in the in the
seventeenth century in New England. Right, it's a it's a
spasmodic incident. It's not the only uh, it's not the
only spasm there's uh, there's one in hard for their
(12:27):
other you know, there are other clusters. But the reason
we keep going back and back and back to Salem
is because of the ways that it jumps the tracks. Um,
it goes outside of the normal abnormal witchcraft suspects. UM.
There are a higher proportion of men suspected and UH
and tried and even executed in Salem than there are
(12:51):
elsewhere at other times in the colonies. And it goes
up and up and up the social spectrum, touching eventually
even the governor's wife herself. UM. And that's one of
the reasons that people have looked so intensively at the
structure of that community. UM. The instability in church headship
(13:12):
that we see both in Salem Town and Salem Village,
where that covenant community is fervent in the way that
many New England towns are, but is also repeatedly rocked
by ministers coming and going. UM. Some of the military
upheaval and economic upheaval that we see in the sixteen eighties,
the political upheaval UM around Massachusetts's response to UH England's
(13:38):
overreaching the dominion of New England that results in the
revocation of the first Charter. So UM, it's an it's
a a volatile place at an unstable moment um. We
know from Marybeth Norton's work that there are also particular
UH familial connections between the traumas that are inflicted by
(14:01):
the Indian Wars, the the sort of backcountry frontiers of
Britain's Imperial Wars. UM in the northeast. It's it's overdetermined
the reasons why, um, that community would be at risk
in various ways. UM. And yet still uh, there's enough,
(14:23):
there's enough mystery in it, right, you could do a
control Well what are all the what are all the
places that have similar instability? And um? And why does
you know? Why aren't you know why isn't there a
massive witch hunt in New Haven at the same time?
Or um? Uh, it's certainly not that people in Salem
(14:46):
are less learned than they are other places. Um. Their
leadership is um is lacking right that that they have
hindsight is always um. You know, looking back, if you
had had a minister unlike Samuel Paris who had chosen
(15:09):
to preach on peace and love and quiet the flames
rather than to um poor, it wouldn't have been gasoline
for them. But you know, pine tar on a on
a smoldering set of embers. Um you could have had
you could have had a different outcome. You can think
of people who could have intervened all along the way
(15:32):
to say, but wait, isn't this God telling us to
love one another or UM. You know, isn't this a
call for um? The greatest of these is love or charity? UM?
Should we look to this scripture instead of that scripture
to guide us? UM. I don't think even Samuel Paris
(15:56):
thought from week to week. Oh, if I do this
this week, in two weeks, it's really gonna get going. UM.
It's a It's an interesting instance of how UM, without
I think, without any concerted malign action, UM, good people
(16:17):
failing to um to to step up can result in
a kind of conflagration UM. A conflagration only related to
its time and place. Right, It's it's hundreds of people,
not thousands of people who are drawn into its web.
Although UM, that conflagration is large enough and is late
(16:42):
enough in the history the long history of European and
Anglophone witchcraft that it sticks out almost immediately right that
by three UM, you have people knowing that Salem is
a is a black eye UM. For for the whole
New World experiment, that New England is going to be
(17:04):
called New witch Land is one of the first things
that's UM that's said ex post facto about it, and
UM people continuing to write about it in the you know,
in the seventeen forties, in the era of the American Revolution.
It very quickly enters the domain of metaphor. Why was
(17:26):
why was the slave woman Titsuba's testimony so powerful to
this community? I would have, I mean, my my, looking back,
you know, twenty one century attitude is was she She
seems to be so far of an outsider that she
shouldn't have voiced at all, and yet here she is,
and it seems to matter so much. Why do you
think that was? I think, um, I will answer your question,
(17:48):
particularly about Tichiba. I think what you've just said hangs
over the whole of Salem in general, right, like, why
are the most powerful men in the West tern hemisphere
listening to these girls in their teen years, in their
early twenties. There's a whole flipping of whose word counts
(18:10):
and who's doesn't. I think Tichubus speech, at least as
we have it come down to us, you know, through
a court clerk's hand, whose um probably uh to some
degree over exoticizing her dialogue, her dialect um. It's just
(18:31):
incredibly vivid, right, you know that she uh, she decides um.
You know, possibly tactically in some way. Oh you want
a witch. You know, here's you. You've told me to
sing like a canary. I Am going to sing in
the Song of the Tropics. It's gonna have it had
(18:51):
just if you just look through Tichubus speech for the
color um. You know, the the birds, the tawny man,
the uh. It's a scholars have studied UM. Here seems
to be some fusion of what she must have picked
up of um New England lore, which in Paris's household
(19:15):
she would have had abundant access to. UM. She must
be hearing him walk around practicing his preaching even before
he's doing it UM, and what she's brought with her,
we think from Barbados. UM. So you know, you could
have called central casting for somebody to make the riveting
intervention in a drama and not have conjured up somebody
(19:39):
who could do so with more alan than she winds
up doing UM. At other points in New England jurisprudence,
I think it would have been quickly relegated to the
side like just just uh, it doesn't follow, it doesn't
follow conventions, right, um. Uh, there's a lot of leading
(20:03):
the witness, um is there this. Yes, there's that, and
let me give you a little more. Um. She plays
her role very well. And UM, it's it's interesting, I
think unknowable ultimately. UM. One of the things that happens
in Salem is the conventions of witchcraft trials and jurisprudence
(20:27):
flip to some degree. So UM, in sixteen sixty in Boston,
if you had made a heartfelt confession of your involvement,
uh in witchcraft, that would have perhaps yielded you absolution
in the world beyond. But what it would have yielded
you in this world is death. UM. In Salem, confession
(20:50):
liberates people from the news. And UM, she can't know
that yet when she's testifying, she's testifying too early. UM.
You know, maybe that what she says is so narratively
compelling that she begins to set that pattern in motion. UM.
But that's one of the many things that goes topsy
(21:11):
turvy in Salem. We're listening to people were not supposed
to listen to. Um, And kinds of utterances that would
get you killed ten years before. UM make you a
sort of star of the confessional circuit in well, and
you mentioned the girls, the you know, the afflicted accusers
(21:32):
who are there at the front of the meeting house
and they're you know, going into convulsions, and and that
it's odd that they too are being listened to, you know,
as opposed to the grown adults in the room. Right.
Is there a nuance to that or is is it
just more of the same. It's just more of the
conventions being flipped on its head, you know. I think
(21:52):
that is to me the great mystery of the Salem
proceedings is how in a world that devalues women's utterances
and that tends to keep um, maybe especially young women
within their channels. Uh, this group of UM adolescent that's
(22:15):
anachronistic term, but UM, women in their teens and early twenties,
UM come to be this this sort of star witness
coterie UM is completely ineffable. UM. I think there is
pretty convincing evidence that they are to a certain extent,
(22:35):
coordinating with each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. UM.
This is what the scholar Bernard Rosenthal believes that UM. Uh,
you know, you can't A pin doesn't come out of nowhere, right, UM,
it's a there's a kind of stagecraft to what they're doing.
(22:57):
UM that in the normal run of Puritan punishment and
social sanction, UH should land them in the stocks UH
in either private or public shaming right UM, either chastening
in their families or by their congregations UM, or punishment
for scolding and raillery and speaking against their betters, right
(23:20):
the speaking out of fifth commandment order the younger against
the older, UM, women against men, women against ministers in
some cases UM with George Burrows. So how that happens?
You know, it seems like a moment where UM, the
normal sources of authority holds so poorly, and the need
(23:47):
for answers to questions that seem profound UM feels so
urgent that UM people begin listening. Two unexpectedness is who
say they have answers. It's so out of it's so
out of the ordinary. When you have magistrates, you know,
the judicial rulers who are also the business rulers, and
(24:11):
they're from families that have been cultural and social patriarchs.
But they're the leader in every aspect of life. And
yet they're deferring to these children in a sense, you know,
tell me, tell me the truth, right, I mean, they
wouldn't have seen themselves as deferring right, they would have
seen themselves as using these female youths as the conduit
(24:35):
to UM, you know, scouring into the marrow of God's justice. UM.
But if you look even a handful of years before UM,
there's a possession case in Massachusetts, the case of Elizabeth Knapp,
which John de Moss writes about at length. She's a
(24:56):
young female servant in a minister's house, and UM undergoes
many of the same kinds of UM traumatic manifest manifestations
that the afflicted accusers do in Salem, including UM, you know,
saying vile things to the to the minister, maybe even
(25:17):
speaking in a voice that sounds like UM, a voice
not her own. And you know, the the seal is
put on the box really fast. You know she is.
She's possessed, UM, not afflicted, not a witch herself. And UH,
we're gonna we're gonna get her cured, and nobody's gonna
(25:40):
listen to her. For Heaven's sake, you know, nobody is
going to listen to her. We're going to get her
the help that she needs, UM, which in our time
would be some kind of psychiatric intervention, and in their
time is a religious one. UM. That's that's a moment
and a happening that extremely close in both time and place. Right,
(26:03):
it's not I think it's not a full ten years before.
I think it's the sixteen seventies. I think it's actually
sixteen seventy two. It's Willard, right, we're talking. I think
it's twenty years before. But Willard has his own connections
to Salem as well. Yeah, but Willard is a skeptic.
I mean Willard is a thorough going skeptic. UM. I
(26:25):
think Willard is one of the people who represent a
kind of um secularizing is too strong, but who represent
a kind of cosmopolitan urbanity UM that is nibbling at
the edges of Salem. I I did a piece of
work at one point that I never published, UM about
(26:50):
the image of the Devil's Book in the Salem, which trials,
you know, what does it look like? Oh, it's it's
you know, it's small and they hide and it's red.
It's not read. Um and looking at the book trades
in New England at the time where um, you know,
this is a moment in the late sixteen eighties and
early sixteen nineties where small secular print materials, um, you know, histories, geographies, satires,
(27:16):
joke books, playing cards, UM are coming into the bookstores
in the ports cities, and UM are undermining the kind
of unitary authority that ministers who had less of the
urbanity that Willard uh happened to have UM had experienced before.
(27:40):
UM at the same time increasing Cotton Mather, UM, who
were fundamental to Salem unfolding the way it did. We're
also part of that urban world. You know. Cotton Mather
was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UM. You
know was it was a fancied himself, a scientist of
(28:03):
international connection. UM. So it's not education or intellect that
explains where people came down and and how because Cotton
Mather at the same time would publish works collecting supernatural
occurrences and treat them in that sort of scientific and
(28:26):
historian minded view of well, here's this thing that happened.
Let's let's not do that, right. Well, I mean this
is a world in which UM, science and religion and
UM ghost stories all are are very much of a piece. UM.
(28:46):
I've been reading in the last week or so the
first volume of Deborah Harkness is All Souls Trilogy, which
is called a discovery of which is Um. I started
reading it, you know, I thought, I had thought, these
are books about which is in vampires? This is not
something I'm going to read. And I did a panel
(29:07):
with her a couple of weeks ago. She's an early
modern historian of science, and she said that the conceit
of the books was what if the world actually works
the way that people thought it did in the fifteen
and six and much of the seventeenth century. And I thought,
that's a great conceit. Um. You know, they had they
had a particular cosmology, parts of which we believe we
(29:30):
have proved wrong. Um, we also have a cosmology right
that there are certainly things in our conceptions of science
are totalizing conceptions of science that people in two hundred
or three hundred years will wonder, how on earth did
they believe that? How did they think? You know, this
(29:51):
is something that we're already starting to question. How do
they think that bombarding the body with poison was going
to cure cancer? Right? I mean I one of the
things that we can take from a Salem into the
present day are what are the things that we believe
ardently and with the backing of all of our um
(30:13):
scripture and science and uh and learning that are just
going to be revealed as wrong. So yes, science and
magic and almonds and portents and a message in every
eclipse would have been true for mother, you know, who
(30:33):
lives on the edge of the world of Newton. Absolutely
side note. What I love about Elizabeth knapp story is
that she moves on and she marries a man named
Samuel Scripture. Well, how can I redeem my name as
best as I can? His last name is Scripture. I
think he was the slave next door. In your book
(30:55):
Governing the Tongue, you argued that which hunting was in
part of policing of speech. Well, young me said that
I don't know whether old me would say that, so,
um was witch hunting in part of policing of speech?
I mean I think that, um, the ways that social
(31:16):
norms are policed is that there are a set of
consequences when um, when people overstep or um or misspeak
and um. The you know, most witch hunting is informal, right, UM,
so saying to a neighbor UM or complaining in church
(31:36):
or taking to court an accusation that um that somebody
has done something to make you very uncomfortable, and that's
something gets the name of witchcraft. UM is a way
of enforcing norms. I want to shift over to the courtroom,
the meeting house at least this. You have this unique
thing happening in the first examination with Sarah Good and
(31:58):
Sarah Osborne. How they're husbands are brought in and give
testimony against them, um. And it might be coerced out
of them, they might be freely giving it. I'm not sure.
But how would their testimony against their wives have have
matched up with I guess expectations for the Puritan husband,
(32:19):
you know, the type of role that they're supposed to have,
you know, with this kind of testimony against a spouse
have been unusual in a courtroom. UM. I think that
the goal of puritan a goal of parent religion, and
a goal of jurisprudence in a place like Massachusetts where
it's an inquisitorial system not an advocacy system. UM. So
(32:43):
the goal of a proceeding is to get to the truth,
not to defend one side against the other. UM. I
think those are instances where the charges at hand and
the testimony of neighbors had made people questioned the behavior
of those they lived with intimately, and it would have
(33:04):
been expected in the community that they would come forward
with their doubts. Um. You know there's UM, there's a
unity of husband and wife as a UM, as a
political person, as an economic person. UM. But I think, UM,
you know, in spiritual manners like that, if there UM,
(33:28):
if there is a need to delve into error, UM,
you know they I think they don't realize at that
moment that they're on the leading edge of a mortal
battle that's gonna encompass scores and then hundreds of people
and and bring all the towns around it. Um. You
would have joined the court in uh, trying to get
(33:51):
to the bottom of a search for error. UM. In
a perfect world, I mean in a you know, UM,
I haven't done the research to be able to say
husbands in x percentage of cases would demure when asked
about about their wives in discretion. But UM, in theory,
(34:13):
that's the way jurisprudence in an inquisitorial system should work.
And and when brought before magistrates or whether we're talking
you know, the meeting house kind of village trial, or
we go to oy or in termin or where things
get very serious, is there a difference in gender with
how people are represented. Just thinking about about the dynamics
(34:36):
of gender. When a suspect or accused is brought into
the courtroom, is it different for a man or a woman. Well,
I think, Um, the situations in a place like seventeenth
century Massachusetts where a woman would have been called upon
to speak publicly and officially for herself are are extremely few. Um.
(35:01):
Uh you know, there's a pretty lively debate in Puritan
meeting houses about whether women should narrate their own conversions.
Um you know when they're when they're uh you know,
when they're describing how they experienced in dwelling grace to
become full members of the congregation. And um some uh
(35:22):
as I recall dimly when I did this work on
seventeenth century New England. Um, some ministers preferred to take
those narratives in longhand um or in chambers in some
way to having a woman come in and profess openly. Um,
you know, famously in New England and Hutchinson in sixteen
(35:44):
thirty six, not all that long ago, right from sixto
uh is banished from the colony for um preaching to
mix audiences. Um. You know, women, women in uh can
enticles that did Bible study, woman on woman, UM, women
(36:05):
in birthing chambers, women in household working groups would have had,
you know, very free speech in front of each other.
But the number of times that you would call a
female speaker to depose herself in any official proceeding would
be UM would be you know, pretty rare. A defendant
(36:27):
in a court trial, UM, a witness sometimes in a
court trial, a jury person, never a preacher, never UM,
a political candidate or giver of a political opinion, never UM.
A poet on occasion. Right, Ann Bradstreet has published her
poetry in England and it has come back and been
(36:50):
republished in New England by the same time that Salem
breaks out and Um speaks in those poems. Got those
beautiful poems mostly on the combination of domestic and spiritual matters,
but takes up even in poetry the question of um
(37:11):
am I obnoxious to each carping tongue who says um,
a woman's hand better needle than a pen fits UM.
So this this, you know, this question of speaking out loud,
writing out loud, beyond the domestic context, it would have
been an extraordinary scene. Well, you know, it's interesting. We were, um,
(37:31):
we were at the Pvody Institute library and Damer's talking
to Richard Trusk and he has a number of things
in the vault, one of which is the he has
the Minister's notebook, which you can watch things such as
the handwriting of Samuel Parris Degrade over eight months, you know,
from Neaton Clean to he's just trying to get everything
on the page. But there's the church notebook as well.
(37:54):
And evidently after Reverend Green came in and took over
for forever in paris Um and Putnam, one of the accusers,
one of the afflicted accusers, wanted to become a member
in the church and had to confess, you know, and
apologize because so many people in that congregation been affected
by her words. And so there's this large book that
(38:16):
we can still open up. And he opened up the
page right to us, and and her confession has been
written out by Reverend Green, not by her, it's but
it's been it's been recorded, Longhand like you said, and
then there's her signature, that's hers, it's in a different hand.
So he just hands her the pen and she she
signs her name. Well, she probably couldn't have written anything
(38:38):
of that degree of elaboration, right, So UM, reading and
writing are separately taught skills at the time, UM and uh.
Women in in Puritan New England have an unusually high
level of reading literacy UM because it's thought to be
so important for everybody to be able to read the
(38:59):
Bible and for mothers to be able to read the
Bible to their children. UM. But they have a pretty
low level of what's called sign literacy. UM. So she
can sign her name. She has some rudimentary UM written literacy,
but probably not the fluency to write an entire document.
I guess one of the things that I find fascinating
(39:19):
about that um uh post hoc confession around Salem. I mean,
uh so people remember, right how what a what a
terrible uh scar on the community it's been in her
role in it. UM. But she's kind of able to
sew it up and resume a normal life, if I
(39:39):
recall correctly, she goes on to Mary's. UM. You know,
you would think that you would have um a sort
of lifelong staying on your reputation and on the informal
um economy of the marriage market. UM. You know, social
life ability to speak kindly to your neighbor and vice versa.
(40:05):
Um and um, you know, I think some of them
remain unmarried, but not in a not in an extreme proportion. Um.
So the ability and and this is Puritanism as it's
supposed to work, to write, the ability to make a
heartfelt repentance and um and go on in forgiveness no
(40:27):
matter how big the no matter how big the mess
up was. We tind to look back at Salem and
kind of snicker at them for their obsession over witchcraft
and things like that. But Monty Python, yeah right, yeah, Um,
but how different are we today? Well, I mean we're, um,
(40:50):
we're at a moment where I think we're looking for
others under every rock, right. Um, We're we're acutely sensitive
to um uh to threats from the outside to American civilization,
whatever that is. Um. I think we're uh, we're an
extremely tribal moment in American politics and public life. Um uh.
(41:17):
I'm you know, I think we're at a moment where
it's pretty easy to see how the wheels come off
the bus of society, right um, and to begin wondering
about questions like how does the community heal after a
period of UM mutual recrimination, profound upheaval UH shifts in
(41:42):
the dynamics of power that seem unpredictable and anomalous in
the UH. In the span of history that you can
look at closely with the tools that you have to
look UM, you know what will our UM confessions and
uh UM reconciliation look like. UM. I think one of
the things that makes Salem so perennially interesting UM that
(42:05):
brought hundreds of thousands of people to UM, the sort
of makeshift UM memorial that was created for the three
anniversary in UM. I hope one of the things that
brings them is a humility around how close to the
surface such moments of spasmodic intolerance are. It's easy to
(42:29):
feel smug, right, you know, how do I know she
was a witch? She turned me into a new UM?
I got beta right, UM. It's it's easy to um
UH to put them in high hats and UM shoes
with buckles and and put it in the back then. UM.
I think one of the reasons that we come back
and back and back to it after three centuries is
(42:52):
because UM the idea of of such of the danger
of society tearing its helpful part um being so close
to the surface. Um is it's a perennial absolutely. If
there's one thing that you hope people can walk away from. UM.
Sort of the takeaway, you know, as as you learn
(43:14):
about the whole experience, what is there a lesson every Yeah?
I mean I the the um. The lesson that I
think a lot of popular history misses and that calls
for humility and empathy in all of us, is that
many of the accusers, especially as um uh, many of
(43:35):
the accused, that many of the accusers, as the conflict
ripples from beyond Salem Village eventually to bring in the
great minds of of Boston and New England. Um. These
are the best minds of their generation, right. Um. These
are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists. Um. Uh,
(44:00):
the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and
ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically
in their universe. Um. They cannot be laughed off. Um.
You know they are the smartest, uh, most privileged people
(44:24):
of their times. Confronted with uh, something that is awful
to them, and they act in ways that come to
seem even within a couple of years. Um, almost miraculously,
terribly Um. And yet they do it with the best
of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If that doesn't
(44:45):
encourage a kind of radical humility um. And uh second
guessing and um uh you know, checking in with each
other about who's doing what to win who why? Um,
I don't know what does. So that's that's the thing
I think is easiest to miss. Hey, folks, it's Aaron here.
(45:13):
I hope that today's interview helped deepen your understanding of
everything involved in the Salem witch trials. But we're not
done yet. We've got more interviews to share with you,
so stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear
a preview of next week's interview. I'm Stacy Chiff. I'm
(45:34):
the author of The Witches, um in narrative history of
what Happened at Salem, to which I came because I
was surprised by how little most of us really know
about what happened in Um Salem, which trials seemed like
a shorthand, but none of us really understands to what
it is a shorthand. UM. I had written a book
about Cleopatra before this and it was the same kind
of dynamic of just a name that a name brand,
(45:55):
something that everyone recognizes without really having any grasp of
the actual history. Well, when you talk about the misunderstanding,
I think the place to start here is almost the
most obvious question, what was a witch in Salem? And
you're right, that's the question over which we stumble because
our definition, the twenty one century definition of a which
is not the seventeenth century definition of a witch. So
(46:17):
so which at the time witchcraft is a Biblical construct
and which at the time has a concrete reality because
she's mentioned in he or she has mentioned in the Bible,
and which is understood to be any figure male or female,
but primarily female, who is in league with the devil,
and who works his or her magic by means of
little imps or a menagerie of little animals who can
do his or her bidding. Um. And that was something
(46:39):
that was imported to the colonies from England. It was
an extremely rampant It was extremely common concept in in
the Old World and actually throughout the Old World, although
by the idea of witchcraft has pretty much fallen out.
Um in Europe, the colonies are in a little bit
of a time work of their own, and they haven't
quite got the message that this this the witchcraft concept
(47:02):
is a little antiquated by now, Um, but you see
it throughout the colonial record there, which is really from
the very beginning of New England. And the only difference
with two is that um is the prosecution, is that
you get this um feverish set of accusations and you
get a real onless prosecution. In earlier cases, UM, there
had been tremendous leniency. Often someone who brought in a
(47:24):
charge of witchcraft was accused of lying and was sent
home with a whipping. Um. Things were not necessarily taken seriously.
In obviously the opposite happens. Going back to these differences
in our perception, there's how we imagine it to be
and there's the reality of it. How do some of
the common symbols of witchcraft that we have today, like
flying on a broomstick or black cats, connect with the
(47:44):
sale which trials or do they? One of the one
of the most interesting to meet pieces of this is
how the flight gets into um, the entire panic, the
entire delusion in there had not been um, there had
not been flying, which is in New England for um,
and it would see and they were not flying, which
is an English witchcraft either. So this is really an
(48:06):
import from the continent. And it would seem that we
get that idea UM from a narrative that cotton Mouth,
by one of the most influential ministers at the time,
includes in an earlier text of his, and he writes
about a Swedish witchcraft epidemic in which a little girl
UM is on her way to a satanic meeting to
two young children in fact set off this witchcraft crisis,
(48:27):
and a little girl falls off her broomstick. He writes
about all these wonderful details which we will then see
transpost to Massachusetts. But he writes about things that had
never before happened in New England, a satanic meeting UM
in a meadow at which people signed satanic pacts into
which they fly on sticks. Um. And that is really
there were French flight French flying, which is before six
nine two there had never really been English flying witches.
(48:48):
So that's pretty pretty much seems to be where that
aspect of it comes from. Black hats. I spent a
lot of time I live with a black cat, so
I spent a lot of time on black hats, and
they seem to have been the devil since in Quddy.
They've we've had a bad wrap all along. And if
you look at the Salem testimony, the court testimony, you
see a tremendous number of cats. They're translucent cats, they're
(49:09):
gleaming cats, they're black cats, they're red cats. They're all
over the place. And it does it does seem to
be it's a seductive creature. It's a female seeming creature
in many many people's minds, and a black cat will
detach itself from the darkness without any warning, and it's
a cat is unpredictable. So there's that sense that you
can caress a cat and be rewarded with scratches, and
(49:29):
all of those things seemed to add up to something
that people are very uncertain about and often taken aback by.
So there are many number of theories as to how
black cats get get wrapped up in the witchcraft, but yes,
that is a constant from day one. This episode of
(49:50):
Unobscured was executive produced by me Matt Rederick and Alex Williams,
with music by Chad Lawson and audio engineering by Alex Williams.
The Unobscure website has everything you need to get the
most out of the podcast. There's a resource library of maps, charts,
and links to Salem document archives online, as well as
(50:10):
a suggested reading list and a page with all of
our historian biographies. And as always, thanks for supporting this show.
If you love it, head over to Apple podcasts dot
com slash Unobscured and leave a written review and a
star rating. It makes a huge difference for the show's growth,
and as always, thanks for listening.
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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