In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton

Author:Mary Beth Norton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307426369
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

QUESTIONS AND CAVEATS BEGIN

Following the hanging of Bridget Bishop, afflictions in Salem Village ceased almost entirely for two full weeks. Between June 10 and June 24, specters tortured only three victims, and no new suspects were jailed. Of those three sufferers, just one—Susannah Sheldon—was included in the core group. The first victim was Jonathan Putnam, Sergeant Thomas’s younger cousin. When his sudden illness appeared attributable to witchcraft, the family called in Mercy Lewis, who the previous month had identified the apparitions tormenting members of the Wilkins clan. This time, she named Rebecca Nurse and Martha Carrier as those responsible for Jonathan’s condition. Three days later, Jemima Rea, the eleven-year-old daughter of a King Philip’s War veteran, likewise accused Rebecca Nurse—along with her sister Sarah Cloyce and a third woman—of causing her “strange fitts.” Finally, on Tuesday, June 21, Sheldon charged the specters of Lydia Dustin and Sarah Good with conducting a concerted campaign against her. The two apparitions had not only tormented her but had repeatedly tied her hands with cord, witnesses revealed, and objects had been mysteriously and frequently transported out of the house in which she was staying temporarily. (As was becoming commonplace, Sheldon’s afflictions had physical manifestations. That continued into the following week, when she once again accused Goody Good of having bound her hands so tightly she could not easily be freed.) 35

Although such events must have aroused much talk in the Village, the fact that their number and frequency were so reduced, and that the main group of accusers (with the notable exception of Sheldon) now appeared relatively free of torments, might have suggested to some that the height of the crisis had passed. Perhaps the death of Goody Bishop had served the purpose of freeing the afflicted from at least some of their sufferings, just as the conviction and execution of the Lowestoft witches in England had cured the children who complained against them. Indeed, Cotton Mather later wrote in Wonders of the Invisible World, a Salem Town woman who had angered Bridget Bishop a decade earlier, and who subsequently became “Froward, Crazed . . . [and] unreasonable,” had begun to recover with the arrest of Bishop and Alice Parker. She then regained her sanity entirely after the two women were executed.36

And perhaps the slight easing of tensions, the halt in what had been an unrelenting daily round of new bewitchments, formal accusations, and examinations, allowed some of the residents of Essex County and Boston to contemplate at slightly greater distance the bewildering events that had surrounded them for the past five months. Whether for that or some other cause, the weeks just prior to the second session of the Court of Oyer and Terminer witnessed the development of the first tentative criticisms of the proceedings.

Few surviving documents reveal any challenges to the magistrates prior to the execution of Bridget Bishop. Four suspected witches did attack Mary Warren’s credibility about two weeks after her May 12 confession, charging that she had earlier repeated “Severall

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.