The White Queen: Witchcraft

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BBC, Elizabeth Woodville, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, James Frain, Janet McTeer, Kings and Queens, Legal Stuff, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Philippa Gregory, Rebecca Ferguson, Richard Neville, The White Queen, Witchcraft

My first post about the BBC series The White Queen took a ‘So Close and Yet So Far’ approach. But a few people thought that it was more close than far. That’s mostly because I decided to save a couple of big things for separate posts. Here’s where we really get into the Far parts.

 

Throughout the series the Rivers women, including Jacquetta (Janet McTeer), Queen Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) and Elizabeth of York (Freya Mavor) all practice witchcraft. In the first couple episodes it’s entirely about predicting the future, and so I thought that the show was taking the approach that Jacquette was just engaging in a little folk magic that happened to give the right answer about whether her daughter was going to get married.

But no, the women are in fact witches. As the series goes on, not only do they occasionally use magic to predict or shape the future, such as ensuring that Elizabeth gives birth to a boy, but they also go for larger-scale things. Over the series they conjure a small hurricane that nearly sinks Warwick (James Frain) and George of Clarence (David Oakes), create a fog that covers Edward IV (Max Irons) as his army approaches Warwick’s at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and produce a storm that prevents Henry Tudor from sailing from Brittany to join Buckingham’s Rebellion in 1483. (In all three cases, this weather did actually happen historically.) They also curse Warwick and George to die for killing Queen Elizabeth’s father and brother; that one takes a long time to play out, but the show suggests that the curse really did work. Elizabeth briefly curses Richard with a pain in his hand that he feels. The Elizabeths also curse whoever killed the princes in the Tower; the show suggests that Anne Neville’s death in 1485 was due to that curse. All three women ‘have the sight’ and periodically get visions that correctly predict the future.

And everyone around them knows they are witches. Lord Rivers jokingly asks “what spells are you two weaving this time?” Queen Elizabeth jokes that if they burn a portrait of Margaret of Anjou, she and her mother will both get hanged as witches. Clarence and Anne both repeatedly accuse them of witchcraft, blaming them for everything that goes wrong in their personal lives. Clarence hirers an astrologer to protect himself from Woodville magic, but it gets misunderstood as an attempt to kill Edward. The only person who doesn’t think the Woodville women are witches is Edward.

Elizabeth and Jacquetta working a spell

 

So, to be clear about what the show does, it purports to be a historical narrative about the Wars of the Roses and it shows the Woodville women successfully using magic to manipulate the events. Their magic justifies many of the odd twists and turns the Wars took over the years. It never bothers to address why these magically powerful women didn’t just use their magic to directly kill their enemies like Clarence and Richard, so the narrative is just sort of ham-fisted about it.

There is an increasing trend in the past decade or so of ancient and medieval historical films and show throwing in magical elements. I have no problem with movies and shows depicting ancient and medieval magical practices; nearly all societies have magical practices of some sort, so it’s not unreasonable to show medieval women occasionally resorting to magic in hopes of achieving their ends. But I have a big problem with stories that claim to be historical showing those magical practices as producing real effects. At that point, a film or show crosses the line from history into fantasy.

 

The Basis for the Claims

Philippa Gregory’s idea that the Woodvilles were actual witches does have a small nugget of fact in it. In 1469, during the period when Warwick had taken control of Edward and was trying to run the government through him, Jacquetta was accused of witchcraft. A man named Thomas Wake gave Warwick “an image of lead made like a man of arms of the length of a man’s finger broken in the middle and made fast with a wire, saying that it was made by [Jacquetta] to use with witchcraft and sorcery.” Wake got a parish priest to support this by claiming that Jacquetta had also made two figures of the king and the queen, presumably some form of love magic to ensure that Edward would marry her daughter.

A drawing of Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick

 

The charges were obviously political. Wake’s son had died fighting for Warwick against Edward and he may have been involved in the death of Lord Rivers. Warwick had just arranged the execution of Lord Rivers and one of his sons, and was clearly now maneuvering against Jacquetta as part of a sustained attack on the Woodvilles.

Jacquetta pushed back by writing a letter to the mayor and aldermen of London, reminding them that back n 1461, she had saved the city when Margaret of Anjou wanted to destroy it. Jacquetta had been a close friend and lady-in-waiting to Margaret, so her personal influence apparently helped sway the wrathful queen. The citizens of London repaid the favor by sending a letter supporting her to Warwick via George of Clarence.

That didn’t stop the trial, though. Edward was forced to order an examination of the witnesses, but when the time came for the trial before the Great Council (in this case, essentially a session of the House of Lords), Edward was back in charge and the case against Jacquetta collapsed. The witnesses recanted their testimony, and Jacquetta asserted what was, at least in canon law, an entirely valid defense that Wake was a long-time enemy of hers; whether this particular canon law principle was carried over into English Common Law on witchcraft I’m unsure of, but if something similar applied, this would have disqualified Wake as an accuser by establishing that he had an obvious motive to lie.  The Council, clearly understanding where the king’s sympathies lay, acquitted Lady Rivers and agreed to her request to include the proceedings in the official records of the Council. Jacquetta was obviously a smart woman, and knew that having an official note of her acquittal might come in useful if the charges were revived later on.

And in fact the charges were revived in 1484 when Richard III asked Parliament to declare that Edward and Elizabeth had never been legally married because Elizabeth and Jacquetta had used magic to procure the marriage. By this point Lady Rivers was already dead, and Richard needed Parliament to make this declaration because it justified his seizure of the throne. Parliament did as it was told and declared the marriage invalid.

These two incidents, which were clearly motivated by politics, comprise the sum total of all the actual evidence that the Woodville women ever practiced witchcraft. It is out of these false charges that Gregory spun this entire subplot for her books. She worked within the framework of the known facts, which is commendable, but by blowing these details up into a major part of the story and inventing a host of facts that are literally impossible, such as controlling the weather, she took her story off into fantasyland. And Gregory has falsely claimed in an interview that Jacquetta was convicted and spared only by Margaret of Anjou’s intervention.

Philippa Gregory

 

In the show, Warwick tries Jacquetta for witchcraft while he has control of Edward. He brings in a witness (not Thomas Wake) to make the same accusations; Jacquetta protests that she has never seen the man before, rather than trying to disqualify him as an enemy. Since Jacquetta is actually a witch, the whole scene represents very serious danger; although the accuser is making things up, what he’s inventing is somehow correct. She is saved by calling a witness of her own, Margaret of Anjou, whom she was close friends with years ago. Her strategy is that Warwick is dependant on Margaret politically and militarily, so he won’t be able to oppose her in this trial. It works and Jacquetta is acquitted. But this all rests on the false assumption that medieval English courts worked like modern ones, a mistake that other tv shows have made as well.

Jacquetta on trial

 

What is really frustrating to me about this is that the series had a perfect opportunity to explore the way that witchcraft accusations were generally motivated not by actual evidence of witchcraft but by political or personal motives. It was a charge that women were vulnerable to because this culture associated witchcraft with women rather than men. (Men were much more likely to be accused of learned magic, such as the malicious astrology charge brought against George of Clarence’s personal astrologer.)

In the later part of the Middle Ages, English society gradually began using accusations of magic for political reasons. In 1419, Henry V believed that he had been a target of a magical plot. In 1431, witchcraft was one of the charges against Joan of Arc. In 1441, Duchess Eleanor of Gloucester was accused of treasonous astrology when she had an astrologer forecast the death of Henry VI. She was convicted, forced to do public penance, divorce her husband, and suffer life imprisonment. In 1450, Henry VI’s government accused the rebel Jack Cade of using sorcery. As already mentioned, in the 1470s, George of Clarence was implicated in treasonous astrology. Looking forward a generation of so, Anne Boleyn was accused of witchcraft by Catholic propagandists, although contrary to Internet claims, witchcraft was not one of the charges brought against her at her trial (although Henry VIII may have once made an off-hand claim that she had ensnared him through witchcraft).

So Gregory could easily have written a subplot in which the charges of witchcraft were entirely false and used that to explore the way that women were culturally vulnerable to ideas about witchcraft. Instead, she chose to actually reinforce the cultural bias around women as witchcraft by making them genuinely guilty. That really pisses me off, because in a way, it re-victimizes these two women.

If you like this post, please think about making a donation to my Paypal account to help me afford to pay for Starz and the other pay services I uses for this blog. Any donation is appreciated! Or follow the links below to purchase one of the books below. I get a small portion of the proceeds.

Want to Know More?

The White Queen is available on Starz, and on Amazon. The three novels it is based on are The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter. They are also available as a set with two other novels.

If you’re interested in this issue, you can read this blog post, which digs a bit further into the evidence for the Woodville women as witches (and explodes it). The author of the post, Susan Higgenbotham, is a novelist and author of The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England’s Most Infamous Family. She’s not a professional historian, but she’s clearly dug into the sources on this.

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The Witch: Fear and Loathing in Puritan New England

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Anya Taylor-Joy, Colonial America, Kate Dickie, Movies I Love, Ralph Ineson, The Witch, Witchcraft

The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers) got a lot of buzz when it came out last year, but I only got around to watching it tonight. It tells the story of a Puritan family living in rural New England struggling against a machinations of a malicious witch.

The film is set in 1630 in an unspecified plantation in New England. It is probably Massachusetts, but could possibly be New Hampshire or Maine. William (Ralph Ineson) is a devout Calvinist who is forced out of the colony because of a never-explained theological dispute within the church of the colony. He takes his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and his children, who include teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Caleb (Harry Scrimshaw), and young twins Mercy and Jonas (Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson), and sets up a small farm on the edge of a remote woods about a day away from the plantation.

Katherine gives birth to a baby boy, Samuel, and that’s when things start to go wrong. Thomasin is watching the baby one day by the woods when he simply disappears. The film makes it clear that he has been stolen by a witch and sacrificed to make a flying ointment. So the film immediately establishes that this isn’t simply in the minds of the family. There really is an evil force hell-bent (quite literally) on destroying them, although we only rarely see it.

Taylor-Joy as Thomasin

Although the troubles in the film are clearly caused by the witch, the film is really a study of a deeply devout and conservative Christian family trying to cope with the trauma of (literally) losing a child. Katherine grieves inconsolably and cannot stop praying, and William struggles to hold the family together and make this marginal farm thrive. But the crops do poorly, he proves an ineffective hunter, and the family’s nanny goat starts giving blood instead of milk. Mercy and Jonas’ misbehavior start to wear down Thomasin’s patience, and young Caleb, who is only about 9, tries to be the hunter his father cannot be. The family inevitably spirals down to their destruction; this is a horror film, after all.

The film really impressed me from a historical standpoint. It has a lot to recommend it. The film-makers worked hard to capture the material culture of the period, consulting with museums and historians of the period, and Eggers only filmed with natural light outdoors and candle-light indoors. Much of the dialog was lifted from 17th century documents, and the cast does a great job making the archaic language sound real. Even the children turn in excellent performances and make the dialog work.

The film tries to capture genuine 17th century Puritan beliefs of witches. Nearly everything supernatural that happens has a solid foundation in the writings and trial records of the period. The disasters that befall the family are not wild Hollywood spectacle but simple rural crises–the corn grows badly, they keep seeing a rabbit they can’t catch, something kills their dog– that prey on the family’s economic vulnerability. Witchcraft was always primarily about economic and personal disasters, and Eggers does a great job getting us to understand that.The witch’s malevolence is simply a given; she destroys the family purely because she is evil, and that’s where the family’s religious anxieties come in.

Ineson as the strict but loving William

The film also does justice to the Calvinist beliefs of the Puritans. As William teaches Caleb, they are deeply sinful people, and only Christ’s redeeming sacrifice can save them. Caleb, understandably unnerved by the implication that his baby brother was a horrible sinner, begs his father to tell him what sin the infant committed. William replies that he does not know and that he cannot know that the baby was saved, because they must simply pray that they are among God’s Elect. As a result, what mattered for Puritans was having a spiritual experience that shows them that they truly are one of the Elect. While most movies and tv shows (cough Salem cough) treat such beliefs with contempt and assume that Puritans simply didn’t love each other, The Witch accepts Puritanism as a genuine belief system and shows how deeply William and Katherine love their children and desperately desire their salvation. But prayer isn’t enough to stop the evil assailing them because if it was, this wouldn’t be a horror film.

A big part of the reason that New England saw so may witchcraft charges is that in the 17th century, the American colonies were small and precarious. Life was genuinely hard for these people, and witchcraft provided an explanation for the various things that could go wrong. Additionally, the Puritans saw themselves as God’s tiny minority of the Elect under siege from the forces of Satan. Native Americans were understood to literally worship the Devil, so Satan’s agents lurked just beyond the tree line, unseen but waiting to strike. And witches were the embodiment of many of the moral failings that Puritans struggled against–lust, envy, disobedience to authorities, resentment. So as Thomasin tries to be a good Christian girl and cope with the tragedies befalling her family, her struggles slowly push her into the suspect category of witch.

All in all, I’d have to call The Witch one of the best historical films I’ve ever seen. The cinematography is gorgeous, and Eggers is willing to take his time building the tension for both the family and the audience. The film avoids the usual cheap tricks of horror films, like sound spikes, false scares, and gore, in favor of drawing the viewer into the growing fear and madness of the family, and making you squirm over the way the family inevitably turns against itself. It is certainly the best depiction of early modern witchcraft beliefs I’ve seen on screen.

Got a specific movie you’d like me to tackle? Please make a donation and tell me what movie you’d like me to review. If I can get access to it, I’ll review it for you.

Want to Know More? 

The Witch is available on Amazon.

If you’re looking for an introduction to New England witchcraft trials and beliefs, you can’t do better than Carol Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman. It’s hands down the best thing I’ve read on the subject.

Heartless: Vampires, Witchcraft, and Teen Romance in Denmark

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17th Century Denmark, Early Modern Europe, Heartless, Homosexuality, Julie Zangenberg, Sebastian Jessen, Vampires, Witchcraft

I recently ran across the shortlived Danish tv Heartless (Danish with English subtitles) on Netflix. It was only 8 episodes and I’d read some interesting things about it, so I gave it a try. It’s not a great show, but it has an interesting take on vampirism and part of the show is set in 17^th century Denmark, so I figured I’d fire off a quick post about it.

 

Sebastian (Sebastian Jessen) and Sofie (Julie Zangenberg) are teenage homeless twins living in Copenhagen, dealing with a dark secret. To survive, they need to steal people’s life energy through kisses. If they take too much, the victim bursts into flames and dies. Sebastian is guilt-ridden over this while Sofie shrugs her shoulders and is resigned to her existence. But Sebastian convinces her that they need to find out why they are the way they are, and their investigations eventually reveal that their mother, shortly after dropping them off at an orphanage, went to Ottmannsgaard Academy, an elite private school (the school prides itself on the quality of its fencing instruction) where she evidently vanished. So they manage to enroll and begin seeking clues. Cue all the usual teen drama angst that one expects at that age: social competition, teen romance, existential angst, and vampiric murder.

Sofie getting what she needs

 

It turns out that Ottmannsgaard has its own dark history, stemming back to Denmark in the 1670s, when the local nobleman, the weak-willed Count Ottman (Lior Cohen) gets his peasant mistress Ane Sørensdatter (Shelly Jacquline Levy) pregnant. His pregnant wife, understandably pissed about her husband’s wandering eye, evidently leans on the local Lutheran minister to accuse Ane of being a witch (like you do). The count tries to get Ane to flee the area, but she refuses because she’s young, in love, and fated to die for the plot to happen, and so instead she gets arrested, tortured, and sentenced to burn at the stake, even though she’s carrying his child.

The execution succeeds, but triggers a curse that follows the children of both the Countess and Ane (who must have been a witch, because her unborn baby somehow survives her mother being burned to death. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is). There’s a twist of sorts here that I won’t give away, although it’s not a huge one (so don’t get your hopes up).

Jessen as Sebastian

 

Eight episodes of that doesn’t give me a whole lot to comment on. But the show at least gets the witchcraft details in the right ballpark. There were no executions of witches in the 1670s, but there was one in the 1680s (the Rugard Trials), in which Jørgen Arenfeldt, a local nobleman, used his authority as the lord of the manor to imprison, try, and execute a half-dozen women as witches. One of the unfortunate women was named Anne Sorensdatter. In doing this, Arenfeldt violated the law by torturing the women and by prosecuting women who lived outside his jurisdiction. The last execution for witchcraft in Denmark happened in 1693.

So the trial and execution of Ane Sørensdatter could actually have happened in loosely the fashion the series depicts. Like the Rugard women, what Ane is subjected to is, I think, supposed to be ducking. As usually happens with this practice, the show misunderstands ducking as a form of torture intended to elicit a confession when in fact it was an effort to obtain objective evidence of witchcraft. But Ane’s ducking is more like just being held underwater rather than being put in a classic ducking stool, so maybe it’s simply supposed to be torture. Torturing witches was illegal in Denmark in this period, but the show doesn’t touch on that, so I think we’re just intended to understand that early modern authorities were gullible sadists and we’ve moved beyond that.

It’s nice to see a show in which historical research (albeit conducted at the high school level) is actually an important component of the series. Throughout the show, Sebastian is constantly seeking clues to the past, speaking with his history teacher, asking to write his term paper on witchcraft trials, reading old books, and so on. So in a way, the show offers a nice example of the way a historical researcher chases events through the evidence to unravel the mysteries of the past. It’s rather convenient that at key moments he runs into people who just happen to have saved boxes of old stuff for more than a decade and those boxes always have a clue he needs, but hey, it’s a teen drama so I think we can forgive that wild coincidence.

Sofie’s character is handled particularly nicely. As the show goes on, she develops an attraction to the headmaster’s daughter Emilie (Julie Christiansen) who gradually reciprocates her feelings. When the headmaster discovers this, he’s uncomfortable with the relationship, not because of the lesbianism but because he’s suspicious of Sofie’s motives and nature. There’s a very nice scene in which he tells Emilie that he doesn’t care that she might be attracted to women, but that he doesn’t want her involved with Sofie. The show’s treatment of two young lesbians is really refreshing because their lesbianism isn’t in any way the problem in the relationship.

Sofie and Emilie

 

Heartless is not a great show, either in its treatment of its historical themes or the quality of its teen drama. It nearly got cancelled after 5 episodes, and the network apparently decided to film three more episodes simply as a way to give the story a conclusion. It’s filled with lots of wordless brooding of the kind Scandinavians are so good at depicting but which can get sort of tedious for American viewers. But it captures some of the complexities of teenage sexuality and identity quite well, in which the problems of vampiric existence become an interesting metaphor for the transition to adulthood, and the show doesn’t try to stretch out its central mystery further than the story can support. So if you’re in the mood for a novel approach to vampirism or just want to see lots of Scandinavian teens yearning for what they can’t have, give it a look.

 

Want to Know More?

Heartless is available through Amazon.

I can’t offer you anything on witchcraft in Denmark, but if you want to know more about witch trials and related matters, a good introduction to the Early Modern Witch Hunts is Joseph Klaits’ Servants of Satan.

Penny Dreadful: A Few Last Thoughts

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Eva Green, Ferdinand Lyle, Homosexuality, Joan Clayton, Josh Hartnett, Larry Talbot, Lycanthropy, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Polari, Simon Russell Beale, The Wolfman, Victorian England, Witchcraft

For the past couple of posts, I’ve been covering Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. There were a couple of other small points that I couldn’t really develop into full posts, so I thought I’d just put them together in one quick post.

1. Penny Dreadful riffs on Victorian science-fiction, occult, and horror stories. At least it does in theory. It’s got Frankenstein and his monster, Mina Harker from Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Josh Hartnett’s Wolfman. But as I’ve already pointed out, Frankenstein isn’t a Victorian character; he’s from the Regency period a full two decades prior to the Victorian era. And the Wolfman isn’t a particularly Victorian character either. Although there were a handful of short stories published about lycanthropes in the 19th century, the major Wolfman stories are 20th century. The earliest novel on this theme (that I know of, at least) is 1933’s The Werewolf of Paris. The character in this novel, set in the 1870s, is not a wolfman, but a classic werewolf (he turns totally into a wolf, rather than a wolf/human hybrid). But the novel helped inspire the 1935 horror film, The Werewolf of London, whose protagonist, played by Harry Hill, is the first Wolfman. Werewolf established two of the key tropes of such films, namely that lycanthropy is spread by bites and that transformation into a werewolf is governed by the moon. That in turn helped inspire 1941’s The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the unfortunate title character. Maybe if we average out the Regency era Frankenstein with the Depression era Wolf Man, we get the late Victorian era. (Incidentally, Josh Hartnett’s character is eventually revealed to be named Ethan Lawrence Talbot, Lawrence Talbot being Lon Chaney Jr’s character in The Wolf Man.)
2. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) watches her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone) burned to death sometime in the 1880s. In reality, the last person executed in the British Isles for witchcraft was the elderly Scottish woman Janet Horne, who was sentenced to detain Scotland, along with her daughter, in 1727. Her daughter managed to escape custody, but Janet was smeared with pitch, paraded through town, and burned alive. Laws decreeing the death penalty for witches were repealed a few years later, so the idea that a group of angry townspeople would burn Joan to death in the 1880s is pretty far-fetched.
3. Simon Russell Beale’s flamboyant homosexual Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle was one of the great charms of season 2. But he has a rather 20th century sense of self. In the last episode he refers to himself as a ‘queen’, using what so far as I know is a term that only emerged in the 1950s.He also describes himself as belonging to a ‘tribe’, but I’m not sure that a 19th century gay man would have thought of himself in those terms. If the show had been more interested in an historically accurate portrayal of homosexuality, it should have had Lyle using polari, a wide-spread British slang system used by homosexual men (among others) in the 19th and 20th century. Polari was a complex mixture of Italian, Romani, London English, rhyming slang, back slang, sailor slang, and thieves’ cant that was employed by gay men to covertly signal their homosexuality to other men and have discrete conversations about sexual activity. For example, “Vada the dolly dish, shame about her naff riah” means “Look at the attractive man, shame about his bad hair.” Although some words (like ‘naff’ in the above example) have become common British slang, polari sadly began to die out as homosexuality won a wider social acceptance in the late 20th century. If you’re interested in polari, check out this short film in which two men have a conversation in it.  (Ignore the number 4–I can’t get the auto-numbering to turn off)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly wrote that Claude Rains played the Wolf Man in the 1941 movie. While Rains was in the film, it was of course Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. 

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Witches in Medieval England?

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Alan Rickman, Geraldine McEwan, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Witchcraft

I commented in an earlier post about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds) that one of the biggest anachronisms in the film is Mortianna the witch and what appears to be a Satanist coven. The problems with it are big enough that I decided to give it its own post.

 

Medieval Notions of Witchcraft

One of the persistent notions about the Middle Ages is that people were constantly terrified about witches and that witch hunting was a common phenomenon in the period. The reality is quite different. The average medieval person probably did have a vague belief in witches and some fear that he or she could be a victim of witchcraft, probably the way that many modern Americans have a belief in serial killers and some vague fear that they could become a victim of one. But the surviving evidence from the medieval period suggests that this wasn’t a serious fear that obsessed people, the way films and tv shows typically present it.

Many communities probably had a small number of men and women that I will call ‘cunning folk’. The term is not really medieval (it’s mostly used in the period form the 15^th to the 20^th centuries), but it’s one of the terms modern scholars of witchcraft have adopted. Cunning folk were men and women who had unusual knowledge of semi-magical matters, such as the medicinal uses of plants, contraceptive and abortifacient techniques, the making of poisons and love charms, faith healing practices, how to find lost objects or predict the future, how to manipulate the weather, how to curse people and protect against curses, and so on. Different cunning folk appear to have specialized in one or two of these matters, and accepted payment in exchange for their assistance. These folk magical practices were used to help people deal with problems that were out of their direct control (such as medical problems and the weather). Such practices were not, by and large, illegal in the medieval period.

McEwan as Mortianna

What was illegal, however, was using such practices to inflict harm on another person, for example by causing crops to fail or making someone fall down a flight of stairs. Employed this way, folk magic could be charged in court as maleficia, the causing of harm by magical means. The issue here is not that using magic is inherently evil, it’s that harming a person is evil. Magic is simply understood as the tool through which evil was done. (If I kill you with my car, I may have commited vehicular homicide, but driving a car isn’t evil in itself.) So periodically, down into the 15^th century, we find secular courts charging people with maleficia. But in the surviving records, it’s not a common charge; I know of only a tiny handful of such cases across the entirety of medieval English history.

Nor was the medieval Church particularly worried about witches. As I noted in one of my posts on Salem, for much of the medieval period, the prevailing view among theologians is that witchcraft wasn’t really possible. If people thought they had performed magic, they were actually deluded. In particular the idea that old women could perform malevolent magic was discounted. That doesn’t mean that medieval clergy had no belief in magic at all; they often had a strong belief in astrology, in alchemy, in the hidden (‘occult’) properties of plants and minerals, and in the communication with spirits, who might have knowledge beyond what humans had. These forms of magic were seen as educated, and therefore more legitimate than folk magic.

However, in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, the ecclesiastical position on witchcraft began to change, for reasons that historians have still not managed to completely pin down. Intellectuals began to embrace the argument that magic was only possible through the assistance of the Devil, so that all forms of witchcraft were a form of Satanism. This led to an idea that witches were not simply cunning folk with specialized knowledge but were actually in active collusion with Satan. Whereas a cunning man or woman might commit maleficia for specific human reasons like envy or revenge, a Satanist witch was simply malevolent as a person (rather the way Hollywood presents serial killers as just figures of motiveless violence). This meant that any magic cunning folk employed could be evidence of Satanism, even if it wasn’t maleficia. And increasingly there was an assumption that witches did not operate alone; they taught other witches and operated in covens that periodically assembled to worship the Devil, fornicate, and plan evil.

But this evolution took about 300 years to happen, so that its major manifestations took place in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, not in the Middle Ages. It is not the Middle Ages that was obsessed with witches and witch hunting, it is the Early Modern period. The 15^th century was a transitional period, in which the number of witchcraft accusations began to climb, but there is no evidence of a ‘witch hunt’ during that period.

 

Mortianna

In RH:PoT, the witch is Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan), who is presented as a classic Early Modern stereotypical witch; she is an ugly old hag with a milky eye who lets toads and snakes roam freely in her rooms within Nottingham Castle. She’s Nottingham’s mother, so presumably she’s minor nobility. She mostly seems to predict the future, rather than performing curses or whatever. She also covers the altar of the castle’s chapel with magical paraphernalia, including a pentacle, knives, and, bizarrely, cobwebs. Early on in the film, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman) confronts Robin’s father as part of a group of white-robed, torch-carrying people. This looks a lot like 20^th century cinematic depictions of Satanist covens, but this group is never mentioned again and the film basically drops this plotline after that scene. So I think the audience is supposed to assume that Mortianna and Nottingham are part of a coven of witches who worship Satan, even though the film never directly explains this.

Nottingham and his coven

But as I’ve already explained, this is entirely out of place in late 12^th century England. The concept of Satanist witches and covens won’t even begin to emerge until the early 14^th century, and they are entirely fantasies anyway, with no evidence that anyone actually did such things. Given that Robin Hood is an entirely fictional character made up well after the 1190s, I suppose it’s no more egregious to depict the Sheriff of Nottingham as working with a Satanist witch, but it’s a pretty glaring anachronism.

However, the film does unintentionally suggest that Martianna has some pretty impressive magical powers. In the finale, Nottingham drags Marion (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) into the chapel, where the evil bishop of Hereford is waiting to marry them so Nottingham can legally rape her. Mortianna is with him, and he bars the door of the chapel. Robin (Kevin Costner) and Azeem (Morgan Freeman) get to the chapel but are unable to get in, and try unsuccessfully to batter the door down with a statue. So the film seems to establish that there is only one door between the chapel and the hallway outside.

Eventually Robin goes out a nearby window and manages to swing through one of the chapel’s windows. About the same time, Mortianna magically appears in the hallway where Azeem is still trying to get the door open; she comes charging down the hallway at him and stabs him in the leg with a spear. Then she notices he’s black and briefly thinks he’s the Devil. She runs away, Azeem successfully impales her with the spear, and she falls out the window. Later, after Robin has just killed Nottingham, Mortianna suddenly appears behind the altar, having magically teleported there instead of falling to her death. She tries to stab Robin with the spear, but Azeem miraculously kicks the door in (the one he’s been unable to open so far), and kills her by throwing his scimitar at her (apparently his scimitar is aerodynamically balanced for throwing, despite the absurdly wide head). So apparently Satan has given Mortianna the ability to teleport at will. Either that or the film’s ending is just nonsense. You’ll have to decide which is more likely.

 

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves [Double Sided]is available on Amazon.

One of the best studies of the shift from the folk magic model to the Satanic model of witchcraft is Richard Kieckhefer’s European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500. He documents the shift in the accusations at trials. It’s a bit old, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested in medieval witchcraft.

 

Salem: The Real Problem with the Show

Tags

Janet Montgomery, Mary Sibley, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, WGN, Witchcraft

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been using WGN’s Salem as an entry point into the Salem Witch Trials. I’ve pointed out problems with the show’s treatment of its putative location, its inaccurate depiction of the people involved, its misrepresentation of torture, and its failure to address the community tensions that probably played a large role in the Trials, as well as its probably accidental identification of factors that might have led to Mercy Lewis and other young women making their accusations. But for all the serious errors the show makes, I think the real problem lies elsewhere, with the very concept of the show.

Women and Witchcraft Accusations

For anyone who studies witch trials, one of the first things they notice is how disproportionately the charges tended to target women. From the 1960s, when quality scholarship about witch trials first started, down through the 1980s, it was generally said that virtually all accused witches were women. Authors in that period, often feminists who were not actually scholars, asserted that witch trials were explicitly about misogyny, and that the witch trials were a women’s Holocaust.

By the 1990s, detailed statistical studies had modified that perception a little; across all of Europe in the 16^th through 18^th centuries, roughly 80% of defendants in witch trials were women. But there was some variation. In some regions nearly all defendants were women: Basel, Switzerland: 95%; Essex, England and Namur, Belgium, about 92%.But elsewhere numbers were somewhat lower; in parts of Scotland, Germany, and France, the figure is between 72 and 82%, and in Spain it was 71%.Even more strikingly, in Freiburg, Switzerland, it was 64% and in Waadtland, Switzerland, it was 58%. In Normandy, France, only one of four defendants was a woman, and in Iceland, all defendants were male. Assertions that witch hunting was about nothing more complex than male hatred of women can’t be supported in face of such statistics, but clearly gender was an extremely important factor in European beliefs about who witches were.

Not all women were equally vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. While there are always some outliers in the data, the typical accused witch was an older woman, between 50 and 70. She was also likely to be either a widow or an unmarried woman (termed a singlewoman by scholars). In one French trial 58% of all the accused were widows. Poverty was a third common characteristic, although to some extent that was a common quality that older widows and unmarried women tended to share. A less-commonly accused group were younger women with a reputation for sexual promiscuity. It is not uncommon to see an older unmarried woman and her younger illegitimate daughter both accused. Patterns mean something, and historians have devoted much energy to trying to make sense of these patterns around witchcraft accusations. What was it that made older, unmarried, poor, and sexually promiscuous women more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men or married women?

The literature on this is truly enormous, and if you really want to dig into it, take my class on witchcraft sometime. Some theories, such as the idea that witches were mostly female medical practitioners, have been exploded because there is little factual basis for them. Some scholars have theorized that accusations had a ‘social function’ of keeping women in line with community standards, but Social Function Theory sees social functions are being almost mechanical; to work it needs to happen regularly and constantly, the way that ‘fag jokes’ and student aggression against less masculine boys in high school serve to reinforce behavioral gender norms. But witchcraft accusations were neither constant not regular; communities could go decades without seeing a witch trial and then suddenly experience a surge of them, only to see the trials fade away a few months or a year later.

The late historian Christina Larner argued that witchcraft accusations were not sex-specific, but sex-related. In other words, witch-hunters were seeking out witches, not women, but their ideas about witches were so intimately tied into ideas about women that far more women than men were likely to be accused. That doesn’t explain places like Normandy and Iceland, where most accused were men, but it provides a helpful handle on the problem to explain at least some of the issues.

Going back at least as far as Classical Greece and Roman, there was a strong tendency to associate women with witchcraft, because the things that tended to be considered witchcraft were things that women were thought to use to circumvent male control. Love potions and love curses were seen as ways that women tried to control male desire, and poison was understood to be a woman’s weapon because they were not strong enough to physically confront their opponents. Abortifacients enabled a woman to cover up an illicit affair, and thereby evade male control over women’s bodies. The stereotype of the witch as an old hag was already deeply embedded in Western thought by the end of the Roman period. So notice how major elements of this begin to explain why some women were being accused in the 17^th century.

Both Classical and Medieval authors tended to assume that women were morally weaker than men, and therefore more liable to succumb to temptation. Early Christian theologians like Tertullian and St. Jerome strongly linked women to lust and vanity, two sins that Tertullian explicitly associated with witchcraft. Tertullian established the notion that all women were inheritors of the moral guilt of Eve, who had given in to Satan’s temptation (in fact, the Bible never claims that Satan was present at Eve’s fall, but Tertullian gave Latin theology a pretty strong shove in that direction, which is why people tend to read Genesis 3 as involving Satan). Medieval authors like Andreas Capellanus accused women of being inherently envious, given to slander, and rebellious against male authority. And in the 15^th century, we start to see ideas about witches engaged in sexual relationships with the Devil.

An early 16th century image of Adam and Eve. Note the focus on Eve’s sexuality.

So by the end of the 15^th century, a picture of witches had emerged as primarily being people who were envious of others, given to arguing and slander, insufficiently submissive to both divine and male authority, lustful, promiscuous, and manipulative. While all of these qualities could be applied to men, they were all most typically associated with women.

One consequence of this pattern is that women who tended to be quarrelsome or litigious toward their neighbors or family, instead of being properly submissive, might find eventually themselves eventually being accused of witchcraft, not by their opponents, but by other members of the community who saw their quarrels and lawsuits as the sort of behavior that witches typically engaged in. In other words, women who failed to fit the demure, submissive role expected of women in this period might open themselves up to accusations of witchcraft. Carol Karlsen found considerable evidence for this in New England; a sizeable number of those accused of witchcraft in colonial New England as a whole had at some point been involved in an inheritance dispute, for example.

So modern scholarship has emphasized that the women who were accused of witchcraft were not in fact guilty of any activity related to witchcraft, although some may have engaged in folk magic of various kinds. Instead, these women fell victim to deeply misogynistic ideas about women as naturally given to certain forms of evil and sinful behavior, such as lust; rebellion against husbandly, paternal, or religious authority; and envy. The only thing the accused women had done was fail to confirm to their society’s rules about proper female behavior.

A Moral Trainwreck in Slow-Motion

Unfortunately, Salem has serious problems with the way it navigates this issue. At the start of the show, it makes a big point of saying that the people getting executed for witchcraft are innocent. Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery) explicitly says that the witches’ plot requires the death of a number of innocent people. So when the pilot opens, three people have already been hung for witchcraft and Giles Quarry is pressed to death unjustly. In the next episode, the innocent Bridget Bishop is executed when Mary uses her magic to deform an already dead fetus that Bridget is trying to birth. Then Mercy Lewis and her posse orchestrate the accusation against the innocent but horrible father of one of the girls. Then Mary and Mercy orchestrate the execution of the innocent Barkers.

Janet Montgomery as Mary Sibley

So the show initially seemed to be aware of the problem of saying that the people executed at Salem were actually guilty. With the exception of the first three anonymous victims, all those executed were actual historical people, although historically the Barkers dodged execution by confessing to being witches.

But then the real witches start getting caught up in the search. The brothel-keeper Mab gets caught and commits suicide, and Mary’s evil mentor Rose gets caught, although it’s Mercy who finally kills her. Mercy’s gang of girls gets captured and tortured, and then Mercy accuses Tituba, who is tortured by Increase Mather. So by the end of the season, the show has forgotten to only orchestrate accusations against innocents. Although most of these women are fictional, other than Tituba, the show shows that some of those who were apprehended, tortured, and killed were actually guilty.

Tituba being tortured

Even worse, the actual witches in the series conform quite well to the 17^th century stereotypes of witches. With the exception of Magistrate Hale (Xander Berkeley), all the real witches are women. Rose is an old woman, and there is a group of elderly and hideously deformed witch women who live out in the forest. Mary Sibley is rebellion personified; she wishes to overthrow the Puritans of Salem, she has cast a magical spell on her husband to render him a total invalid, she commits adultery against him (as well as fornication and abortion during the pilot), and she has seized control of the Salem government. Mercy similarly craves power, knowingly accuses an innocent man, grows envious of Tituba, and by the end of the season is plotting some sort of rebellion of the disaffected youth of Salem. In other words, Salem actually affirms that Puritan fear that there were witches around, and it affirms that witches were exactly the way that the Puritans thought they were. If the women of Salem were all properly submissive, the show would literally have no plot.

Given that the Salem Witch Trials were one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history, the idea that the witch hunters were actually right about everything except who their targets were is incredibly offensive. Imagine, if you will, a TV show in which the Nazis were somehow right that there actually was an international conspiracy of Jews to destroy Germany, and that Hitler and his cronies were actually unwitting dupes of the sinister Jews who sent them after other, innocent Jews as part of some grand scheme for the Jews to seize power, and that those tragically misguided Nazi were sometimes killing evil Jews as well as innocent ones. That’s basically the plot of Salem. Put in those terms, it’s an appalling show. Pretty much the only thing that keeps the show for descending into total moral putridity is that it emphasizes that Bishop, Quarry, and the Barkers were actually innocent.

The show is trying to pursue too many shades of grey. It wants Mary Sibley, the main character of the show, to be both a villain and a good guy at the same time. It has her leading a plot that, if properly pulled off, will apparently kill an appalling number of people. It has her orchestrating the deaths of innocent men and women to advance that plot. And yet she’s conflicted because she truly loves John Alden and so she starts having second thoughts, causing the other witches to start turning against her in various ways.

Perhaps the most obvious place where the show can’t figure out how to handle Mary is the episode with Bridget Bishop. One of the town prostitutes is pregnant and in labor, and Mary wants to use this situation to ruin Bridget. So she casts a spell to horribly deform the fetus, which is already dead. So orchestrating an innocent woman’s death is acceptable, but aborting a live fetus or causing a stillbirth is too heinous an action for the show. She needs to be evil, but not that evil. It’s interesting that killing a live woman is ok, but killing an unborn child is beyond the pale. What’s particularly interesting is that at this point in the show, Mary and the viewers falsely think that she’s aborted her own illicit child. Right at the end of the season, that turns out to not be the case. I guess a villain can abort her child, but not someone else’s, but in order to redeem her, her baby has to get un-aborted.

Bridget Bishop

Similarly, Magistrate Hale is an evil man who’s actually sort of good. He’s a willing participant in this plot that will killed lots of people. But he’s also a loving family man whose primary motive is that he saw witch hunters kill his parents and now he wants to create a place where his people (that it, the witches) can live free and in the open. That’s all well and good, but the show has already established that his people are evil murderers. Again, it’s sort of as if his goal is to create a state in which the Nazis can murder Jews in peace. I’m not against moral nuance; I love well-written morally grey characters, because most human beings are morally grey in different ways. I love morally complex villains and heroes who have moral flaws. The problem is that the show isn’t doing morally grey characters; it’s trying to make explicitly evil people the good guys.

In other words, the show is actually a total mess morally. It can’t resist the temptation to lionize characters who are doing genuinely evil actions. It validates some of the worst misogynistic stereotypes of Western Civilization, and comes perilously close to suggesting that some of the people who died at Salem actually deserved their deaths. Pardon me while I sit over here in the corner and be quietly appalled.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

Carol Karlsen’s book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New Englandabsolutely dazzled me when I first read it. If you only read one book on New England Witch Trials, make it this book.

The late Christina Larner’s most important work is probably Enemies Of God: The Witch-Hunt In Scotland. 

Salem: The Tensions Beneath the Accusations

Tags

Paul Boyer, Religious Issues, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Stephen Nissenbaum, Witchcraft

When I first started discussing Salem, I looked at the way the series misunderstood Salem as a place. I’ve also mentioned how Salem omits one of the key figures in the Witch Panic, Rev. Samuel Parris. After a lot of intervening posts, it’s time to tackle why those omissions are such a big deal.

A House Divided

I’ve already explained that Salem was actually two communities, the larger, more prosperous Salem Town and the smaller, more agricultural Salem Village. Salem Town had reluctantly allowed Salem Village to have its own church (or ‘meeting place’), reluctantly because the church and its minister were supported by taxes, so a new church meant that Salem Town would be losing tax revenue from Salem Village. The Town had only done this because the Massachusetts Legislature had authorized the new church. So this new church was a focus on considerable tension with the wider Salem community.

And, in fact, the question of who was to serve as the minister of Salem Village’s new church was extremely contentious. In 1673, Rev. James Bayley was appointed minister, but left 7 years later, amid accusations that he wasn’t praying enough and that church members had not been allowed to participate in his selection. He was replaced with Rev. George Burroughs, who was ousted in 1683 and ultimately wound up moving to the Maine frontier. Burroughs was succeeded by Rev. Deodat Lawson. He stayed for four very turbulent years before departing in 1688. His successor was Rev. Samuel Parris, who was eventually forced out in 1696 because members of the church who opposed him were refusing to pay the taxes for his salary. The constant disputes are not entirely understood, but it is clear that Salem Village was split into two factions, those who supported Bayley and Burroughs and those who supported Lawson and Parris, which each side opposing and complaining about the other.

Samuel Parris

In 1974, historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum published a very important work, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. In it, they worked to untangle the religious politics of Salem in the 1680s and 90s, and what they found is that during the Witch Trials those Villagers who supported Lawson and Parris tended to be bringing accusations of witchcraft against those who supported Bayley and Burroughs. Indeed, Rev. Burroughs was himself accused of being the leader of the witches, initially by Abigail Williams and then later by Mary Walcott, Susannah Sheldon, and Mercy Lewis. He was forcibly brought back from the Maine frontier to stand trial, and was eventually found guilty and executed that August. But the supporters of Bayley and Burroughs were not bringing accusations against the supporters of Lawson and Parris. This suggests that there was something distinct about the former group that was leading them to fear witchcraft.

Boyer and Nissenbaum mapped out the residences of those involved, and found that a majority of the accusers came from the western half of the Village, which was the more rural side, while a majority of those accused, as well as those who spoke in defense of them at the trials, lived on the eastern half of the Village, closer to Salem Town. Furthermore, the accusers mostly tended to be farmers by occupation, whereas large numbers of the accused witches were tradesmen and craftsmen, including a carpenter, a shoe-maker, a miller, and a sawmill operator. Several of them, such as Bridget Bishop, ran taverns. In other words, the accused tended to be somewhat better off economically, enjoy more social and commercial contacts with Salem Town, and engage in occupations directly tied to the growing commercial world of Boston and Salem Town, while the accused tended to struggling members of a more traditional rural economy. Puritans in particular considered taverns highly suspect places where immoral activity went on.

Boyer and Nissenbaum’s map. A for ‘accuser’, D for defender of an accused witch, W in a circle for an accused witch

Since that pattern tended to also manifest in the question of who supported which ministers, Boyer and Nissenbaum suggested that Salem Village was a community divided between those who were suspicious of the economic transformation taking place in late 17^th century Massachusetts and those who had found it a source of economic opportunities. The ‘traditionalists’ had been uncomfortable with Bayley and Burroughs and succeeded in forcing them out and installing first Lawson and then Parris because they suspected the first two ministers because they seemed insufficiently traditional in some way, perhaps because their supporters were too ready to embrace economic change.

The Problem of the Quakers

Another thing that troubled the Puritans of Salem Village was that they and their ancestors had come to New England to get away from what they considered the ungodly society of England. Not only was England wealthy, it was home to numerous different brands of Christianity. The Puritans were strict Congregationalists who felt that the Anglicans were too moderate and willing to compromise on religious matters. They also loathed the much more religiously liberal Quakers, who maintained that every person possessed an inner divine light, which to the Puritans seemed dangerously close to saying that God was in all people and might therefore speak through anyone. The Quakers had earned their derisive nickname by a tendency of some members to ‘quake’ when they felt the Holy Spirit within them. Such religious shaking looked rather like the seizures that those afflicted by witchcraft sometimes experienced.

The oldest Quaker Meeting House in the US, in Flushing, NY

As a result, the Massachusetts Colony had initially been extremely hostile to Quakers, arresting them, ordering them whipped, and in the 1650s and 60s, hanging them. The Puritans were determined to keep out what they saw as the diabolical Quakers. But when Massachusetts received a new charter from James II in the mid-1680s, it granted religious toleration to all Protestants, meaning that Quakers now enjoyed legal protection and could not be violently forced out of the community. By 1692, the largest community of Quakers in Essex County was located in Salem Town, and Quaker communities had sprung up in neighboring communities as well. Accused witches frequently had Quaker connections, but were not generally Quakers themselves. For example, Rebecca Nurse had taken in an orphaned Quaker child, while Elizabeth Proctor had numerous Quaker relatives. And, as one historian has demonstrated, Quakers tended to live in the eastern half of Salem Village.

So if we pull all of this together, what we see is that Salem Village had a significant faction of traditionalist Puritans who saw themselves struggling economically as farmers; increasing settlement meant that the farmers had fewer opportunities to expand their farms. Even if the stormy weather of 1692 didn’t cause ergotism, it may well have caused poor harvests and similar problems. These traditionalists saw themselves losing their social position to people whose occupations and economic activities seemed religiously suspect. They were seeing rising numbers of Quakers appearing in the colony, and could no longer keep them out or express their distaste for Quakers through legal persecution. They saw these religious and economic changes as signs they were losing ‘their’ Salem to the forces of Satan, and because the two sides of Salem Village were geographically and socially quite distinct, they had fewer chances to interact and see their opponents as human beings. They had won a few victories over the issue of which minister would lead them, but their preferred candidates were being contested by their opponents. And then, in 1692, a group of teenage girls began to experience strange symptoms and claimed that some of the non-traditionalists were witches. Seen in that context, the Witch Panic makes a lot more sense.

To appreciate the anxiety the Quakers caused, one only has to think about the considerable anxiety that the spread of Islamic immigrants has caused in some sections of contemporary American society. Like Salem, modern America is experiencing a growth of religious pluralism and some traditionalists are extremely uncomfortable with that development. Some traditionalists call directly for the restriction of religious rights to Christians, but others express their anxiety a bit more indirectly through worries about ‘terrorism’. While there are certainly many differences between witches and terrorists (not least of which is that terrorists actually exist), they are both easily demonizable figures who cannot be compromised with because of the danger they are seen to pose.

The Salem Witch Trials are a fascinating set of events. They have engaged the attention of many serious scholars and enthusiastic amateurs for generations, and hopefully these posts have given you a sense of why they are so compelling and worthy of study. The work of scholars like Walter Stephens, Carol Karlsen, Paul Boyer, and Stephen Nissenbaum have reveled a truly complex set of social, economic, religious, and cultural forces (and I’ve only scratched the surface of the issues).

And yet, WGN’s Salem ignores most of this in favor of an entirely fabricated, historically inaccurate, lurid tale of actual witches plotting evil and working actual magic. The show runner and writers have taken a rich, fascinating story and replaced it with juvenile pabulum. In a few places they’ve gotten bits right; there’s a passing line in one episode about how the Puritans are losing control of the town and are afraid, but that’s a throwaway line that goes nowhere. And while they’ve managed to replicate part of what’s going on with the teenage girls of Salem, I think that was basically blind luck.

I entirely understand that in order to succeed, a television show has to be interesting and engaging to its audience. It has to give them a reason to turn in week after week. But the actual Salem Witch Trials are interesting and engaging. The unembellished facts have held people’s attention for 3 centuries now and show no signs of becoming boring. Instead of throwing out the facts and making a new story out of whole cloth, Salem could have woven its lurid intrigues around the real characters and events. They didn’t have to lead Mercy Lewis through town in bondage gear to make her seizures and accusations shocking.

The past is a fascinating place. It would be nice of American television actually went there occasionally.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

When I was a first semester freshman, I took a course in American History before the Civil War. It was my first college history course, and one of the textbooks was After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. Its various chapters are dedicated to introducing various interesting historical issues to college students, and its second chapter, on Salem, introduced me to the work of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. That chapter is probably what I remember most clearly from that class (apart from everyone humming the Preamble to the Constitution when we had to write it on an exam). If you’re looking for an easy introduction to historical methods and American history, this is an excellent book.

Or you could buy Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.

Salem: One Thing the Show Gets Right

Tags

Carol F. Karlsen, Colonial America, Linnda R. Caporael, Mary Warren, Mercy Lewis, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Sarah Churchill, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Witchcraft

The Salem Witch Trials are one of the great historical puzzles. What led a group of mostly teenaged girls to accuse their neighbors of having bewitched them? The problem is a remarkably complex one, and one worth looking at.

In the Salem series, the first accuser that we see is Mercy Lewis (Elise Eberle), who in the pilot is being tormented by Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery). Mary has magical control over Mercy, so when Cotton Mather tries to use Mercy to sniff out witches, Mercy accuses the innocent Giles Quarry. Later, Mercy breaks free of Mary’s control and a group of young girls ask her to accuse on of their fathers, who is a drunk who abuses his daughter; this time Mercy makes the accusation freely and with full knowledge that the man is not a witch. Then Mary approaches Mercy and offers to train her a witch, which Mercy agrees to. Later, Mercy recruits several other girls to become witches in training. The season ends with her recruiting a small army of disaffected youth. But, as I’ve shown, the series gets almost everything wrong. So let’s turn to the actual accusations and how historians have tried to make sense of them.

The first histories of the Salem Witch trials were written in the middle of the 18^th century, and although they were only two to three generations removed from the events, an enormous shift had taken place in the colonial mindset. Whereas a majority of colonists accepted the reality of witchcraft in 1692, by the 1750s, very few people still seriously believed in witches. This left the historians of the day with a problem; if witches were not real, why did Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr. and the other girls bring the accusations in the first place? Some scholars adopted an early version of Linnda R. Caporael’s theory that the problem was medical in nature; the girls were suffering from some illness that made them imagine they were being tormented by witches.

But Thomas Hutchinson took a different approach. He argued that the girls were guilty of intentional fraud. He suggested that they had initially just wanted some sympathy from the community, and that adults had started bringing charges to avoid becoming the targets of accusation. In other words, it was a sort of game that got out of hand. 19^th century historians, steeped in the rationalism of the day, followed Hutchinson’s line of argument and attributed the accusations to fraud, attention seeking, and similar factors. Basically, they felt that the afflicted were just naughty girls who let things get disastrously out of hand and found themselves riding a tiger that eventually turned and bit some of them.

There is definitely good reason to see fraud as an element in the accusations. On one occasion, Susannah Sheldon was found with her wrists tied tightly. Rev. Deodat Lawson’s account says that a couple of girls were found with their wrists tied and hanging from hooks such that they had to be lifted. It’s hard to see how this could be anything except an intentional act of deception. Mary Warren, one of the afflicted girls, at one point claimed that the other girls were faking their symptoms; when the other girls began to accuse Warren of witchcraft, she withdrew her claim and resumed her role as accuser. Similarly, Sarah Churchill told a friend that she had been lying, but that she couldn’t change her story after such a long time, because the authorities would not believe her.

However, in the 20^th century, the growth of modern psychology, particularly Freud’s argument that humans are not fully rational beings, has led many historians to consider the possibility that the girls were suffering from some form of mass psychopathology, such as mass hysteria. (This is not the same thing as being mentally ill; if a society recognizes a concept such as demonic possession, it is rational and sane for some members of that society to demonstrate the symptoms of possession.) Some of their symptoms were so extreme that they astounded those who saw them. Many of the girls experienced convulsions so extreme that they seemed to defy anatomical possibility, and on some occasions, several men were required to physically restrain the violent thrashings of teenage girls. Many of the girls were periodically rendered incapable of speaking or experienced a choking sensation, while fits of blindness are also sometimes mentioned. These symptoms—physical contortions, violent thrashing, the inability to speak, the sensation of choking or a lump rising in the throat, temporary blindness—are all recognized symptoms of hysteria today.

A 19th century drawing of a patient with hysterical convulsions

So we are left with a situation in which some of the symptoms the girls displayed may well be legitimate symptoms of a temporary psychopathology, while other evidence points to willful fraud. When Mary Warren broke away from the group of accusers and began to recant, the other girls seem to have pressured her into returning to the fold. That would seem a paint a picture of the girls as being at least partly conscious of their performance as afflicted victims of witchcraft and partly genuine victims of some condition they could not fully understand or control.

Let’s Look at the Accusers

Historian Carol F. Karlsen, in her impressive witchcraft study The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, surveys all known cases of witchcraft accusation in colonial New England, and focuses considerable attention on the demographics of those accusers who were considered possessed. Out of 78 such people, 67 of them (86%) were women. In contrast, non-possessed accusers (what I referred to in a previous post as ‘secondary accusers’) had a much more even gender ratio. So that suggests that something was different or special about the possessed or afflicted accusers.

Carol F. Karlsen

Looking at them more closely, Karlsen noticed that they tended to be clustered in the 16 to 25 year-old range, and tended to be unmarried. (In this and my other posts on Salem, I collectively refer to the afflicted as ‘girls’ for simplicity’s sake. Many of them were legally adults but lacked the chief social marker of womanhood of the day, namely marriage.) This pattern holds true at Salem. Only a few of them, chiefly Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and Ann Putnam Jr., were below that age range, and only Ann Putnam Sr was substantially older or married. Among non-possessed accusers, there was a tendency for accuser and accused witch to have had a prior antagonistic interaction, but among possessed accusers, the social relationship seems to have been minimal. In other words, while it is possible that non-possessed accusers were influenced by previous negative encounters with those they accused, possessed accusers do not show any signs of playing out an established hostility to those they accused.

When Karlsen narrowed her focus specifically to the Salem trials, she noticed something even more interesting about afflicted girls there. Of the 24 afflicted girls over 16 but still unmarried, 13 had lost their father and 4 others had lost their mother, whereas among all non-possessed accusers in that age group, only 25% had lost a parent. Most of the afflicted girls at Salem had originally come from small settlements in Maine territory that had been attacked by Native Americans. As orphaned refugees they had come to Salem and were therefore socially newcomers. Some were living with relatives, but many had been taken in by strangers out of Christian charity. Most of them were being employed as servants by the families that had taken them in.

A few examples demonstrate this pattern. Sarah Churchill had come from a wealthy Maine family and was now living as a servant to George Jacobs Sr (whom she accused of witchcraft); her wealthy grandfather had been killed in an attack by Wabanakis, and her father had been forced to become a refugee. She was living in Salem because she had relatives there, but she was not living with them. Mercy Lewis was not, as Salem depicts, the daughter of a local minister; rather she was the daughter of a poor family from Falmouth, Maine, who was now living as a servant in the household of Rev. George Burroughs; she was the only survivor among her whole family of a Wabanaki attack. Later, she was a servant to the Putnams. Elizabeth Hubbard was living as a servant in the household of her great-aunt, Rachel Griggs, whose husband was the town physician. Mary Warren was a servant of John and Elizabeth Proctor. Mary Watkins apparently came from a wealthier family, but was living as a servant at the time of the Witch panic. After she was jailed during the trial (having at one point accused herself of witchcraft), she struggled to claim her inheritance from her father and a brother because her family would not provide her bail; she eventually filed a petition asking to be sold as an indentured servant.

Note how close Wabanaki territory was to colonial Massachusetts and Salem

As Karlsen demonstrates, one of the common characteristics that many of the possessed accusers shared was that they were economically vulnerable; they were orphans, unmarried, and poor, and therefore probably quite worried about their future work and marriage prospects. The influx of refugees into Salem and other nearby communities meant that sex ratios in the area had skewed; there were more women of marrying age than men, which meant that some women were unlikely to ever get married. In a society in which marriage was the main respectable ‘occupation’ for women, and unmarried servants did not make enough to live independently, many of the afflicted girsl at Salem were looking at a future in which they could expect to remain low-status domestic servants for the foreseeable future. For a girl like Sarah Churchill, who had apparently come from wealth, that was surely a very difficult prospect to contemplate. In this context, the fact that Betty Parris and Abigail Williams performed a Venus Glass ritual to see the face of their future husbands takes on a very different significance.

In at least some cases, there is evidence that the afflicted girls resented their position as servants. John Proctor initially refused to believe that Mary Warren had been possessed, and warned her that she would be beaten if her symptoms interfered with her spinning work. He told her that if her seizures threw her into the fire or water, that she would not be pulled out. Sarah Churchill claimed that her 80-year-old employer had regularly beaten her with his cane when he was not satisfied with her work. Although I haven’t found any reference to Lewis claiming she had been beaten by George Burroughs, she did accuse him of being a witch. What these cases suggest is that the possessed girls at Salem may have felt a powerful sense of discontent and resentment at their current social situation.

The Last Temptation of Elizabeth Knapp

Karlsen then turns her attention to the case of Elizabeth Knapp, who experienced possession in 1672. Her minister employer, Rev. Samuel Willard, wrote a detailed account of her case. Knapp’s symptoms sound quite like the Salem cases; she experienced seizures and uncontrollable screaming, and attempted to accuse an elderly woman of bewitching her. Willard, however, refused to accept the accusation and pressured her to reveal the true cause of her fits. Knapp then declared that the Devil had appeared to her several times, tempting her to become a witch, in return for which he promised her money, fine clothes, release from chores, and the like. She admitted that he had come to her because she was discontented with her situation and that his appearances had become more numerous after she had become a domestic servant for Willard. As her fits went on, she alternated between claiming to have become a witch and denying that she given into that temptation. Sometimes she lost her voice entirely. When Willard essentially blamed her for having called the Devil to her by her discontent, she attempted suicide, began striking people, and then had a severe seizure in which the Devil spoke through her, calling Willard a rogue and a liar. Ultimately, Willard helped Knapp reject the Devil and accept the social situation that God had led her to. Knapp went on to marry and become a model of Christian womanhood.

Rev. Samuel Willard

For Karlsen, Willard’s narrative is about the psychological struggle that Elizabeth Knapp experienced. She was unhappy with her situation as a servant, and understood her discontent to be a form of diabolical temptation, because discontent was sinful. Knapp believed that her dissatisfaction was a doorway through which Satan had attempted to recruit her into the ranks of his witches, but ultimately, she was able to overcome her temptations, reject Satan and witchcraft, and embrace God’s will and her social situation. Karlsen feels that Knapp’s extreme symptoms were a physical acting out of her emotional distress, channeled into a culturally-acceptable experience of demonic possession. Karlsen argues that for Puritans, the experience of “possession was not itself witchcraft, only the potential for witchcraft.” In other words, girls who experienced seizures and similar symptoms had been targeted for recruitment into the ranks of the witches but did not truly want to join that evil sisterhood.

None of the possessed girls at Salem was the subject of so detailed a spiritual account as Elizabeth Knapp, but Karlsen argues that Knapp’s experiences are the key to understanding what drove the accusations of the possessed girls at Salem. She argues that they were young women struggling with feelings of fear, resentment, and anger over their lowly status. She points out that Rev. Hale commented that several of them were worried about their marriage prospects. Some may have been emotionally traumatized by the violence they saw in Maine. They may have experienced feelings of anger toward their employers, and then possibly a sense of guilt over being angry at men and women who were ostensibly offering them Christian charity through employment. Some may also have been experiencing the awaking of sexual desire, feelings that Puritan society considered sinful. Discontent was itself understood to be sinful, a form of rebellion against both God and the male head of the household. Rebellion against any social authority was seen as one of the worst sins a woman could commit. Since witches were classically understood to be envious, rebellious, and overtly sexual, these girls may well have understood their feelings to be signs of being tempted to engage in witchcraft. Both Sarah Churchill and Mary Warren did, at different moments, confess to having become witches, only to later recant (a pattern we have already seen with Elizabeth Knapp).

In addition to serving as an explanation for their sinful feelings, possession appears to have had two other benefits for the possessed. First, it elevated their social status by making them the objects of attention and sympathy, and granting them a form of social power. Their mysterious symptoms brought them a good deal of concern and the sympathy of their employers and friends. As people began to take their accusations of witchcraft seriously, the possessed experienced a sense of social empowerment and importance, whereas previously they felt disempowered and unimportant. People were listening to them and arresting the women and men they accused. Thus possession relieved at least some of their social anxieties.

At the same time, possession gave them exemption from the conventions of Puritan behavior. Seizures and fits gave them an acceptable way of avoiding work without being seen as lazy, although not in Mary Warren’s case. More importantly, it allowed them to say and do things that would have been utterly sinful and blasphemous for normal girls. They swore, they cursed their elders, and they spit on their employers. They shrieked and writhed instead of being demure and quiet in public. They uttered blasphemies, threw Bibles across the room, refused to listen to prayers or Scripture readings, and disrupted church services. So possession gave the possessed a chance to violate proper Christian behavior without being personally guilty of misbehavior. Thus it allowed them to dramatize their spiritual crisis and give vent to that crisis at the same time.

However, the benefits of possession could only continue as long the girls could display their symptoms. As Karlsen points out, possession is often a social phenomenon; it occurs in groups more than in isolated individuals, and the victims often learn their behavior from watching other victims. As one girl ‘discovered’ a new symptom, it could spread to other girls. They policed each other, so that when Mary Warren began to recant, the other girls forced her back into a more proper performance of victimhood. And sometimes it was necessary to counterfeit symptoms, for example when Susannah Sheldon was found with her wrists tied, and then later when several girls were found with their wrists tied and hanging from hooks. On one occasion, Mary Warren and other girls were found with pins stuck in their bodies. It seems likely that these were voluntary symptoms, but ones which the girls may have genuinely believed in, since they felt that they were being tempted to act as witches. Thus the girls were not exactly ‘faking’ their symptoms so much as seeking ways to perform the role they had found themselves in.

To me, Karlsen’s explanation of what was driving the afflicted girls’ experiences is far more persuasive than Linnda Caporael’s ideas that they were simply sick with ergotism. Karlsen’s theory accounts for a far widely range of behaviors than Caporael’s, and takes into account many more of the common features of the girls, such as why it was mostly young female servants who were afflicted and why so many of the girls were orphans. It offers us a window into the social, religious, and economic dynamics of Salem and gives us an interpretative tool for making sense of Puritan society more generally. It takes account of the wider context of the accusations, such as the attacks on the Maine settlements and the skewing of the colonial marriage market. And it connects the accusations at Salem to the many other witchcraft accusations in colonial New England.

So What Does the Show Get Right?

Salem unintentionally replicates the connection between possession, social rebellion, and witchcraft that lies at the heart of Karlsen’s interpretation. Although we don’t see the beginning of Mercy Warren’s affliction, and although Mercy is not depicted as being economically vulnerable or a servant, Mary Sibley does in fact approach Mercy to become a witch. Initially, Mercy is Mary’s puppet pure and simple, but early in the season, Mercy throws off Mary’s control, and at that point, Mary approaches her and offers to end the torture and teach her witchcraft if she will support Mary’s plans. In other words, Mary offers Mercy exactly the deal that Elizabeth Knapp thought that Satan was offering her.

Mary begins teaching Mercy to be a witch

At the same time, Mercy is approached by a group of young girls who point out to Mercy that she has become one of the most powerful women in Salem; when Mercy speaks, people listen to her. This sense of empowerment is presented as being a major reason why Mercy decides to accept Mary’s offer. This too is exactly in line with Karlsen’s reading of the possessed girls. Although Mercy is not shown as resenting her social disempowerment, the moment her empowerment is pointed out to her, it becomes something she craves.

In the same episode, Mercy and her coterie intentionally fabricate an accusation against one of the girl’s fathers, a drunk who beats her and takes the money she makes from singing, and who is planning to sell her to the whorehouse. In doing this they are essentially rebelling against authority, although it’s presented as a corrupt paternal authority that deserves rebelling against. Later in the season, Mercy uses the Venus Glass ritual to trigger more false accusations, this time against the Barkers, an entirely innocent family. Increase Mather burns the Barkers in an action that literally subverts justice, although only the witches understand this. In fact, the series makes the point that, for the witches’ plan to work, they must engineer the executions of a dozen innocent people, so the witches are intentionally working to rebel against justice.

Mary Sibley is also in a state of literal rebellion against her husband, having taken control of him by means of a toad familiar that she feeds to George against his will. Her witchcraft has made her the wealthiest woman in Salem, just as the Devil promised Elizabeth Knapp. She engages in both premarital and later adulterous sex with John Alden. In fact, by being so powerful in Salem, Mary is an exact match for the Puritan notion of the witch as a woman who cannot accept the ‘natural’ submission of women to male authority. Even Magistrate Hale, her fellow witch, is unable to control her.

Finally, Mercy becomes the focus for all the discontented youth of Salem. She lures her coterie into practicing magic and worshipping the Devil, and in the final episode she issues a call for all the disaffected teens of Salem, male and female, to rally to her cause. As Puritans saw it, that is exactly why people became witches.

Mercy and her coterie worshipping the Devil

So while Salem gets nearly everything about the Salem Witch Trials wrong, the show has, I think entirely by accident, managed to dramatize precisely what Puritans thought caused people to turn to witchcraft. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

Carol Karlsen’s book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New Englandabsolutely dazzled me when I first read it. Her argument is so well-constructed and draws off so much evidence that I immediately found myself persuaded. If you only read one book on New England Witch Trials, make it this book.

Salem: What the Problem Wasn’t

Tags

Ann Putnam, Colonial America, Ergotism, Linnda R. Caporael, Rev. Samuel Parris, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Thomas Putnam, Witchcraft

In my last post, I said I would start exploring what caused the moral panic that underlay in the Witch Trials in this post. But then a reader asked a question on my Facebook page (which you should Like) and it’s prompted me to make a slight detour to address one of the common ideas about the Salem trials that circulates among the general public but which historians mostly reject: the idea that the trials were caused by ergot poisoning or ergotism.

Ergotism is a condition caused by, among other things, the accidental consumption of ergot rot, the fungus Claviceps purpurea, which grows on rye and other grains (including wheat and barley) in warm, moist weather. Ergot produces alkaloids that are precursors to LSD, so ergotism can produce hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD (in fact, Albert Hoffman first isolated LSD from ergot). It is also a vasoconstrictor (meaning that it narrows the arteries and restricts blood flow), which is the reason it is sometimes used in modern pharmacology.

Ergot fungus growing on barley

Ergotism has three types of symptoms. It produces a variety of convulsive effects, include seizures, diarrhea, itching, nausea, headaches, vomiting, and mental issues like confusion, mania and psychosis. Because it is a vasoconstrictor, it also produces dry gangrene in poorly-vascularized body parts, chiefly the digits and the hands and feet, causing skin discoloration, peeling skin, neuropathy (pain or numbness in body parts), formication (the feeling of bugs crawling on or under the skin), edema (the retention of fluid in body parts, leading to swelling), the rotting of affected body parts, and in some cases death. Finally, because it contains LSD precursors, those affected sometimes see hallucinations such as halos or auras.

Ergot poisoning was a recurrent problem in Western society down into the 19^th century. In parts of medieval Europe, it was known as St. Anthony’s Fire, although that term can also refer to erysipelas as well (especially in the British Isles). If the ergot rot is not noticed when grain is harvested, it can sometimes be inadvertently ground up when the grain is milled into flour, and may survive cooking. As a result, an outbreak of ergotism can affect a whole community. It is a particular issue with rye grain, because the dark color of rye can mask the presence of the dark-colored fungus, whereas in lighter grains it can often be spotted.

Advanced gangrenous ergotism

 

So What Does This Have to Do With Salem?

In 1976, Linnda R. Caporael, a graduate student working on a PhD in psychology, wrote an article for Science in which she argued that the possible causes of the moral panic of the Salem trial fell into three broad categories: fraud (basically, the accusers were intentionally faking their symptoms), psychological issues (essentially, mass hysteria), or physiological issues (physical medical problems). Since very little research had been devoted to the third category, Caporael devoted 2 ½ pages to proposing the novel theory that ergotism was an important factor in the Witch Trials.

Dr. Linnda R. Caporael

She points out that ergotism was an issue in New England, where rye was an important element of the diet, and that the spring and summer weather in 1692 was hot and rainy, ideal conditions for the growth of ergot rot; in 1693, however, a drought set in, which would have prevented the growth of the fungus. This, she feels, perfectly coincided with the outbreak of the Witch Trials.

She then notes that four of the afflicted girls (including one adult), Ann Putnam Sr., Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott, all lived on the very large Putnam farm, so they could easily have been affected by eating ergot-tainted rye grown on their farm. Two other girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, lived at the home of Rev. Samuel Parris; two-thirds of Rev. Parris’ salary was paid in produce, and as a major supporter of Parris, Thomas Putnam would have given grain to the Parris household. Another afflicted girl, Elizabeth Hubbard, lived at the home of Dr. Griggs, the physician who treated the afflicted girls; he too would have been paid at least partially in grain. Sarah Churchill, another afflicted girl, lived on a farm that Caporael thinks could have had its own problem with ergot, but Caporael dismisses her accusations as fraud. The only accuser Caporael is puzzled about is Mary Warren, who lived with the Proctors, who were accused of witchcraft. The Proctors were well-off farmers and would probably not have received grain from anyone. Thus Caporael argues that ergot-tainted grain spread through a social network, causing young girls to develop symptoms they understood as magical affliction.

Salem Village in 1692

Caporael then examines the testimony. She notes that when the crisis started, Mary Sibley give instructions for making a witch cake out of rye, which was then fed to the dog. How the dog acted after eating the cake is unknown, but Caporael speculates that it may have suffered convulsions, and she argues that it was the dog’s reaction that started the accusations.

Then she moves into the heart of her argument, arguing that the symptoms described in the trial records are consistent with ergotism. The accusers were stricken with convulsive fits, and the spectral images they saw Caporael attributes to the hallucinations produced by ergotism. The girls reported numerous pains, including pinching, pricking by pins, and biting, which Caporael considers ergotic neuropathy or formication. She says that references to vomiting and “bowels almost pulled out” were common. She mentions the case of John Londer, who awoke in the middle of the night to see an apparition of a witch sitting on his chest; she attributes this to the mental confusion sometimes caused by ergotism. A visitor who “probably spent the night at the Putnams”, Joseph Bailey, experienced a strange encounter while traveling with his wife, in which the Proctors appeared, struck him in the chest, and then turned into a cow; he subsequently experienced pricking sensations. Another man saw strange quivering objects, which Caporael suggests were like LSD hallucinations.

Convulsive fits were a common symptom among the Salem girls

 

So It Was Ergotism that Caused the Accusations?

Nope. There are a lot of problems with Caporael’s theory. To start with, although Caporael is today a respected expert on the relationships between culture and biology, she was at the time only a graduate student in psychology; she is neither an historian nor a medical doctor. So she’s writing well outside her field of study, without expertise either in reading old documents or diagnosing medical symptoms, and only part-way through her professional training. In and of itself, that doesn’t invalidate her argument, but it does force us to consider it with caution.

Caporael’s article was the subject of an immediate refutation by Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, who responded with their own article in Science later the same year. They noted numerous flaws in her analysis. Convulsive ergotism typically occurs in populations that are deficient in vitamin A; Salem, however, consumed a lot of fish, which means that vitamin A deficiency was unlikely to be a serious problem. Additionally, those most likely to suffer from ergotism are small children, whereas the youngest accuser was 9, and most were in their teens; Ann Putnam Sr. was a married woman with children. Even if these older females were affected by ergotism, there should have been a much larger number of younger children affected.

They also ask why there are no references to ergotism’s gangreneous symptoms such as discoloration, peeling skin, and rotting of digits. Ergotism is more likely to strike livestock than humans, and yet there is little reference to livestock dying. Additionally, they note that it is extremely unlikely that the ergotism would selectively strike only the girls in a household, given that the whole family would be eating the same food; why weren’t Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, or the Proctors sickened? Why didn’t the girls manifest the ravenous hunger that typically followS ergotic convulsions? And if the ergot rot was more widely spread in the farmland, why wasn’t it occurring in more households?

John Proctor’s stone at the Salem Memorial

Spanos and Gottlieb also challenged Caporael’s claim that gastrointestinal issues were widespread. They found no explicit mention of vomiting in the sources, and the three girls who mentioned issues with their innards all mentioned only a single attack, rather than recurrent problems. So they feel that Caporael was exaggerating the degree to which gastrointestinal problems occurred among the afflicted girls.

They also note that the symptoms displayed by the afflicted girls behaved differently than ergotism would. The girls’ symptoms were sometimes resolved entirely by reading the Scriptures and in other times aggravated by it, suggesting that the issue was more psychological than medical. During the court sessions, the girls would appear to be fine until they encountered the defendants, and would then suffer sudden attacks that cleared up after the encounter ended. LSD hallucinations typically involve auras, halos, shimmering colors, and the like, but generally don’t involve seeing people who aren’t there. Finally, there is no record that any of the girls continued to have symptoms after May of 1693, but substantial incidents of ergotism cause long-term neurological damage that would probably have stayed with the girls throughout their lives.

Finally, they challenged Caporael’s explanation for why the panic subsided so quickly. Far from requiring the onset of a drought, Spanos and Gottlieb pointed out that most witch panics in Europe ended quite suddenly. So the drought would be irrelevant as an explanation.

Spanos and Gottlieb demonstrated that Caporael had read the evidence very selectively, mischaracterized the way some ergotic symptoms operate, and failed to account for the absence of key symptoms of ergotism. In other words, it is highly unlikely that ergotism was the issue because the reported evidence doesn’t actually match up with ergotism.

There are other issues that Spanos and Gottlieb don’t address. Why were there no young boys among those afflicted? There is no obvious reason that the ergotism would spread among teenage girls but not affect teenage boys. Caporael attributes the starting of the hysteria not to the initial affliction of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams but to the dog’s reaction after eating the witch cake. Yet she admits that we have no record of the dog’s reaction. She is theorizing that the dog had a seizure or died, and yet it is just as likely that the dog had no reaction at all. She also seems to think that Tituba played a role in the initial magical activities of the girls, which is wrong; it suggests to me that Caporael wasn’t reading that primary sources closely enough to realize that Betty and Abigail were employing English folk magic and not just following Tituba’s lead. It’s also been pointed out that what John Londer described is most easily explained as a case of sleep paralysis.

In regard to Joseph Bayley’s strange experience, Caporael notes that “it is a moot point, of course, what or how much Bailey ate at the Putnams’, or that he even really stayed there.” In fact, it matters a great deal, because the heart of her theory is that ergotism was being spread through social contacts; if Bayley didn’t contract ergotism from his visit to the Putnams, then his testimony actually works against her argument, because he would have been experiencing symptoms without a clear route of transmission. Similarly, her failure to account for Mary Warren’s connection to the Putnams is a problem. (But see Correction at the bottom of the article.)

Her brief treatment of Sarah Churchill is also a small problem. She first comments that Churchill lived on a farm next to a river, which would have been ideal conditions for the growth of ergotism. She seems to mean that the soil or air would have been moister there and therefore more conducive to the growth of ergot. But her model is that ergot was spreading from the Putnam’s farm, not that ergot was popping up in various areas across Salem, so she’s being a little inconsistent in her explanation. Then she dismisses Churchill’s case as probably being fraudulent. If that’s so, why mention the farm and the river at all? This is a small point, but it makes me feel like she wasn’t thinking through her argument very well.

Another flaw in Caporael’s argument is that she doesn’t account for all the girls doing the accusing. She connects the girls of the Parris, Putnam, and Gibbs households to the grain distribution network that she theorizes was spreading ergot-tainted grain, but admits she cannot connect Mary Walcott to that network at all. She also fails to connect Sarah Churchill, but discounts her. More seriously, she also entirely omits three afflicted girls: Bathsheba Pope, Elizabeth Booth, and Susannah Sheldon. Perhaps Caporael didn’t know about these three girls; Pope played a lesser role in the accusations, but Sheldon was an accuser of the Proctors and Rev. George Burroughs, three of the more important cases, and Booth also accused the Proctors. Given Caporael’s tendency to cherry-pick her facts, the omission of these girls might be due to her inability to find any connection at all with the grain-distribution network.

Furthermore, Caporael focuses her analysis only on the girls whose charges started the panic. In a short article, limiting the focus of research that way is not unreasonable. But she never says that’s what she’s doing, and in fact she includes analysis of two men outside that group, John Londer and Joseph Bayley. This creates the assumption that the accusations came largely from the girls she focused on, when in reality there were dozens of accusers. The girls tended to bring the initial accusations, but once a particular person was on trial, more accusers tended to come forward. For example, during Sarah Good’s trial, her six-year-old daughter Dorcas claimed to have seen her mother with strange birds and her husband William testified that she had a Witch’s Tit. Some secondary accusers brought fresh charges, claims that the accused had afflicted them years before in some fashion. In fact, if we limit ourselves purely to those who lived in Salem Village (as opposed to the other communities in the area) and factor out the non-adult accusers like Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and so on, a total of 32 people brought accusations. Caporael only mentions two adult accusers, Londer and Bayley. She makes no effort to connect Londer to the grain distribution network and first connects Bayley and then says that his connection is irrelevant. The other 30 accusers go largely unmentioned. Again, given her tendency to read the documents selectively, it seems possible that she omitted the other accusers because she couldn’t find any way to connect their testimony to the symptoms of ergotism.

So after we dig into Caporael’s argument, we find that it really doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Unfortunately, as often happens, Caporael’s theory began to circulate in the wider public, and Spanos and Gottlieb’s refutation got overlooked outside of academia. A few other scholars have attempted to salvage Caporael’s theory. In 1982, historian Mary Matossian suggested that perhaps those in Salem did not think to record symptoms such as gangrene as being relevant because not all the symptoms fitted into current notions of witchcraft affliction. That’s certainly possible, but it’s hard to see how a major symptom like toes rotting off wouldn’t be remarked on. Furthermore, witches were routinely accused of killing livestock, and yet there is no mention of livestock being afflicted (although one dog was identified as acting strangely, and another was accused of trying to bewitch a girl). It’s also been pointed out that different strands of ergotism can cause either convulsive ergotism or gangrenous ergotism. That would explain the absence of reports of gangrene, but it then it can’t explain the presence of the other neuropathic symptoms that Caporael relies on, since those are associated with gangrenous ergotism, not convulsive ergotism. So, in my opinion and, I think, the opinion of most scholars who have studied witchcraft trials, the ergotism theory is too weak to act as a useful explanation of what was going on in Salem.

Medicalizing the Past

A wider problem here is that Caporael’s theory is an example of the tendency of some non-historians to medicalize the past. Medicalization is the tendency to attribute unusual behavior to an underlying medical problem rather than to social forces, the supernatural, or other possible factors. For example, modern psychiatry has to considerable extent persuaded Western society that certain forms of unstable behavior are the result of medical problems such as schizophrenia rather than, for example, demonic possession. In and of itself, medicalization is not wrong. A person who eats ergot-tainted rye bread and subsequently develops neuropathy and gangrene is probably legitimately suffering from ergotism, and may well be curable through modern medical techniques, whereas simply reading the Bible over them is unlikely to heal them. And I just medicalized John Londer’s experience when I said it is more easily explained by sleep paralysis.

Medicalizing the past occurs when someone attempts to explain unusual behavior in the past by resorting to the claim that the underlying issue was an undiagnosed medical problem rather than whatever contemporaries saw the issue to be. Enlightenment intellectuals often sought to explain away Biblical miracles by seeking what they saw as a more scientific justification for something. It wasn’t God who parted the Red Sea; it was a powerful windstorm. Jesus didn’t die on the cross; he fell unconscious from pain and blood loss and revived three days later. This is a common subject for modern news items and internet articles. People have been using this technique ever since the 17^th century to explain away all sorts of things they don’t understand about the past, and Caporael’s article is a perfect example of this.

An uncorrupted saint’s body: miracle, or saponification?

The problem with medicalizing the past is two-fold. First, it encourages us to feel superior to the people of the past because we know something they didn’t, and therefore we wouldn’t make the same mistakes they made. If only the residents of 17^th century Salem had understood ergotism better, all those innocent people wouldn’t have died! Rather than truly explaining the past, medicalization often serves to make us feel better about ourselves; we’re not at risk of accusing daycare workers of raping children unpopular women of witchcraft because we’re smarter than that.

I sometimes see this with my students. Their thought process often seems to be as follows. “Accusing people of witchcraft is weird, because believing in witchcraft is irrational. No rational person would ever actually believe in witchcraft. I know that ergotism is real but witchcraft isn’t. Witchcraft can’t be the cause of the Witch Trials, but ergotism could be. So the Witch Trials were caused because the residents of Salem were ignorant of science. Therefore, they were irrational and weird. But I’m smarter than that.” Notice how that argument makes a spurious connection between lack of scientific knowledge and irrational behavior, and that the argument is founded on a sense of superiority over the people of the past. And it’s not just witchcraft that triggers this thought process. I’ve frequently seen students fall into this mode of thinking when discussing monarchy, the Crusades, or any religion they don’t personally follow. I’ve even seen students resort to this when talking about the Nazis, labor unions and progressive taxation. It’s a very useful mode of thinking because it is so ego-stroking. We’re smarter than our ancestors; we’ve made “progress”.

The other major flaw in medicalizing the past is that, even when it’s right or plausible, it fails to fully explore the issues at hand. Once the problem has been medicalized, it’s generally assumed there’s no need to explore the social and intellectual world around the problem. For example, let’s assume that Caporael’s theory is right and ergot really was at the root of the accusations at Salem. That would explain why the afflicted girls were suffering. What it wouldn’t explain is why the girls and those around them interpreted their symptoms as signs of witchcraft rather than, for example, divine testing or conventional illness. It wouldn’t explain why only some girls made accusations, or why some healthy girls might have chosen to join in the accusations like Sarah Churchill. It wouldn’t explain why the adults around them found teenage girls making outrageous claims to be credible witnesses. It wouldn’t explain why the girls chose to focus their accusations on certain people like older women rather than healthy young men or Native Americans. It wouldn’t explain why the town elders regarded these accusations as issues for a law court or why they considered them serious enough to merit public execution. In other words, by medicalizing Salem, we’re missing most of the interesting social, economic, religious, and political dynamics operating in Salem, because we assume that the medical element of the problem is sufficient to explain everything that happened. Again, note how this links lack of scientific knowledge with extreme or irrational behavior.

Almost all historians who work on witch trials agree that the underlying issues are social, not physiological in nature. There has been enormous effort devoted to understanding the social psychology of witchcraft accusations, the social networks that manifested themselves in patterns of accusation, and so on. To me, the most interesting part of Caporael’s argument is not the ergotism, but her brief analysis of the social network that linked the Putnams, the Parrises, and Dr. Griggs. Ergotism led her to find a piece of a much bigger puzzle, but her theory caused her to stop her research once she found the specific link she was looking for. The social psychology and the social networks at play in Salem is what I’m going to look at in my next two posts.

Want to Know More?

Caporael’s article was published as “Ergotism: The Satan Loose in Salem” Science 192 (4234): 21–6. Spanos and Gottlieb’s response was published as “Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials”, Science 194 (4272): 1390–4. Mary Matossian’s attempt to defend the Ergotism thesis was published as “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair”. American Scientist 70 (4): 355–7.

Correction: A reader pointed out to me that I may have misinterpreted Caporael’s use of the term ‘moot point’. If she uses the phrase in its strict sense as “a question to which no satisfactory answer is available,” then she is simply acknowledging that we can’t know whether Bayley ate with the Putnams or not. I still think she’s dodging the issue a little though.

Salem: Torturing the Facts

Tags

Colonial America, Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Legal Stuff, McMartin Preschool Trial, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, The Enlightenment, Torture, Witchcraft

One of the things that the average person knows about witch trials is that they involved a lot of torture. Innocent women and men were tortured to force them to confess to crimes they didn’t and couldn’t possibly have committed, and so we look at the witch trials as a massive exercise in human irrationality, because things like that couldn’t happen today.

Salem fully embraces this idea. Cotton Mather (Seth Gabel) harasses Mercy Lewis (Elise Eberle), hacks her hair off, locks her in bondage gear, and later literally hangs her up in a church. He tortures Giles Quarry to force him to plead in court. Later, he catches an actual witch and hangs her from a tree. Then Increase Mather (Steven Lang) shows up and kicks the torture into high gear. He ducks the witch Mab in an effort to force her to confess. He captures Mercy’s pack of female wannabe witches and tortures them to throwing boiling hot water on them and strapping them down to various bondage chairs and tables. Then when Mercy accuses Tituba (Ashley Madekwe), he straps her down and goes full inquisition on her. He has a steamer trunk filled with all sorts of torture instruments that he lovingly shows her—various knives and other edged tools, the Pear of Anguish, a vicious ‘breast-puller’ (at least, that’s what I think he calls it), and so on. He clearly uses them on her, because she gets bloodier as the episode goes on.

The Reality

The series, and the general audience, is very confused on these issues, because the reality was much more complex. The first issue of confusion is who tortured and who didn’t. Across most of Continental Europe, torture was generally a legally-accepted practice in at least some situations. The use of torture on witches was permissible, but generally quite regulated. If a suspected witch refused to confess, she (or perhaps he) would be warned that they could be tortured, and then they would be returned to their cell to contemplate this. A day or two later, they would be shown torture implements and urged to confess, and then returned to the cells. A day or two later, they were tied down for torture, but usually not actually tortured, before again being urged to confess and then returned to their cell. It was generally only on the third or fourth session that they might actually be tortured. So the authorities generally employed torture only as a last resort, whereas in popular imagination it’s the first resort. And in most jurisdictions there were legal rules about when and how torture could be used, just the way that today there are rules about when and how police can question a suspect. So torture was never the legal-free-for-all that it’s nearly always presented as (as in Salem, for example).

More importantly for the show, Salem was under English common law, and English common law forbade torture, except in the case of treason against the monarch. As English jurists understood torture, it was never legally applied against any witch either in England or in the American colonies. (Scotland, while ruled by the English monarchs, followed Scottish law, which did allow torture, so accused Scottish witches were tortured.)

The tricky thing here is that some things that most modern Americans would regard as torture were not considered torture at American facilities at Iraq and Guantanamo under English common law. Sleep deprivation, for example, was entirely legal, so accused witches were sometimes kept awake for several days as a way to extract a confession. Accused witches could be strip searched for the ‘Witch’s Tit’, any unusual mole or skin tag or wart that could be interpreted as a supernatural nipple that witches used to suckle their demonic familiar, especially if it was near their breasts, genitals, or anus. Ducking (not ‘dunking’), which involved tying an accused witch into a chair and lowering her into the water, was not an attempt to torture a witch into confession but rather a test to see if the witch floated, because it was widely believed that witches were supernaturally light or that water would reject them. So the above scene in which Increase ducks Mab, is entirely wrong; he’s breaking the law by ducking a confessed witch because, since she’s confessed, he doesn’t need to get more evidence that she’s a witch.

If we disregard the mistakes in the way Mab is ducked, her ducking itself is plausible (it was actually something that was done in the American colonies); however no one was ducked at Salem during the Witch Trials. But the other things he does to Tituba and Mercy’s posse would have been blatantly illegal and would have forced the Salem authorities to arrest him as a criminal. But, as I’ve already pointed out, the show has literally no legal framework for the trials and interrogations; the rules vary from episode to episode and Increase Mather just makes up the law as he goes, even when he contradicts himself.

But the Search for Witches was Irrational, So Who Cares?

While witch-hunting looks irrational to us, it was less unmoored from reality than it’s generally presented. For most of the Middle Ages, scholars and clergy maintained that while miracles were real, magic wasn’t. In the 10^th century, a document known today as the Canon Episcopi declared that belief in magic was false, because Satan had no power to influence the physical world. The best that Satan and his demons could do was trick people into thinking magic had happened. So if someone thought they had flown through the air magically, this was impossible and what had actually happened was they had experienced an illusion or a dream. Although the Canon Episcopi was probably authored in the 10th century, it was later mistakenly ascribed to an important 4th century ecclesiastical council, and as a result it was taken to be binding on the entire Western church. So from the 10th to the 14th century, the official position of Western bishops and theologians was that magic and witchcraft did not actually exist; as a result, very few witchcraft trials occurred during the period, because church law refused to consider it a possible crime.

The text of the Canon Episcopi

But in the later 14^th century, this idea began to be challenged by scholars who maintained that the Devil actually could affect the physical world. Modern scholars are still unsure exactly why beliefs changed, so I won’t go into that complicated question, but by the later 15^th century, both religious and secular authorities were much more willing to consider the possibility that magic had actually happened when something inexplicable occurred. (When physicians were unable to explain what was happening to Betty Parris, her father Samuel began to consider the possibility of witchcraft.) So witchcraft was used as an explanation when other explanations seemed unconvincing or unavailable. That in itself is not irrational based on the level of scientific understanding at the time.

More importantly, most legal systems in Europe and the New World recognized that simple accusations of witchcraft were insufficient to prove a charge. It was not enough for someone to say that they had been bewitched or had seen a neighbor do something suspicious. Everyone recognized the possibility of false accusation driven by ulterior motives like spite or personal quarrels.Following Biblical precepts, moral crimes like witchcraft required the eyewitness testimony of at least two witnesses. But the nature of witchcraft as it was understood was such that it was unlikely to be corroborated by witnesses, because the witnesses to witchcraft were generally thought to be restricted to other witches. So law courts across Western society had the same problem that modern law courts do; how do you prove an accusation of a serious crime without witnesses to the crime?

Modern law courts have recourse to a wide variety of forensic tools such as taking fingerprints, blood spatter analysis, DNA evidence, and ballistics. But early modern courts did not have such tools. Instead, they turned to the expert testimony of the day, scholars and manuals that explained how to identify witches. So they searched the accused’s body for a Witch’s Tit (or, on the Continent, for the Devil’s Mark) and ducked her in hopes they could find evidence of the crime. They searched her house for poppets or other tools of witchcraft. They questioned neighbors and heard accusations of different examples of witchcraft. In other words, they sought hard evidence. Again, this is perfectly rational based on their understanding of how the universe worked.

A man holding two early 20th century poppets, made from clay, nails, and thorns

But in many cases, the evidence they found was insufficient. Was that wart actually a Witch’s Tit, or just an ordinary wart? Was the witch starting to sink just as she was pulled out during the ducking? Was that actually a poppet, or just a child’s toy? The judges weren’t always convinced that the scraps of evidence they had located was enough to justify convicting someone of a very serious crime.

In a situation like that, the best evidence would be a confession by the accused that she had actually committed the crimes, because a confession was considered solid proof of guilt. And that’s where torture came in. The idea of torture was that if it could extract a confession, the need for further evidence was moot, because the witch would have implicated herself and told who her accomplices were. In other words, torturers were interrogating accused witches for exactly the same reason that cops on CSI and Law & Order do, because getting a confession makes proving guilt in a court of law much easier. These shows rarely show the cops coercing false confessions out of innocent people for the same reason that judges were comfortable with torture in the 17^th century, because they were sure that innocence was a powerful protection and that only the guilty had anything to fear. The notion of false confession as a common matter was not seriously contemplated because it would undermine the sense that the legal system generally worked to achieve real justice. (Although there are no hard studies of the rate of false confession in the modern American legal system, the Innocent Project has found that fully 25% of people convicted and then exonerated by later DNA evidence had made a false confession. That suggests that false confession may be a far larger problem in the American system than people generally recognize.)

So the desire for confession stemmed for an entirely rational concern that in the absence of compelling evidence, it was hard to prove the truth of an accusation without a confession. Many 17^th century judges had a lower threshold of proof than modern courts do, but they still recognized the same problems.

The rationality of the Salem judges is shown by the debate over the admissibility of spectral evidence. Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and other girls claimed that they could see invisible witches torturing them, but no one else could see these spirits. The judges who presided over the trials recognized that the testimony of teenage girls was not entirely reliable, especially given the rather outlandish nature of the testimony), so they asked Cotton and Increase Mather for their opinion on the issue. Both men responded by cautioning them to not put too much weight on the evidence, because the Devil could be causing the girls to see the images of innocent people in order to destroy the innocent. But Cotton’s letter admitted that God would certainly protect the innocent, and that equivocation seems to have persuaded most of the judges that spectral evidence was acceptable. Perhaps the judges were just looking for a reason to accept evidence they already wanted to accept. But at least one judge, Nathaniel Saltonstall, was sufficiently uncomfortable that he resigned from his appointment. Again, the standards these judges were using are rather lower than those of modern judges, but the issues are not entirely dissimilar.

A 19th century depiction of the Salem trials

In fact, one historian, Walter Stephens, has argued that among some early modern theologians, the interest in witchcraft arose not from an overabundance of credulity, but the growth of skepticism about the supernatural and the existence of God. Stephens’ argument, briefly put, is that the desire to find and interrogate witches and prove that they were employing magic stems from anxiety about the inability of theologians to prove the existence of God. If women could be found who would admit to having sex with the Devil (an activity that some witch-hunting manuals dwelt on at considerable length), then that would prove the existence of Satan and by extension the existence of God. In other words, Stephens suggests that many witch-hunters were trying to prove to themselves that God existed precisely because they were scared to acknowledge their own doubt, the way that many vocal homophobes are closeted homosexuals trying to persuade themselves that they’re straight. (George Rekers, I’m looking at you. You too, Pat Robertson.)

So if witch-hunting was more rational than it looks on the surface, why do we so strongly associate it with irrationality? For that, we can thank the major intellectual movement of the 18^th century, the Enlightenment. Enlightenment intellectuals, like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, saw themselves as helping lead European society out of the darkness of irrationality and superstition into the light of science and rationality. These men emphasized that the Christianity of their day was irrational, superstitious, and anti-intellectual. Emphasizing the irrationality of the witch hunting of the previous two centuries was a perfect way of highlighting how backward the previous centuries had been in comparison to their contemporary drive for science and rationality, the way that American films often flatter the democratic impulses of modern Americans by showing that medieval and early modern society was autocratic.

Well, It Still Couldn’t Happen Today because We’re Too Rational Now

I’ve got three words for you: McMartin Preschool Trial. In 1983, a mother in Manhattan Beach, California reported to police that her daycare-aged son had been anally raped by a staffer at the McMartin Preschool, basing her claim on the fact that her son had been suffering from painful bowel movements. Initially, the police refused to investigate, but she sent out a letter to the 200 other families at the preschool warning them that their children might have been abused as well, and mounting public pressure led to the police questioning several hundred children from the McMartin Preschool.

The McMartin Preschool, where the alleged atrocities supposedly took place

They hired an organization named Children’s Institute International to do the questioning, since the police had not been trained to question such young witnesses. CII employed a range of novel and untested methods,  inviting children to speculate about “what might have happened”, to play pretend, and to use anatomically correct dolls to show what might have been done to them. Children were sometimes told what other children had already said. Children who supported the accusations were praised for “telling the truth”, while those who denied anything had happened were sometimes badgered into changing their testimony.

The resulting testimony was often bizarre. The staffers didn’t just have anal sex with the children, they also had sex with animals, used power drills on the children, flew through the air (sometimes in hot air balloons), maintained a network of secret tunnels, flushed children down the toilet into secret rooms, sacrificed animals in secret rituals at an Episcopal church, forced the children to dig up coffins in cemeteries, and engaged in orgies in car-washes, circuses, and airports. One child reported that movie star Chuck Norris had participated in the abuse. A group of concerned parents began digging at a lot next door to the preschool in an effort to find the tunnels; an archaeological organization eventually got involved in the effort.

Digging for the secret tunnels next to the preschool building

Despite the absurd and logically impossible nature of much of the testimony, and despite the fact that even the prosecutor admitted that the children had “embellished and exaggerated” their stories, six women and one man were charged with 321 counts of child abuse; Virginia McMartin was in her mid-70s at the time. The trial began in 1984 and lasted two years, involving testimony from “experts” who claimed that there was a nation-wide organization of Satanists who conspired to sexually molest children and sacrifice them to Satan; a key piece of their evidence was the supposedly scientific notion of ‘repressed memories’, which has subsequently been largely debunked. Eventually in 1996, a new prosecutor dropped all charges against five of the defendants, admitting that the evidence was “incredibly weak”. Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Ray Buckey were subject to a new trial that ended in acquittal for Peggy in 1990; Ray was found not guilty on 52 out of 65 charges but two jurors refused to believe he was innocent of 13 charges of child abuse. He was tried again on six of the 13 charges and the result was a hung jury. He spent 5 years in jail during the process. The McMartin trials were the longest and most expensive case in US legal history.

Peggy McMartin Buckey during the trial

Although the McMartin case was the most famous example of fears of daycare child abuse rings, it was not unique. In the later 1980s, there were at least 21 similar trials. Despite a near-total lack of actual evidence, at least 22 daycare employees were convicted, and 3 are still in prison today, although most have had their convictions overturned.

The parallels between the McMartin case and the Salem Witch Trials are fairly clear. The accused were mostly women while the accusers and victims were children. The charges depended on what even at the time was seen as dubious evidence, and involved shocking stories of highly sexualized activities and devil-worship. Charges of flying through the air and engaging in secret meetings to do abominable things were common to both. In both cases, some of the charges seem to be literally impossible without magic.

The fact is that both the Salem Witch Trials and the McMartin Preschool Trials are examples of what scholars call a “moral panic”, a widespread fear among society that something is threatening the moral order, in which shocking charges create intense pressure for authorities to act. In the McMartin case, those who have studied it have sometimes argued that it reflects a deep but unspoken fear that leaving children at a daycare is somehow morally wrong, because rather than working, their mothers ought to be taking care of the children. The charges of intense sexual abuse acted to dramatize the fear without directly expressing it, and created a situation in which the authorities are reluctant to simply ignore the problem. But once authorities began treating the charges seriously, that legitimized the fears and intensified the panic. So the McMartin case may reflect anxieties about working mothers and proper forms of child-rearing. But what about Salem? What was driving the charges there? I’ll start looking at that next time.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

I don’t know of any studies that focus specifically on the use of torture in the Salem trials, but many general studies of the Witch Hunts discuss the subject. Robert Thurston’s The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North Americahas section on both the Salem Trials and torture as it was generally used in witch trials. Joseph Klaits’ Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Midland Book, Mb 422)has a very good chapter on the legal and psychological issues involved with the torture of accused witches.

Finally, Walter Stephens’ Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Beliefmakes a very interesting argument that one of the core texts of witch hunting, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, has been badly misunderstood and is a reflection of its author’s doubts about the existence of God rather than an irrational credulity in the existence of witches. It’s a bold thesis and I’m not sure that he’s convinced all the scholars, but it certainly influenced my understanding of witch hunting. If you’re interested in witch hunting, or specifically in the Malleus, it’s well worth the read.