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UBC: Escaping Salem
Dec. 17th, 2009 12:21 pmGodbeer, Richard. Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
This is a fairly straightforward recounting of the events of 1692 in Stamford, Connecticut, where a seventeen-year-old servant named Katherine Branch started having fits in April (too early, in other words, for her to be influenced by reports of the goings-on in Salem). Godbeer chronicles her master and mistress' attempts to find an explanation, either natural or supernatural, and the eventual uneasy settling on witchcraft; the (comparatively) slow process by which Kate came to accuse Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough as her tormentors; and Goodwives Clawson and Disborough's trial and eventual acquittal. It's all very familiar if you've read much of anything about witchcraft in colonial New England--and probably a good place to start if you haven't. The most interesting chapter is the examination of the magistrate William Jones' notes on the legal requirements for a conviction. Unfortunately, the least successful chapter is the last one, where Godbeer steps back from his narrative to provide historical contexts and some very rudimentary analysis. Most of his best points are simplified from other authors (particularly John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan, and Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare*), and he doesn't do anything with them. Also, although he does some comparisons with Salem, he doesn't discuss the points I thought were the most interesting:
1. Kate Branch's affliction was not contagious, unlike the very similar fits of the girls in Salem. No other persons joined her in her suffering--and this despite the fact that Joanna Wescot, the daughter of Kate's employers, had suffered fits of the same sort a few years previously.
2. The magistrates in Connecticut seem to have been following very different rules than the ones in Massachusetts, including the a priori disallowal of spectral evidence (i.e., anything an afflicted person claimed to have seen or heard in one of her fits); the insistence that there be two reliable witnesses for any piece of evidence; and the clear focus on the covenant with the Devil as the prosecutable offense, not the sufferings that the accused might or might not be inflicting on her neighbors. Books about Salem spend a lot of time, of course, talking about the controversy over spectral evidence (although Godbeer makes it sound as if there was no controversy, that the legal situation was unambiguous--which my other reading has suggested was not the case), but the other two points--also the point that judicial torture was illegal under English (and therefore colonial) law, which means (a.) most of the confessions in the Salem trials were invalid and (b.) the actual criminals were the authorities--are things I haven't seen discussed before. I would really have liked a little more unpacking of this particular issue.
3. The attitude shown by the magistrates toward the afflicted parties were polar reversals of each other. Whereas the afflicted girls in Salem were considered to be unimpeachable witnesses and were all but encouraged to "perform" at the trials of those they accused, Kate Branch was treated with extreme skepticism. If she was present at the examinations of Goodwife Disborough and Goodwife Clawson, either she did not fall into fits or the magistrates disregarded her fits as evidence. Partly, of course, they were determined not to follow Salem's terrible example, but I would have liked Godbeer to have discussed in greater depth the process by which, in Stamford, the focus shifted away from Kate Branch once the legal proceedings began.
In general, this book is quite useful for throwing a spotlight on the moments at and ways in which Salem fell off the beam and into what can be quite accurately called hysteria. Ironically--given its title and Godbeer's stated aim of correcting our view of witchcraft trials in colonial New England--I found that this, being a single case study and without any ground-breaking analysis, didn't tell me anything new about the general subject of witchcraft in New England, but it DID highlight peculiarities of the situation in Salem and suggested new questions to ask.
---
*01/29/2011: Having now read Godbeer's earlier book, The Devil's Dominion (1992), I need to modify that a little: he made the points about the hostility with Native Americans before Norton.
This is a fairly straightforward recounting of the events of 1692 in Stamford, Connecticut, where a seventeen-year-old servant named Katherine Branch started having fits in April (too early, in other words, for her to be influenced by reports of the goings-on in Salem). Godbeer chronicles her master and mistress' attempts to find an explanation, either natural or supernatural, and the eventual uneasy settling on witchcraft; the (comparatively) slow process by which Kate came to accuse Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough as her tormentors; and Goodwives Clawson and Disborough's trial and eventual acquittal. It's all very familiar if you've read much of anything about witchcraft in colonial New England--and probably a good place to start if you haven't. The most interesting chapter is the examination of the magistrate William Jones' notes on the legal requirements for a conviction. Unfortunately, the least successful chapter is the last one, where Godbeer steps back from his narrative to provide historical contexts and some very rudimentary analysis. Most of his best points are simplified from other authors (particularly John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan, and Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare*), and he doesn't do anything with them. Also, although he does some comparisons with Salem, he doesn't discuss the points I thought were the most interesting:
1. Kate Branch's affliction was not contagious, unlike the very similar fits of the girls in Salem. No other persons joined her in her suffering--and this despite the fact that Joanna Wescot, the daughter of Kate's employers, had suffered fits of the same sort a few years previously.
2. The magistrates in Connecticut seem to have been following very different rules than the ones in Massachusetts, including the a priori disallowal of spectral evidence (i.e., anything an afflicted person claimed to have seen or heard in one of her fits); the insistence that there be two reliable witnesses for any piece of evidence; and the clear focus on the covenant with the Devil as the prosecutable offense, not the sufferings that the accused might or might not be inflicting on her neighbors. Books about Salem spend a lot of time, of course, talking about the controversy over spectral evidence (although Godbeer makes it sound as if there was no controversy, that the legal situation was unambiguous--which my other reading has suggested was not the case), but the other two points--also the point that judicial torture was illegal under English (and therefore colonial) law, which means (a.) most of the confessions in the Salem trials were invalid and (b.) the actual criminals were the authorities--are things I haven't seen discussed before. I would really have liked a little more unpacking of this particular issue.
3. The attitude shown by the magistrates toward the afflicted parties were polar reversals of each other. Whereas the afflicted girls in Salem were considered to be unimpeachable witnesses and were all but encouraged to "perform" at the trials of those they accused, Kate Branch was treated with extreme skepticism. If she was present at the examinations of Goodwife Disborough and Goodwife Clawson, either she did not fall into fits or the magistrates disregarded her fits as evidence. Partly, of course, they were determined not to follow Salem's terrible example, but I would have liked Godbeer to have discussed in greater depth the process by which, in Stamford, the focus shifted away from Kate Branch once the legal proceedings began.
In general, this book is quite useful for throwing a spotlight on the moments at and ways in which Salem fell off the beam and into what can be quite accurately called hysteria. Ironically--given its title and Godbeer's stated aim of correcting our view of witchcraft trials in colonial New England--I found that this, being a single case study and without any ground-breaking analysis, didn't tell me anything new about the general subject of witchcraft in New England, but it DID highlight peculiarities of the situation in Salem and suggested new questions to ask.
---
*01/29/2011: Having now read Godbeer's earlier book, The Devil's Dominion (1992), I need to modify that a little: he made the points about the hostility with Native Americans before Norton.
