The problem of Salem

[truepenny]

I'm reading Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare (Knopf 2002), which mostly--thus far--is an excellent book, providing yet another set of contexts for the Salem witch trials of 1692 (in this case the Indian Wars of the 1670s and 80s). But it has a problem, and in rereading my posts about the other books on Salem which I've read, I find that it is a problem I've been complaining about consistently since the beginning. (The one shining honorable exception is John Demos, Entertaining Satan, and I'm trying to decide if Demos's exemption is somehow linked to the fact that he's not talking about the Salem outbreak. I.e., I'm wondering if it's something about the Salem outbreak itself that causes this difficulty.)

Here is the problem:

The people who started the outbreak of witch accusations and trials in Salem Village in 1692 were girls, ranging in age from ten to twenty. (Adult women would also become accusers, most notably Ann Carr Putman, the mother of one of the original accusers.) Unlike the magistrates and ministers and other adult (male) participants, they left no records of their motivations or of their interiority at all. We get them only second-hand, from their fathers and uncles and community leaders. And when we, rational 21st century readers and historians, read accounts of the afflicted girls' behavior at the trials, it is all but impossible for us not to conclude that they were faking, that they were in full and conscious control of their "fits" and concomitant accusations.

Something that occurs over and over again: during the examination of Goody B, Girl A cries out: "Goody B's specter is about to pinch Girl C!" Girl C shrieks and wails: "Goody B's specter is pinching me!" To us, this looks obviously like collusion between and outright lying by Girl A and Girl C. To the magistrates and audience at Salem in 1692, it looked like proof of Goody B's witchcraft. Likewise with the tendency of new accusations to be made against people who openly scoffed at witchcraft (like John Proctor) or who were openly angry about the accusations (like Rebecca Nurse's sister Sarah Cloyce). To us, it's blatant one way--the girls accuse their doubters in order to sabotage them--to the people of Salem it was blatant the other way--those who doubt the truth of the girls' afflictions can only be witches. (Once you were accused of witchcraft, it was basically all over. The magistrates operated on the assumption of guilty until proven innocent, and there was no way for you to prove your innocence. It's terrifying.)

All of the books I've read on Salem pay lip service to the idea that these people, seventeenth century Puritans, believed fully and sincerely in the Devil and in witchcraft. And they never explicitly say otherwise. But their discussions of the accusers imply, sometimes very strongly, that the girls are lying, faking--whether on their own account or at the behest of their elders.

And what's especially problematic is that this assumption is never stated and therefore never examined. No one comes to grips with the question of the inner life of these girls. Were they faking? Or did they sincerely believe that they were afflicted by the people they named? Did they control their fits or were they as helpless as the adult witnesses believed they were? We don't know, and we can't know, and that means that we need to be very careful about how we extrapolate from what we do know. Yes, the manifestations and accusations were often "convenient"--girls stricken deaf when posed a question they couldn't possibly answer, accusations made against people who opposed them, etc.--and maybe that does mean that the girls were consciously faking. But that's a argumentative position, and it needs to be addressed specifically and explicitly, instead of being obscured behind blanket statements about Puritan cosmology and a focus on the adults' motivations.

Does anyone know of a book that actually tries to deal with the afflicted girls? (And, no, fiction does not count for this purpose.)

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I feel that possibly relevant are the accounts, some of them very recent, about 'hysterical' outbreaks of apparent illness (http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowFulltext&ArtikelNr=26064&Ausgabe=226208&ProduktNr=224259), usually among adolescent populations, but not all of them by any means. The individuals aren't 'faking' the symptoms - but there is no obvious contagious mechanism in play as opposed to the powers of communal suggestion.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Huh. Yes. That does look like a useful parallel.

(I am resisting with all my might the realization that I have just come up with a doctoral thesis in early American history.)

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

yeah, I do this all the time. Not about the Salem trials, but I have four or five perfectly good dissertations not in my field that I would love to see someone write.

Wait, you might actually know the answer to this. Is there a good book out there that deals with early modern English reactions to the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't (I've never been interested in early American history before, and have tended to avoid the Puritans whenever possible). I know that mid-seventeenth century England was AWASH with radical Protestants (Levellers, Diggers, Anabaptists, Quakers, etc. etc. etc.), so one way to start looking would be to chase footnotes in something like Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (http://www.amazon.com/Heresy-Literature-Politics-English-Culture/dp/0521820766/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224968000&sr=1-1) (Cambridge, 2006). (Full disclosure: one of the co-editors was a professor of mine, and I cite him here because I know his research is meticulous and comprehensive.)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I also wonder whether anyone has looked at it in parallel with the Grandier/Ursulines of Loudun affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Grandier) of the 1630s - my knowledge of the latter more or less begins and ends with Aldous Huxley's book on the subject but I'm pretty sure it has been revisited by scholars since then.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of poor Urbain Grandier before. Thank you!

It's interesting how much the wikipedia account of the nuns' motives looks like a fabliau. Or something Diderot would have written.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

The story was filmed (with what historical accuracy I know not, but suspect the worst) by Ken Russell in 1971 as The Devils (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066993/).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Considering that one of the plot keywords is "female nudity," I am with you in your suspecting.

[themadblonde]

Yes, but it still contains some truly amazing performances. Worth watching for those.

[lesserstorm.livejournal.com]

Good parallel. The example that sprang to my mind reading the post (though it's not something I know a lot about) is false recovered memories of child abuse. That's another example where neither the patient nor the therapist was deliberately faking or planting memories even though that was what the techniques used produced (and partly an effect possibly of the therapist's assumptions about the way the world and the human mind worked).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's the parallel that Frances Hill tries to draw in A Delusion of Satan. Unfortunately, as I said at the time (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/566388.html), she is less than persuasive--in contradistinction to her argument about nineteenth-century hysterics, which is, I thought, quite compelling.

[jenett]

I half-remember having seen a discussion of this in one of the books on the "fasting girl" phenomenon in the late 1800s and early 1900s (when girls - usually about the same age as the initial accusers in Salem) would apparently totally stop eating (for months at a time) with many miraculous claims.

There are, of course, lots of discussions there about whether they're faking (and evidence in some cases that they were) but you've got a better set of data on internal state and their own statements, and it's clear there's often something else going on that isn't a conscious action/under deliberate control.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The Fasting Girl is on my list of books to find.

Or, in other words, yes! Good point!

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I can't remember to whom I've previously pimped Rudolph Bell and Caroline Walker Bynum's studies on female mystics and the body, but they, and most specifically Bynum, go over some of this territory as well (although in medieval Italy, for the most part, and with women mostly identified as saints, not witches - although the lines were frequently very blurry).

Rudolph Bell wrote Holy Anorexia and Bynum wrote Holy Feast, Holy Fast and Fragmentation and Redemption (and several other books) that look at the relationship between belief and how it physically manifests. Covers radical inedia, stigmata, and various other things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I read Bynum in college and remember her as being excellent.

[mithriltabby]

At the suggestion of pinching, I immediately turned my thoughts to the costume of the time; could they have been particularly dressed up for the occasion of a trial and more susceptible to feeling pinches than usual, so once they were primed with the idea, they’d attribute it to a specter?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Pinching is only one example, which I used for expediency.

Another common phenomenon was, when Goody B bit her lip, Girls A and C would bite theirs too. Again, to us the causality is obvious--to them, not so much.

[aberrant1.livejournal.com]

Totally OT, I just wanted to say that you have the single best icon on the interwebs.

[mithriltabby]

Thank you. You can get the images on T-shirts.

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately the closest I've ever gotten to reading about the Salem witch trials is The Crucible, but this does remind me of the issue I always have when reading anthropologists writing about witch doctors in Africa and Malaysia and various other witch-believing parts of the world. The anthropologist usually can't get his head around the idea that the witch doctor doesn't think of himself as a fake -- but a lot of the time, they don't, even though they have a very different understanding of what goes on during witchcraft operations than non-initiates do. So it might be an interesting parallel to explore (I'm thinking specifically of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (http://www.amazon.com/Witchcraft-Oracles-Magic-among-Azande/dp/0198740298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224967413&sr=8-1), and I've had The Modernity of Witchcraft (http://www.amazon.com/Modernity-Witchcraft-Postcolonial-Sorcellerie-Politique/dp/0813917034/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I26DOTUQKVA883&colid=3TMPRZE36Y2C6) on my wishlist for ages now and it is undoubtedly newer, although I don't know if it'd be better. I'm rather fond of Evans-Pritchard, myself.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thank you! That sounds fascinating.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of something I read recently (I think it was in The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen, but someone's borrowing my book so I can't check) where the author, a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, tells about meeting a witch doctor/traditional/faith healer and brings up the concept of magic as fakery - and the doctor basically says that of course there's physical/material trickery going on, but that's part of the magic.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this - I guess that even if conscious trickery/fakery was involved, that it still doesn't necessarily mean what we would take it to mean - that it was a prank, or the people involved were out to get the others, that it was all an act with no belief involved. I dunno.

On a side note, even if I'm wrong about the above anecdote being from that book, the book is utterly fascinating to anyone with interest in saints, UFOs, hoaxes, and much, much more. It's much more thoughtful and serious than either the title or, unfortunately, the summary leads one to believe. (I tell people it's one of the most important books I've ever read, and I'm not really joking.)

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how useful a parallel this is, but my mind jumped to the phenomenon of loa/orisha posession among Vodou devotees in the African diaspora--worshippers report no control over their bodies and no conscious memories of what they did or said while the orisha was supposed to be in command. I personally witnessed a deity posession of this type at a Pagan ritual once--the priestess, a good friend of mine, went "away", the Goddess spoke through her, and she did not remember what she said when the ritual was over. We had to tell her, and she was surprised at the message.

I think most of the writers are unfamiliar with phenomena like this because modern Western religious experience is so staid and unecstatic for the most part.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Although generally it seems that the people afflicted by witchcraft in England and New England did remember what happened in their fits, that's certainly another avenue worth looking into.

...

... in ... my ... copious ... spare ... time.

::facepalm::

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I once went to a wedding blessing of a work colleague of my partner conducted by some charismatic Christian group, and people in the congregation intermittently broke into speaking in tongues and so on - I don't think they were faking it, but I also got the distinct impression that how it was done was quite heavily scripted, if not necessarily conscious. This would fit in with the mention of C19th hysterics above, in particular Charcot's patients at the Saltpetriere, for whom there appears to have been a similar modelling process.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

There was a decent book published recently on choreomania -hysterical contagious dancing- that you might find interesting. A Time to Dance, A Time to Die, John Waller, Icon books. Mostly focussing on a big case in Strasbourg in 1518 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518), but there were people who were literally dancing themselves to death, people who became infected on seeing them dance and were compelled to do so themselves.

The book itself occasionally irritates me (stop "she must have felt" "She must have been"-- you don't have proper evidence for that!), but the information is interesting and includes stuff on other dancing plagues, laughing, trance states and social context (or why people react as their social conditioning tells them to react- talking to ancestors, being ridden by gods, etc.)

It's not what you're after, but you might find it interesting. Me, based on the one girl that did apologise? I think it was a combination of excitement and safety lie-- oh, we say this, and we know it's not true, but at the same time, it must be true or god wouldn't let us say it... On one level, knowing that you're doing it, that it's fake, but coming up with a reason to let yourself believe it anyway. Like kids freaking themselves out with a ouija borad.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

On the off chance that you don't read Will Shetterly's blog, he has this awesome video of recently discovered film footage of ordinary people from Edwardian London. I thought you might like it since you're so interested in history.. here it is! (http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/221760.html?view=2223168#t2223168)

[aranel.livejournal.com]

I may have mentioned this the last time you posted about Salem, but Stuart Clark's Thinking With Demons has been mentioned to me more than once as a very scholarly book that takes early modern witchcraft belief seriously (i.e., as a set of beliefs inextricable from people's general belief system rather than an inexplicable or easily-reductively-explained kind of superstition or hysteria). I think it only covers Europe, though.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you did.

On the other hand, as abysmal as my memory is, thank you for mentioning it again!

Bad rye

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

There's been some scientific research on ergot in grain as a possible trigger event during the run up to the Salem Witch Trials. Nothing else do I know.

Re: Bad rye

[benbenberi.livejournal.com]

One of the big problems with theories about ergotism and suchlike as explanations of the Salem witch hysteria is that they take the events of Salem as if they were unique and extraordinary, when in fact (a) there were many other witch trials in New England prior to Salem, (b) there were many comparable witch-panics in the 16-17c in places other than New England, and (c) the socio-cultural matrix in which (a) and (b) occurred is directly relevant to any meaningful assessment of the Salem events. To treat Salem as sui generis or exceptional permits all sorts of speculation that can only be convincing in a context-free environment.

[busaikko]

Try Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark for a comparison of people who used to see angels (back in the olden days) and people now who report being abducted by aliens. That's what comes to mind re the mental state of the girls: that if they did believe, that's the mechanism that would have made it all seem real to them. He also, as I recall (read book years ago), does discuss witchcraft.

(I'm interested as I have ancestors on both sides of the Salem equation, one of the judges and one of the executed)

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

Odd. I've always assumed that the girls were in some kind of hysterical/delusional state, the original trigger for which will probably never be known. As other commenters have pointed out, it's well-documented that people are capable of experiencing all kinds of effects that originate solely in their minds. And I've always doubted that they could've sustained the effort of faking it for as long as this went on.

Obviously, I haven't done as much reading about it as you have. ;-)

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

I don't have a particular book, I do have a particular website: University of Virginia archives. (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/) You may want to grab their number and give them a buzz ... I'm sure someone there knows of a particular treatment of the research you're looking at.

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was just the other day arguing with some blowhard who was citing Salem as evidence of American lack of support for religious freedom: he said something about it proving we historically had no tolerance for "heretical thought." I do not think the word heresy means what he thinks it means. (Not that I disagree entirely with the main point, but dude, get your facts straight when you're picking an example. Anne Hutchinson, maybe? The Quakers? Also, hi, 17th century, not a great time for peace between religious sects in general.) Anyway, you've got an excellent point, and I wish I could think of something non-fictional.

Adding to the pile of book recs here, though - it's a bit tangential, but the idea of these conflicting worldviews reminds me very much of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (http://www.spiritcatchesyou.com/bookdescription.htm), an examination of a case in the 1980s in California where a traditional Asian culture and modern Western medicine just could not agree on a little girl's epilepsy.

It gets to be tragic in the highest sense of the word, and sometimes very hard to read, because everyone involved had the best possible intentions and was even willing to try accommodating the opposing view - while knowing, of course, that the other view was obviously wrong. Fascinating but painful stuff.

[wicked-witchery.livejournal.com]

There is a book by Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials. She spends a good deal of time focusing on the girls. It's an older book, though. I'm not sure if it is still in print or not. Also, John Demos just published a new book called The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World. There is a whole chapter on Salem in which he does a nice job of outlining the events. He then breaks down the "causes" as put forth by other authors. He summarizes their ideas, from hysteria to class conflict, etc. and gives the author and the book he's citing. He then wraps up with his own thoughts. It's nicely done, and the bibliography is, of course, amazing.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

There is quite a lot of material on girl bullying cultures which has some resemblance to this behaviour. The only ref that I can find off hand tho is to Sharon Thompson "What are Friends For: On Girls' Misogyny and Romantic Fiction" in Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities ed. Janice M. Irvine.

[yukis-kirausagi.livejournal.com]

I don't personally have a book to recommend but recent scientific studies into the phenomenon are showing that the girls' actions might have been caused by ergot poisoning from moldy rye.

I found this article talking more about it here:

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=586

Hope it helps with your conclusions.


*edit*

As an afterthought, I remember something about a similar study in England about those witch trials there too and how they might have resulted from moldy wheat. I sadly couldn't find this particular article as it was some years ago.

But I still hope both leads might be helpful to you.

[sazettel.livejournal.com]

There are tremedous diffiulties in discerning the motivations of the accusers. They were a varied group, and not all of the accusers were in the dramatic group that did most of the public crying out.

I've done some fairly broad research on the subject, because I'm working on a novel from the point of view of Mary Warren, the only young woman who was an accuser, and tried to recant in the middle of the hysteria, which promptly got her accused of witchcraft by the remaining girls.

IMHO, there were a large number of pressures on Salem Village at the time, most of which don't get a lot of attention, but all of which could have contributed to the outbreak. It's pretty well known that it wasn't a happy or united community. What is less well known is that a lot of the disputes over land and fencing were exacerbated by the fact that all the courts had been shut down due to a little problem concerning the governorship of the colony (the colonists had rebelled and imprisoned the previous governor on account of he was a jerk (okay, that's the real short form), and had sent a delegation (including Increase Mather) out to get a new governor appointed who was less of a jerk. But the previous governor had shut the courts down (see previous comment), and without a governor there was no way to open them up again. And without courts there was no way to settle disputes over property boundaries, which were very important in a farming community and had all been thrown into doubt by the governor (remember him?) having declared all deeds that did not recognize the king as the owner of the land as invalid. So, no one was exacty sure who owned what. And there was no way to work it out that everyone could agree on.

Then came a hard winter, then Salem Town on the coast was getting rich, and Salem village inland was not (because MA actually is a lousy place to farm), and then came the better known disputes about the church, and actually paying the ministers. And add into this the French-and-Indians were getting closer and closer (and there were some really terrible massacres and there were refugees from those coming through town), and the new Governor when he DID come had to keep the colony from getting invaded so he couldn't attend to other matters (like the courts) right away.

And then, the miniter's girls got sick, and all hell broke loose. Literally.

This was a time of great pressure and chaos and fear. Above is just SOME of what was going on. I believe some of the accusers were faking for various reasons. I believe some others called their neighbors into court, because it was the only court working, and it was ONLY to hear cases of witchcraft. So, every dispute became a case of witchcraft.

But others...I think they were just scared. Have you ever had a panic attack? It feels very real. Your heart pounds, you get pins and needles in your hands and feet, you want to jump up and run and scream. I think that's what some of them were doing, and I think as the disaster spread, they never had a chance to calm down.

If you want a look at the primary source material on this (and the court records are really interesting), go here:

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've read Boyer & Nissenbaum and am in the middle of Norton's discussion of the French and Indian wars--actually, as it turns out, several of the girls at the center of the crisis were refugees from Maine, Mercy Lewis and Abagail Hobbs in particular.

I'm not under the impression that there's an answer--although I think there's potential for a nuanced exploration; I'm frustrated by scholars' inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the way they're ducking the question.

[coppelius.livejournal.com]

I have no immediately relevant historical sources to recommend, but James Siegel's Naming the Witch addresses the question of witch hunts in small villages in quite a compelling manner. He investigates the outbreak of witch killings in Indonesia right around the time the Suharto regime was coming to an end. [Jean and John Comaroff make a similar investigation regarding the rise of economic/capitalist magic and thus-related witch hunts in post-Apartheid South Africa.] The general theory is that villagers in East Java, sensing a revolution tide but having no way to either understand or really to affect it, though it was affecting them, 'distilled' the complex ideas they couldn't lay hold of into the body of a witch (Comaroffs, 1998). In the conclusive effort to control these external forces impressing down upon them, the village kills the witch. There is catharsis, but this is in no way a solution, for the forces are clearly unaffected (though may well be exacerbated by the contribution to overall chaos), and so the process reboots.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That sounds fascinating--and very applicable to Salem in 1692. Thank you!

[coppelius.livejournal.com]

Most welcome, I'm excited to see more of your academic ramblings!

And a fangirlish addendum, as a first time poster on your blog - the explication of magic is absolutely one of my favorite parts about DoL, eeee. Thank you so much for a fantasy with an intelligent magical theory, it is in so many ways exactly what I've been pining for.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

So I real the posts in here, and the few books I recall reading on the matter that stood out have already been mentioned

I don't take that to mean I didn't find other sources -_- right now I have a cold that's left me dumb as a post, though I still read through over 3 books a day despite it. One idea did occur to me though; perhaps you're too focused on anthropologists and other so-called experts? Why not check out some of the sources actual Pagans who wrote an essay or two about Salem used? It can't hurt to get a perspective. Here's a list I've gleaned while sitting here with my 'dumb as a post' expression and reading an essay from one such pagan. Below are her sources :]

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem, George Braziller, Inc. New York: 1969
Kent, Deborah. Salem, Massachusetts. Dillon Press. New Jersey: 1996
LeBeau, Bryan F. The Story of the Salem Witch Trials: "we walked in clouds and could not see our way." Prentice Hall. New Jersey: 1998
The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak, volume I. Da Capo Press. New York: 1977.

It's possible you already found these, but since a modern pagan used such sources to construct a pretty well-informed essay I thought I'd mention them, just in case :)

[gardenfox.livejournal.com]

Although it doesn't really try to deal with the afflicted girls (in fact, it mostly sidesteps the cultural matter of witchcraft trials and persecution), I found A Fever in Salem: a new interpretation of the New England witch trials (Carlson, Laurie M., Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1999) a quick and fascinating read. It links the symptoms of the witch-accusers and the afflicted individuals in the Salem area to encephalitis lethargica, the "sleeping sickness" that was briefly epidemic in the 1920s. (Actually, the author makes a case for symptoms of encephalitis lethargica being present in many cases of witchcraft hysteria in Europe, as well.)

...and that said, er, hello! I wandered here after finishing Mélusine a few days ago and googling to find the titles of the sequels.

Witch Trials and Gender

[(Anonymous)]

You may also be interested in a book called Devil in the Shape of a Woman by Carol Karlsen. Specifically talks about gender relations in Puritan New England during the trials. Lots of books on the trials to be found here: http://www.cornerstonebooks-salem.com/witchcity/