words, are indicated in brackets.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to my patient and excellent editor, John Siciliano at Penguin Classics, for his thoroughgoing vision and support, to his editorial assistant Douglas Clark, and to my agent, Suzanne Gluck at William Morris Endeavor, for her unflagging friendship and brilliance. Thank you also to the friends and colleagues who have believed in my work on this project, with particular gratitude to David Hall, Patricia Hills, Bruce Holsinger, Virginia Myhaver, Mary Beth Norton, Brian Pellinen, Benjamin Ray, and Bruce Schulman. Rebecca Goetz did yeoman’s labor reading drafts and providing commentary, and I am so grateful to her for her guidance and support. My particular gratitude also to Katerina Stanton for making order out of chaos, and to the librarians and archivists at Houghton Library, Cornell Special Collections, the Huntington Library, and the Massachusetts State Archives for their work preserving the heritage of witchcraft in North America for generations of scholars to come. The online Salem archive maintained by the University of Virginia is a boon to scholars of Salem that is hard to overstate, and I am grateful to UVA for maintaining that initiative.
Thank you to all the book clubs and individual readers I have encountered over the years whose hunger for history inspires me every day, and to my students at Boston University and Cornell for keeping me passionate about the life of the mind.
Finally, my most ardent thanks to Louis Hyman, whose love, support, guidance, counsel, research assistance, and psychoanalysis made the completion of this project a reality.
ENGLISH ANTECEDENTS
WITCHES IN THE BIBLE
When thinking about witches today, a certain standard image comes to mind: she is an old crone with a warty nose, a black pointed hat, raggedy clothes, and a black cat by her side. Though our contemporary picture of the witch has evolved away from the Puritan conception, the American colonists too had a set of assumptions about who a witch was likely to be, and how she—for it was almost always a “she”—was able to conduct her devilish doings. But where did these assumptions come from? How did the colonists define what a witch was?
We might assume that the early modern conception of a witch derived from a description in the King James Bible. This version of the Bible, which was begun in 1604 in response to Puritan criticisms of earlier English translations, became the most widely read translation of the Bible in English during the early modern period. Printing was expensive, but then, as now, the most commonly available printed object was a Bible.
And yet the Bible is strangely quiet about witchcraft. It confirms that witches exist, but most of the telltale details—the identifying characteristics that set a witch apart from a run-of-the-mill person, and the powers that a witch is supposed to have—do not appear.
In fact, witches, as a category of their own, rather than as wizards or sorcerers, are mentioned fewer than a dozen times in the King James Bible. The first appearance comes early, in Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This command forms the justification for capital punishment of witches, but it appears without any illumination or commentary, wedged between a guideline about dowry payment and a prohibition against bestiality. Witches are declared not allowed, and yet all of Exodus 22 remains silent on the definition of what or who a witch is, or on what activities might constitute witchcraft. Even a witch’s gender is, at least according to this translation, undefined.
A bit more detail emerges with the next mention, in Deuteronomy 18:10–12:
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to my patient and excellent editor, John Siciliano at Penguin Classics, for his thoroughgoing vision and support, to his editorial assistant Douglas Clark, and to my agent, Suzanne Gluck at William Morris Endeavor, for her unflagging friendship and brilliance. Thank you also to the friends and colleagues who have believed in my work on this project, with particular gratitude to David Hall, Patricia Hills, Bruce Holsinger, Virginia Myhaver, Mary Beth Norton, Brian Pellinen, Benjamin Ray, and Bruce Schulman. Rebecca Goetz did yeoman’s labor reading drafts and providing commentary, and I am so grateful to her for her guidance and support. My particular gratitude also to Katerina Stanton for making order out of chaos, and to the librarians and archivists at Houghton Library, Cornell Special Collections, the Huntington Library, and the Massachusetts State Archives for their work preserving the heritage of witchcraft in North America for generations of scholars to come. The online Salem archive maintained by the University of Virginia is a boon to scholars of Salem that is hard to overstate, and I am grateful to UVA for maintaining that initiative.
Thank you to all the book clubs and individual readers I have encountered over the years whose hunger for history inspires me every day, and to my students at Boston University and Cornell for keeping me passionate about the life of the mind.
Finally, my most ardent thanks to Louis Hyman, whose love, support, guidance, counsel, research assistance, and psychoanalysis made the completion of this project a reality.
ENGLISH ANTECEDENTS
WITCHES IN THE BIBLE
When thinking about witches today, a certain standard image comes to mind: she is an old crone with a warty nose, a black pointed hat, raggedy clothes, and a black cat by her side. Though our contemporary picture of the witch has evolved away from the Puritan conception, the American colonists too had a set of assumptions about who a witch was likely to be, and how she—for it was almost always a “she”—was able to conduct her devilish doings. But where did these assumptions come from? How did the colonists define what a witch was?
We might assume that the early modern conception of a witch derived from a description in the King James Bible. This version of the Bible, which was begun in 1604 in response to Puritan criticisms of earlier English translations, became the most widely read translation of the Bible in English during the early modern period. Printing was expensive, but then, as now, the most commonly available printed object was a Bible.
And yet the Bible is strangely quiet about witchcraft. It confirms that witches exist, but most of the telltale details—the identifying characteristics that set a witch apart from a run-of-the-mill person, and the powers that a witch is supposed to have—do not appear.
In fact, witches, as a category of their own, rather than as wizards or sorcerers, are mentioned fewer than a dozen times in the King James Bible. The first appearance comes early, in Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This command forms the justification for capital punishment of witches, but it appears without any illumination or commentary, wedged between a guideline about dowry payment and a prohibition against bestiality. Witches are declared not allowed, and yet all of Exodus 22 remains silent on the definition of what or who a witch is, or on what activities might constitute witchcraft. Even a witch’s gender is, at least according to this translation, undefined.
A bit more detail emerges with the next mention, in Deuteronomy 18:10–12:
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all
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