Witchcraft by Michael Streeter

Author:Michael Streeter
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The settlers in New England tended to follow the English approach to witchcraft. The modern view of witchcraft in North America is of course dominated by the dramatic events at Salem in 1692 (see here). Yet the horrors of that small Massachusetts settlement were highly unusual both in scale and frenzy in the English-speaking world. At all other times, events in New England closely mirrored the relatively low level of prosecutions and the relative absence of hysteria seen in England. The settlers were in fact governed by the English legislation passed in 1604 soon after the accession of James I, which did not explicitly link witchcraft to Devil worship and heresy but put more emphasis on witches causing harm by magic. Those executed in New England were hanged, never burned at the stake.

However, the idea that witches could make a pact with the Devil did feature in North American accusations of witchcraft. The writings of Europeans on the subject of witchcraft and demons were well known among the educated in New England, and they would have been familiar with the witch furor that had been raging on the other side of the Atlantic.

One such work was by William Perkins, an English Puritan whose Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, published in 1608, became a standard text on the topic in the English-speaking world. According to Perkins, good indications that someone was a witch included their having a quarrel with someone, followed by an act of misfortune; a curse, followed by someone’s death; or the opinion of “men of honesty and credit” that a person was a witch. Such circumstantial events were often the basis for accusations in New England, though alone they were not sufficient for a conviction.

The first executions of witches in New England occurred in the late 1640s, just after a rash of witch trials in the southeast of England inspired by the self-appointed Witch-Finder General, Matthew Hopkins (see here). The first recorded New England victim was Alice Young, a woman from Windsor, Connecticut, who was tried and hanged as a witch in 1647; other than that, very little is recorded of the case.

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