Speaker 1: Our guest today is Jane Kamensky, Professor of history at
Speaker 1: Harvard University. She's also the director of the slushing Er
Speaker 1: Library on the History of Women in America at the
Speaker 1: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. She's a historian of the
Speaker 1: Atlantic World and the United States, with a particular interest
Speaker 1: in the histories of family, culture and everyday life, you know,
Speaker 1: the stuff that makes history feel more real. I had
Speaker 1: a chance to sit down with Professor Kaminski this past
Speaker 1: summer and we had a wonderful conversation. So, without further delay,
Speaker 1: let's get on with the show. This is the Unobscured
Speaker 1: Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey. Hi, I'm
Speaker 1: Jane Kamensky. I teach history at Harvard University, and I'm
Speaker 1: also the director of the Lessinger Library on the History
Speaker 1: of Women in the United States. I'm gonna start us
Speaker 1: off with a really well, deceptively simple question, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty complex. I'm sure what was a witch in um?
Speaker 1: Which was somebody who made unexpected things happen? Puritans lived
Speaker 1: in a world of portents and wonders and almonds. They're
Speaker 1: always watching the sky, They're watching their earth Um there
Speaker 1: you know, Uh, God speaks to them. And I think
Speaker 1: a which was somebody who made almonds and portents and
Speaker 1: signs happen in ways that um seemed to reside in
Speaker 1: a appropriately in a human form, which is in purit.
Speaker 1: New England were not thought to wear black pointy hats,
Speaker 1: although they sometimes did ride around on brooms. Um. And
Speaker 1: they acted in a whole manner of inappropriate ways or
Speaker 1: were present at times when inexplicable things happened. Um. Small
Speaker 1: harms you know, milk curdling sour side or going sour. Um.
Speaker 1: Big harms. Uh you know, somebody saying, oh, what a
Speaker 1: pretty child that is, and the child soon sickens and dies. Um.
Speaker 1: Women who spoke out of turn, uh you know who
Speaker 1: whose tongues went on like fishwives in ways that um
Speaker 1: really seemed to sort of stick out of the fabric
Speaker 1: of conversation at the time. Um. People who said things
Speaker 1: that later seemed to be ominous. Um. It's a world
Speaker 1: in which, you know, science is quite primitive, and a
Speaker 1: great deal of what unfolds in any given season is inexplicable. Right.
Speaker 1: Crops fail, animals die, um, And sometimes in the search
Speaker 1: for supernatural explanations UM, which included God and the devil Um,
Speaker 1: which is as the handmaidens of the devil um were
Speaker 1: were faulted. It's hard to see looking backwards whether there
Speaker 1: were individuals who cultivated that reputation UM, who had sort
Speaker 1: of family businesses in curative arts that flirted with the
Speaker 1: edge of of the supernatural. You know, there there are
Speaker 1: some instances in Salem where UM women are found with
Speaker 1: poppets that seemed to be a little little cloth dolls
Speaker 1: that seemed to be used in UM in some kind
Speaker 1: of ritual. One thing that's quite different in UH in
Speaker 1: the early New England witchcraft cases than in a lot
Speaker 1: of more ancient witchcraft cases is that Puritans are very
Speaker 1: concerned with the idea that some which is consort with
Speaker 1: the devil um. You know, there's a there's a black
Speaker 1: mass that surfaces in accounts of Salem that's not typical
Speaker 1: in run of the mill witchcraft cases UM, where it's
Speaker 1: where it's really more about livestock or about what we
Speaker 1: would now think of as a nightmare. I woke up
Speaker 1: with a sensation of somebody pressing on my chest, and
Speaker 1: I thought of my neighbor, and it must have been
Speaker 1: her um bewitching me um so, a whole range of
Speaker 1: unexpected happenings that didn't have an easy narrative cause that
Speaker 1: could fasten on somebody who, for whatever reason um stuck
Speaker 1: out in a fabric of society that was supposed to
Speaker 1: be smooth, very which brings us to the idea of gender,
Speaker 1: because when you talk about smooth society, there's orders and rules.
Speaker 1: There's a quote from George Webb who said the tongue
Speaker 1: is a witch. What did he reveal about women's voices,
Speaker 1: how they were understood in in the seventeenth century society
Speaker 1: when he says that the tongue as a witch? Like,
Speaker 1: what does that mean? Um? So? George Webb is an
Speaker 1: Anglican cleric uh and um. He's one of a host
Speaker 1: of people at that time, Reformed Protestants of one kind
Speaker 1: or another um writing about the power of speech, um
Speaker 1: and uh, and often about the power of women's speech
Speaker 1: in particular. This is what my first book, Governing the
Speaker 1: Tongue was about. Um. Puritans are famously people of the
Speaker 1: word uh. They are, you know, devotees of the Bible
Speaker 1: and vernacular language. They take utterances very very seriously. They're
Speaker 1: over a hundred kinds of speech crime policing the boundaries
Speaker 1: of proper speech. In Puritan New England, everything from a
Speaker 1: child cursing a parent was technically a capital crime because
Speaker 1: it was a violation of the Fifth Commandment UM. Speaking
Speaker 1: against authority in various ways slander, defamation, UM, scolding, railing,
Speaker 1: and UH, and a significant number of speech in fractions UM.
Speaker 1: Ways of speaking out of turn hung on women. In particular,
Speaker 1: the idea of of the scold as a female figure
Speaker 1: UM the railer as a female figure UM was was
Speaker 1: old in England and was highly salient in early New England.
Speaker 1: So UM when I was when I was doing my
Speaker 1: research on speech in New England society, UM, I focused
Speaker 1: on cases not just in Salem, but in the long
Speaker 1: run of New England witchcraft from the sixteen parties forward,
Speaker 1: where UM some of what neighbors said about people accused
Speaker 1: of witchcraft was UM ways in which they had spoken
Speaker 1: out of turn. UM. Women who were women who were
Speaker 1: saying things that they shouldn't have or in places they
Speaker 1: shouldn't have, in tones that they shouldn't have. UM. A
Speaker 1: woman's role in Puritan society was a vitally important role UM.
Speaker 1: But it was a vitally important role in a in
Speaker 1: a marital partner, in a marital partnership, um as a
Speaker 1: help meet. UM. You know a uh, it's what what
Speaker 1: would now in evangelical rhetoric be called a complimentarian philosophy. UM.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, the sort of uh yen to the
Speaker 1: husband's yang. Women who weren't married were anomalous. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a significant number of women accused in
Speaker 1: Salem who are either um postmarried or unmarried in uh
Speaker 1: in some way, so helpmate who was a crucial partner
Speaker 1: in a marriage and in a household, but also the
Speaker 1: junior partner, the non speaking partner, the partner who didn't
Speaker 1: serve on juries or vote. Um. Because male house headship
Speaker 1: was thought to cover everybody in the house um, and
Speaker 1: that interest was assumed to be indivisible. Um. There are
Speaker 1: definitely suspects in Salem who rise to community notoriety because
Speaker 1: the husband and wife are fractious against each other. UM.
Speaker 1: So uh there were I guess the channel for the
Speaker 1: virtuous woman um was a pretty narrow channel. UM. At
Speaker 1: the same time, and this is something other scholars have
Speaker 1: dealt with as well. UM. Women had enormous generative power
Speaker 1: in society. Right that if you're if or a uh,
Speaker 1: if you're a society that's unraveling mysteries, the mystery of
Speaker 1: birth is is profound right um, and is the the
Speaker 1: sort of root stock of society. UM. So one thing
Speaker 1: that which is are often accused of is processes that
Speaker 1: UM that interrupt generation in one way or another UM,
Speaker 1: things that are supposed to come to fruition that misfire UM.
Speaker 1: Another scholar, Carol Carlson out at University of Michigan, found
Speaker 1: UM that a significant number of suspects in New England
Speaker 1: witchcraft cases were women who had unusually direct lines to
Speaker 1: property holding, either because they didn't have living husbands, or
Speaker 1: they didn't have sons, or they didn't have brothers. Some
Speaker 1: unusually direct relationship to property in Land. UM. John de
Speaker 1: Moss and his great work enter Attaining Satan tracked the
Speaker 1: number of female witchcraft sub suspects who were post menopausal,
Speaker 1: who were through their childbearing years, so who had completed
Speaker 1: their great function in Puritan society UM, but nevertheless persisted
Speaker 1: in ways that were UM uncomfortable or could get uncomfortable
Speaker 1: for UM for their fellow townsfolk. About four out of
Speaker 1: five witchcraft suspects in New England was female, so way
Speaker 1: outscale for the proportion of the population. And when we
Speaker 1: look at the percentage tried and the percentage executed, um,
Speaker 1: the predominance holds. I'm thinking of the story of Mary
Speaker 1: Webster and Hadley in the I think the sixteen eighties.
Speaker 1: She was accused of witchcraft, taken to Boston. It was
Speaker 1: a quit and brought back. But you know, the complaints
Speaker 1: were what you'd expect. She was, she was cranky, she
Speaker 1: spoke out for herself, she wasn't religious. Um. And And
Speaker 1: there's a one of the themes that's popped up in
Speaker 1: all of the interviews we've been doing is that there's
Speaker 1: this what seems to be the tight normal focus on suspects.
Speaker 1: At the start, you know, the the typical other Sarah Good,
Speaker 1: Sarah Osburne um and obviously a slave Titsuba Um. You know,
Speaker 1: Sarah Good was as you said, she was a mumbler.
Speaker 1: She was she would she would mutter things under her breath,
Speaker 1: corn cob pipe exactly right. She didn't fit those norms,
Speaker 1: and that bothered people. But but then that circle starts
Speaker 1: to get wider, and you you start to get people
Speaker 1: like Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, And do you have
Speaker 1: your own view on why that circle started to move
Speaker 1: outside of the normal others and move on to people
Speaker 1: you wouldn't expect. I mean some of these were covenant
Speaker 1: members of the church, um, and it starts to spread
Speaker 1: in a way that you wouldn't expect. Does that seem
Speaker 1: to still follow these rules of women should be behaving
Speaker 1: one way but now they're not? Or I you know,
Speaker 1: I think one of the reasons we keep going back
Speaker 1: and back and back to Salem um which um, I
Speaker 1: don't have the numbers at the tips of my fingers,
Speaker 1: but I think it's it's under ten percent of the
Speaker 1: people who are accused of witchcraft in the in the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century in New England. Right, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: spasmodic incident. It's not the only uh, it's not the
Speaker 1: only spasm there's uh, there's one in hard for their
Speaker 1: other you know, there are other clusters. But the reason
Speaker 1: we keep going back and back and back to Salem
Speaker 1: is because of the ways that it jumps the tracks. Um,
Speaker 1: it goes outside of the normal abnormal witchcraft suspects. UM.
Speaker 1: There are a higher proportion of men suspected and UH
Speaker 1: and tried and even executed in Salem than there are
Speaker 1: elsewhere at other times in the colonies. And it goes
Speaker 1: up and up and up the social spectrum, touching eventually
Speaker 1: even the governor's wife herself. UM. And that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that people have looked so intensively at the
Speaker 1: structure of that community. UM. The instability in church headship
Speaker 1: that we see both in Salem Town and Salem Village,
Speaker 1: where that covenant community is fervent in the way that
Speaker 1: many New England towns are, but is also repeatedly rocked
Speaker 1: by ministers coming and going. UM. Some of the military
Speaker 1: upheaval and economic upheaval that we see in the sixteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the political upheaval UM around Massachusetts's response to UH England's
Speaker 1: overreaching the dominion of New England that results in the
Speaker 1: revocation of the first Charter. So UM, it's an it's
Speaker 1: a a volatile place at an unstable moment um. We
Speaker 1: know from Marybeth Norton's work that there are also particular
Speaker 1: UH familial connections between the traumas that are inflicted by
Speaker 1: the Indian Wars, the the sort of backcountry frontiers of
Speaker 1: Britain's Imperial Wars. UM in the northeast. It's it's overdetermined
Speaker 1: the reasons why, um, that community would be at risk
Speaker 1: in various ways. UM. And yet still uh, there's enough,
Speaker 1: there's enough mystery in it, right, you could do a
Speaker 1: control Well what are all the what are all the
Speaker 1: places that have similar instability? And um? And why does
Speaker 1: you know? Why aren't you know why isn't there a
Speaker 1: massive witch hunt in New Haven at the same time?
Speaker 1: Or um? Uh, it's certainly not that people in Salem
Speaker 1: are less learned than they are other places. Um. Their
Speaker 1: leadership is um is lacking right that that they have
Speaker 1: hindsight is always um. You know, looking back, if you
Speaker 1: had had a minister unlike Samuel Paris who had chosen
Speaker 1: to preach on peace and love and quiet the flames
Speaker 1: rather than to um poor, it wouldn't have been gasoline
Speaker 1: for them. But you know, pine tar on a on
Speaker 1: a smoldering set of embers. Um you could have had
Speaker 1: you could have had a different outcome. You can think
Speaker 1: of people who could have intervened all along the way
Speaker 1: to say, but wait, isn't this God telling us to
Speaker 1: love one another or UM. You know, isn't this a
Speaker 1: call for um? The greatest of these is love or charity? UM?
Speaker 1: Should we look to this scripture instead of that scripture
Speaker 1: to guide us? UM. I don't think even Samuel Paris
Speaker 1: thought from week to week. Oh, if I do this
Speaker 1: this week, in two weeks, it's really gonna get going. UM.
Speaker 1: It's a It's an interesting instance of how UM, without
Speaker 1: I think, without any concerted malign action, UM, good people
Speaker 1: failing to um to to step up can result in
Speaker 1: a kind of conflagration UM. A conflagration only related to
Speaker 1: its time and place. Right, It's it's hundreds of people,
Speaker 1: not thousands of people who are drawn into its web.
Speaker 1: Although UM, that conflagration is large enough and is late
Speaker 1: enough in the history the long history of European and
Speaker 1: Anglophone witchcraft that it sticks out almost immediately right that
Speaker 1: by three UM, you have people knowing that Salem is
Speaker 1: a is a black eye UM. For for the whole
Speaker 1: New World experiment, that New England is going to be
Speaker 1: called New witch Land is one of the first things
Speaker 1: that's UM that's said ex post facto about it, and
Speaker 1: UM people continuing to write about it in the you know,
Speaker 1: in the seventeen forties, in the era of the American Revolution.
Speaker 1: It very quickly enters the domain of metaphor. Why was
Speaker 1: why was the slave woman Titsuba's testimony so powerful to
Speaker 1: this community? I would have, I mean, my my, looking back,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty one century attitude is was she She
Speaker 1: seems to be so far of an outsider that she
Speaker 1: shouldn't have voiced at all, and yet here she is,
Speaker 1: and it seems to matter so much. Why do you
Speaker 1: think that was? I think, um, I will answer your question,
Speaker 1: particularly about Tichiba. I think what you've just said hangs
Speaker 1: over the whole of Salem in general, right, like, why
Speaker 1: are the most powerful men in the West tern hemisphere
Speaker 1: listening to these girls in their teen years, in their
Speaker 1: early twenties. There's a whole flipping of whose word counts
Speaker 1: and who's doesn't. I think Tichubus speech, at least as
Speaker 1: we have it come down to us, you know, through
Speaker 1: a court clerk's hand, whose um probably uh to some
Speaker 1: degree over exoticizing her dialogue, her dialect um. It's just
Speaker 1: incredibly vivid, right, you know that she uh, she decides um.
Speaker 1: You know, possibly tactically in some way. Oh you want
Speaker 1: a witch. You know, here's you. You've told me to
Speaker 1: sing like a canary. I Am going to sing in
Speaker 1: the Song of the Tropics. It's gonna have it had
Speaker 1: just if you just look through Tichubus speech for the
Speaker 1: color um. You know, the the birds, the tawny man,
Speaker 1: the uh. It's a scholars have studied UM. Here seems
Speaker 1: to be some fusion of what she must have picked
Speaker 1: up of um New England lore, which in Paris's household
Speaker 1: she would have had abundant access to. UM. She must
Speaker 1: be hearing him walk around practicing his preaching even before
Speaker 1: he's doing it UM, and what she's brought with her,
Speaker 1: we think from Barbados. UM. So you know, you could
Speaker 1: have called central casting for somebody to make the riveting
Speaker 1: intervention in a drama and not have conjured up somebody
Speaker 1: who could do so with more alan than she winds
Speaker 1: up doing UM. At other points in New England jurisprudence,
Speaker 1: I think it would have been quickly relegated to the
Speaker 1: side like just just uh, it doesn't follow, it doesn't
Speaker 1: follow conventions, right, um. Uh, there's a lot of leading
Speaker 1: the witness, um is there this. Yes, there's that, and
Speaker 1: let me give you a little more. Um. She plays
Speaker 1: her role very well. And UM, it's it's interesting, I
Speaker 1: think unknowable ultimately. UM. One of the things that happens
Speaker 1: in Salem is the conventions of witchcraft trials and jurisprudence
Speaker 1: flip to some degree. So UM, in sixteen sixty in Boston,
Speaker 1: if you had made a heartfelt confession of your involvement,
Speaker 1: uh in witchcraft, that would have perhaps yielded you absolution
Speaker 1: in the world beyond. But what it would have yielded
Speaker 1: you in this world is death. UM. In Salem, confession
Speaker 1: liberates people from the news. And UM, she can't know
Speaker 1: that yet when she's testifying, she's testifying too early. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe that what she says is so narratively
Speaker 1: compelling that she begins to set that pattern in motion. UM.
Speaker 1: But that's one of the many things that goes topsy
Speaker 1: turvy in Salem. We're listening to people were not supposed
Speaker 1: to listen to. Um, And kinds of utterances that would
Speaker 1: get you killed ten years before. UM make you a
Speaker 1: sort of star of the confessional circuit in well, and
Speaker 1: you mentioned the girls, the you know, the afflicted accusers
Speaker 1: who are there at the front of the meeting house
Speaker 1: and they're you know, going into convulsions, and and that
Speaker 1: it's odd that they too are being listened to, you know,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the grown adults in the room. Right.
Speaker 1: Is there a nuance to that or is is it
Speaker 1: just more of the same. It's just more of the
Speaker 1: conventions being flipped on its head, you know. I think
Speaker 1: that is to me the great mystery of the Salem
Speaker 1: proceedings is how in a world that devalues women's utterances
Speaker 1: and that tends to keep um, maybe especially young women
Speaker 1: within their channels. Uh, this group of UM adolescent that's
Speaker 1: anachronistic term, but UM, women in their teens and early twenties,
Speaker 1: UM come to be this this sort of star witness
Speaker 1: coterie UM is completely ineffable. UM. I think there is
Speaker 1: pretty convincing evidence that they are to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: coordinating with each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. UM.
Speaker 1: This is what the scholar Bernard Rosenthal believes that UM. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't A pin doesn't come out of nowhere, right, UM,
Speaker 1: it's a there's a kind of stagecraft to what they're doing.
Speaker 1: UM that in the normal run of Puritan punishment and
Speaker 1: social sanction, UH should land them in the stocks UH
Speaker 1: in either private or public shaming right UM, either chastening
Speaker 1: in their families or by their congregations UM, or punishment
Speaker 1: for scolding and raillery and speaking against their betters, right
Speaker 1: the speaking out of fifth commandment order the younger against
Speaker 1: the older, UM, women against men, women against ministers in
Speaker 1: some cases UM with George Burrows. So how that happens?
Speaker 1: You know, it seems like a moment where UM, the
Speaker 1: normal sources of authority holds so poorly, and the need
Speaker 1: for answers to questions that seem profound UM feels so
Speaker 1: urgent that UM people begin listening. Two unexpectedness is who
Speaker 1: say they have answers. It's so out of it's so
Speaker 1: out of the ordinary. When you have magistrates, you know,
Speaker 1: the judicial rulers who are also the business rulers, and
Speaker 1: they're from families that have been cultural and social patriarchs.
Speaker 1: But they're the leader in every aspect of life. And
Speaker 1: yet they're deferring to these children in a sense, you know,
Speaker 1: tell me, tell me the truth, right, I mean, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't have seen themselves as deferring right, they would have
Speaker 1: seen themselves as using these female youths as the conduit
Speaker 1: to UM, you know, scouring into the marrow of God's justice. UM.
Speaker 1: But if you look even a handful of years before UM,
Speaker 1: there's a possession case in Massachusetts, the case of Elizabeth Knapp,
Speaker 1: which John de Moss writes about at length. She's a
Speaker 1: young female servant in a minister's house, and UM undergoes
Speaker 1: many of the same kinds of UM traumatic manifest manifestations
Speaker 1: that the afflicted accusers do in Salem, including UM, you know,
Speaker 1: saying vile things to the to the minister, maybe even
Speaker 1: speaking in a voice that sounds like UM, a voice
Speaker 1: not her own. And you know, the the seal is
Speaker 1: put on the box really fast. You know she is.
Speaker 1: She's possessed, UM, not afflicted, not a witch herself. And UH,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna get her cured, and nobody's gonna
Speaker 1: listen to her. For Heaven's sake, you know, nobody is
Speaker 1: going to listen to her. We're going to get her
Speaker 1: the help that she needs, UM, which in our time
Speaker 1: would be some kind of psychiatric intervention, and in their
Speaker 1: time is a religious one. UM. That's that's a moment
Speaker 1: and a happening that extremely close in both time and place. Right,
Speaker 1: it's not I think it's not a full ten years before.
Speaker 1: I think it's the sixteen seventies. I think it's actually
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy two. It's Willard, right, we're talking. I think
Speaker 1: it's twenty years before. But Willard has his own connections
Speaker 1: to Salem as well. Yeah, but Willard is a skeptic.
Speaker 1: I mean Willard is a thorough going skeptic. UM. I
Speaker 1: think Willard is one of the people who represent a
Speaker 1: kind of um secularizing is too strong, but who represent
Speaker 1: a kind of cosmopolitan urbanity UM that is nibbling at
Speaker 1: the edges of Salem. I I did a piece of
Speaker 1: work at one point that I never published, UM about
Speaker 1: the image of the Devil's Book in the Salem, which trials,
Speaker 1: you know, what does it look like? Oh, it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's small and they hide and it's red.
Speaker 1: It's not read. Um and looking at the book trades
Speaker 1: in New England at the time where um, you know,
Speaker 1: this is a moment in the late sixteen eighties and
Speaker 1: early sixteen nineties where small secular print materials, um, you know, histories, geographies, satires,
Speaker 1: joke books, playing cards, UM are coming into the bookstores
Speaker 1: in the ports cities, and UM are undermining the kind
Speaker 1: of unitary authority that ministers who had less of the
Speaker 1: urbanity that Willard uh happened to have UM had experienced before.
Speaker 1: UM at the same time increasing Cotton Mather, UM, who
Speaker 1: were fundamental to Salem unfolding the way it did. We're
Speaker 1: also part of that urban world. You know. Cotton Mather
Speaker 1: was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UM. You
Speaker 1: know was it was a fancied himself, a scientist of
Speaker 1: international connection. UM. So it's not education or intellect that
Speaker 1: explains where people came down and and how because Cotton
Speaker 1: Mather at the same time would publish works collecting supernatural
Speaker 1: occurrences and treat them in that sort of scientific and
Speaker 1: historian minded view of well, here's this thing that happened.
Speaker 1: Let's let's not do that, right. Well, I mean this
Speaker 1: is a world in which UM, science and religion and
Speaker 1: UM ghost stories all are are very much of a piece. UM.
Speaker 1: I've been reading in the last week or so the
Speaker 1: first volume of Deborah Harkness is All Souls Trilogy, which
Speaker 1: is called a discovery of which is Um. I started
Speaker 1: reading it, you know, I thought, I had thought, these
Speaker 1: are books about which is in vampires? This is not
Speaker 1: something I'm going to read. And I did a panel
Speaker 1: with her a couple of weeks ago. She's an early
Speaker 1: modern historian of science, and she said that the conceit
Speaker 1: of the books was what if the world actually works
Speaker 1: the way that people thought it did in the fifteen
Speaker 1: and six and much of the seventeenth century. And I thought,
Speaker 1: that's a great conceit. Um. You know, they had they
Speaker 1: had a particular cosmology, parts of which we believe we
Speaker 1: have proved wrong. Um, we also have a cosmology right
Speaker 1: that there are certainly things in our conceptions of science
Speaker 1: are totalizing conceptions of science that people in two hundred
Speaker 1: or three hundred years will wonder, how on earth did
Speaker 1: they believe that? How did they think? You know, this
Speaker 1: is something that we're already starting to question. How do
Speaker 1: they think that bombarding the body with poison was going
Speaker 1: to cure cancer? Right? I mean I one of the
Speaker 1: things that we can take from a Salem into the
Speaker 1: present day are what are the things that we believe
Speaker 1: ardently and with the backing of all of our um
Speaker 1: scripture and science and uh and learning that are just
Speaker 1: going to be revealed as wrong. So yes, science and
Speaker 1: magic and almonds and portents and a message in every
Speaker 1: eclipse would have been true for mother, you know, who
Speaker 1: lives on the edge of the world of Newton. Absolutely
Speaker 1: side note. What I love about Elizabeth knapp story is
Speaker 1: that she moves on and she marries a man named
Speaker 1: Samuel Scripture. Well, how can I redeem my name as
Speaker 1: best as I can? His last name is Scripture. I
Speaker 1: think he was the slave next door. In your book
Speaker 1: Governing the Tongue, you argued that which hunting was in
Speaker 1: part of policing of speech. Well, young me said that
Speaker 1: I don't know whether old me would say that, so,
Speaker 1: um was witch hunting in part of policing of speech?
Speaker 1: I mean I think that, um, the ways that social
Speaker 1: norms are policed is that there are a set of
Speaker 1: consequences when um, when people overstep or um or misspeak
Speaker 1: and um. The you know, most witch hunting is informal, right, UM,
Speaker 1: so saying to a neighbor UM or complaining in church
Speaker 1: or taking to court an accusation that um that somebody
Speaker 1: has done something to make you very uncomfortable, and that's
Speaker 1: something gets the name of witchcraft. UM is a way
Speaker 1: of enforcing norms. I want to shift over to the courtroom,
Speaker 1: the meeting house at least this. You have this unique
Speaker 1: thing happening in the first examination with Sarah Good and
Speaker 1: Sarah Osborne. How they're husbands are brought in and give
Speaker 1: testimony against them, um. And it might be coerced out
Speaker 1: of them, they might be freely giving it. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: But how would their testimony against their wives have have
Speaker 1: matched up with I guess expectations for the Puritan husband,
Speaker 1: you know, the type of role that they're supposed to have,
Speaker 1: you know, with this kind of testimony against a spouse
Speaker 1: have been unusual in a courtroom. UM. I think that
Speaker 1: the goal of puritan a goal of parent religion, and
Speaker 1: a goal of jurisprudence in a place like Massachusetts where
Speaker 1: it's an inquisitorial system not an advocacy system. UM. So
Speaker 1: the goal of a proceeding is to get to the truth,
Speaker 1: not to defend one side against the other. UM. I
Speaker 1: think those are instances where the charges at hand and
Speaker 1: the testimony of neighbors had made people questioned the behavior
Speaker 1: of those they lived with intimately, and it would have
Speaker 1: been expected in the community that they would come forward
Speaker 1: with their doubts. Um. You know there's UM, there's a
Speaker 1: unity of husband and wife as a UM, as a
Speaker 1: political person, as an economic person. UM. But I think, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, in spiritual manners like that, if there UM,
Speaker 1: if there is a need to delve into error, UM,
Speaker 1: you know they I think they don't realize at that
Speaker 1: moment that they're on the leading edge of a mortal
Speaker 1: battle that's gonna encompass scores and then hundreds of people
Speaker 1: and and bring all the towns around it. Um. You
Speaker 1: would have joined the court in uh, trying to get
Speaker 1: to the bottom of a search for error. UM. In
Speaker 1: a perfect world, I mean in a you know, UM,
Speaker 1: I haven't done the research to be able to say
Speaker 1: husbands in x percentage of cases would demure when asked
Speaker 1: about about their wives in discretion. But UM, in theory,
Speaker 1: that's the way jurisprudence in an inquisitorial system should work.
Speaker 1: And and when brought before magistrates or whether we're talking
Speaker 1: you know, the meeting house kind of village trial, or
Speaker 1: we go to oy or in termin or where things
Speaker 1: get very serious, is there a difference in gender with
Speaker 1: how people are represented. Just thinking about about the dynamics
Speaker 1: of gender. When a suspect or accused is brought into
Speaker 1: the courtroom, is it different for a man or a woman. Well,
Speaker 1: I think, Um, the situations in a place like seventeenth
Speaker 1: century Massachusetts where a woman would have been called upon
Speaker 1: to speak publicly and officially for herself are are extremely few. Um.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, there's a pretty lively debate in Puritan
Speaker 1: meeting houses about whether women should narrate their own conversions.
Speaker 1: Um you know when they're when they're uh you know,
Speaker 1: when they're describing how they experienced in dwelling grace to
Speaker 1: become full members of the congregation. And um some uh
Speaker 1: as I recall dimly when I did this work on
Speaker 1: seventeenth century New England. Um, some ministers preferred to take
Speaker 1: those narratives in longhand um or in chambers in some
Speaker 1: way to having a woman come in and profess openly. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, famously in New England and Hutchinson in sixteen
Speaker 1: thirty six, not all that long ago, right from sixto
Speaker 1: uh is banished from the colony for um preaching to
Speaker 1: mix audiences. Um. You know, women, women in uh can
Speaker 1: enticles that did Bible study, woman on woman, UM, women
Speaker 1: in birthing chambers, women in household working groups would have had,
Speaker 1: you know, very free speech in front of each other.
Speaker 1: But the number of times that you would call a
Speaker 1: female speaker to depose herself in any official proceeding would
Speaker 1: be UM would be you know, pretty rare. A defendant
Speaker 1: in a court trial, UM, a witness sometimes in a
Speaker 1: court trial, a jury person, never a preacher, never UM,
Speaker 1: a political candidate or giver of a political opinion, never UM.
Speaker 1: A poet on occasion. Right, Ann Bradstreet has published her
Speaker 1: poetry in England and it has come back and been
Speaker 1: republished in New England by the same time that Salem
Speaker 1: breaks out and Um speaks in those poems. Got those
Speaker 1: beautiful poems mostly on the combination of domestic and spiritual matters,
Speaker 1: but takes up even in poetry the question of um
Speaker 1: am I obnoxious to each carping tongue who says um,
Speaker 1: a woman's hand better needle than a pen fits UM.
Speaker 1: So this this, you know, this question of speaking out loud,
Speaker 1: writing out loud, beyond the domestic context, it would have
Speaker 1: been an extraordinary scene. Well, you know, it's interesting. We were, um,
Speaker 1: we were at the Pvody Institute library and Damer's talking
Speaker 1: to Richard Trusk and he has a number of things
Speaker 1: in the vault, one of which is the he has
Speaker 1: the Minister's notebook, which you can watch things such as
Speaker 1: the handwriting of Samuel Parris Degrade over eight months, you know,
Speaker 1: from Neaton Clean to he's just trying to get everything
Speaker 1: on the page. But there's the church notebook as well.
Speaker 1: And evidently after Reverend Green came in and took over
Speaker 1: for forever in paris Um and Putnam, one of the accusers,
Speaker 1: one of the afflicted accusers, wanted to become a member
Speaker 1: in the church and had to confess, you know, and
Speaker 1: apologize because so many people in that congregation been affected
Speaker 1: by her words. And so there's this large book that
Speaker 1: we can still open up. And he opened up the
Speaker 1: page right to us, and and her confession has been
Speaker 1: written out by Reverend Green, not by her, it's but
Speaker 1: it's been it's been recorded, Longhand like you said, and
Speaker 1: then there's her signature, that's hers, it's in a different hand.
Speaker 1: So he just hands her the pen and she she
Speaker 1: signs her name. Well, she probably couldn't have written anything
Speaker 1: of that degree of elaboration, right, So UM, reading and
Speaker 1: writing are separately taught skills at the time, UM and uh.
Speaker 1: Women in in Puritan New England have an unusually high
Speaker 1: level of reading literacy UM because it's thought to be
Speaker 1: so important for everybody to be able to read the
Speaker 1: Bible and for mothers to be able to read the
Speaker 1: Bible to their children. UM. But they have a pretty
Speaker 1: low level of what's called sign literacy. UM. So she
Speaker 1: can sign her name. She has some rudimentary UM written literacy,
Speaker 1: but probably not the fluency to write an entire document.
Speaker 1: I guess one of the things that I find fascinating
Speaker 1: about that um uh post hoc confession around Salem. I mean,
Speaker 1: uh so people remember, right how what a what a
Speaker 1: terrible uh scar on the community it's been in her
Speaker 1: role in it. UM. But she's kind of able to
Speaker 1: sew it up and resume a normal life, if I
Speaker 1: recall correctly, she goes on to Mary's. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: you would think that you would have um a sort
Speaker 1: of lifelong staying on your reputation and on the informal
Speaker 1: um economy of the marriage market. UM. You know, social
Speaker 1: life ability to speak kindly to your neighbor and vice versa.
Speaker 1: Um and um, you know, I think some of them
Speaker 1: remain unmarried, but not in a not in an extreme proportion. Um.
Speaker 1: So the ability and and this is Puritanism as it's
Speaker 1: supposed to work, to write, the ability to make a
Speaker 1: heartfelt repentance and um and go on in forgiveness no
Speaker 1: matter how big the no matter how big the mess
Speaker 1: up was. We tind to look back at Salem and
Speaker 1: kind of snicker at them for their obsession over witchcraft
Speaker 1: and things like that. But Monty Python, yeah right, yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: but how different are we today? Well, I mean we're, um,
Speaker 1: we're at a moment where I think we're looking for
Speaker 1: others under every rock, right. Um, We're we're acutely sensitive
Speaker 1: to um uh to threats from the outside to American civilization,
Speaker 1: whatever that is. Um. I think we're uh, we're an
Speaker 1: extremely tribal moment in American politics and public life. Um uh.
Speaker 1: I'm you know, I think we're at a moment where
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy to see how the wheels come off
Speaker 1: the bus of society, right um, and to begin wondering
Speaker 1: about questions like how does the community heal after a
Speaker 1: period of UM mutual recrimination, profound upheaval UH shifts in
Speaker 1: the dynamics of power that seem unpredictable and anomalous in
Speaker 1: the UH. In the span of history that you can
Speaker 1: look at closely with the tools that you have to
Speaker 1: look UM, you know what will our UM confessions and
Speaker 1: uh UM reconciliation look like. UM. I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that makes Salem so perennially interesting UM that
Speaker 1: brought hundreds of thousands of people to UM, the sort
Speaker 1: of makeshift UM memorial that was created for the three
Speaker 1: anniversary in UM. I hope one of the things that
Speaker 1: brings them is a humility around how close to the
Speaker 1: surface such moments of spasmodic intolerance are. It's easy to
Speaker 1: feel smug, right, you know, how do I know she
Speaker 1: was a witch? She turned me into a new UM?
Speaker 1: I got beta right, UM. It's it's easy to um
Speaker 1: UH to put them in high hats and UM shoes
Speaker 1: with buckles and and put it in the back then. UM.
Speaker 1: I think one of the reasons that we come back
Speaker 1: and back and back to it after three centuries is
Speaker 1: because UM the idea of of such of the danger
Speaker 1: of society tearing its helpful part um being so close
Speaker 1: to the surface. Um is it's a perennial absolutely. If
Speaker 1: there's one thing that you hope people can walk away from. UM.
Speaker 1: Sort of the takeaway, you know, as as you learn
Speaker 1: about the whole experience, what is there a lesson every Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean I the the um. The lesson that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of popular history misses and that calls
Speaker 1: for humility and empathy in all of us, is that
Speaker 1: many of the accusers, especially as um uh, many of
Speaker 1: the accused, that many of the accusers, as the conflict
Speaker 1: ripples from beyond Salem Village eventually to bring in the
Speaker 1: great minds of of Boston and New England. Um. These
Speaker 1: are the best minds of their generation, right. Um. These
Speaker 1: are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists. Um. Uh,
Speaker 1: the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and
Speaker 1: ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically
Speaker 1: in their universe. Um. They cannot be laughed off. Um.
Speaker 1: You know they are the smartest, uh, most privileged people
Speaker 1: of their times. Confronted with uh, something that is awful
Speaker 1: to them, and they act in ways that come to
Speaker 1: seem even within a couple of years. Um, almost miraculously,
Speaker 1: terribly Um. And yet they do it with the best
Speaker 1: of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If that doesn't
Speaker 1: encourage a kind of radical humility um. And uh second
Speaker 1: guessing and um uh you know, checking in with each
Speaker 1: other about who's doing what to win who why? Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know what does. So that's that's the thing
Speaker 1: I think is easiest to miss. Hey, folks, it's Aaron here.
Speaker 1: I hope that today's interview helped deepen your understanding of
Speaker 1: everything involved in the Salem witch trials. But we're not
Speaker 1: done yet. We've got more interviews to share with you,
Speaker 1: so stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear
Speaker 1: a preview of next week's interview. I'm Stacy Chiff. I'm
Speaker 1: the author of The Witches, um in narrative history of
Speaker 1: what Happened at Salem, to which I came because I
Speaker 1: was surprised by how little most of us really know
Speaker 1: about what happened in Um Salem, which trials seemed like
Speaker 1: a shorthand, but none of us really understands to what
Speaker 1: it is a shorthand. UM. I had written a book
Speaker 1: about Cleopatra before this and it was the same kind
Speaker 1: of dynamic of just a name that a name brand,
Speaker 1: something that everyone recognizes without really having any grasp of
Speaker 1: the actual history. Well, when you talk about the misunderstanding,
Speaker 1: I think the place to start here is almost the
Speaker 1: most obvious question, what was a witch in Salem? And
Speaker 1: you're right, that's the question over which we stumble because
Speaker 1: our definition, the twenty one century definition of a which
Speaker 1: is not the seventeenth century definition of a witch. So
Speaker 1: so which at the time witchcraft is a Biblical construct
Speaker 1: and which at the time has a concrete reality because
Speaker 1: she's mentioned in he or she has mentioned in the Bible,
Speaker 1: and which is understood to be any figure male or female,
Speaker 1: but primarily female, who is in league with the devil,
Speaker 1: and who works his or her magic by means of
Speaker 1: little imps or a menagerie of little animals who can
Speaker 1: do his or her bidding. Um. And that was something
Speaker 1: that was imported to the colonies from England. It was
Speaker 1: an extremely rampant It was extremely common concept in in
Speaker 1: the Old World and actually throughout the Old World, although
Speaker 1: by the idea of witchcraft has pretty much fallen out.
Speaker 1: Um in Europe, the colonies are in a little bit
Speaker 1: of a time work of their own, and they haven't
Speaker 1: quite got the message that this this the witchcraft concept
Speaker 1: is a little antiquated by now, Um, but you see
Speaker 1: it throughout the colonial record there, which is really from
Speaker 1: the very beginning of New England. And the only difference
Speaker 1: with two is that um is the prosecution, is that
Speaker 1: you get this um feverish set of accusations and you
Speaker 1: get a real onless prosecution. In earlier cases, UM, there
Speaker 1: had been tremendous leniency. Often someone who brought in a
Speaker 1: charge of witchcraft was accused of lying and was sent
Speaker 1: home with a whipping. Um. Things were not necessarily taken seriously.
Speaker 1: In obviously the opposite happens. Going back to these differences
Speaker 1: in our perception, there's how we imagine it to be
Speaker 1: and there's the reality of it. How do some of
Speaker 1: the common symbols of witchcraft that we have today, like
Speaker 1: flying on a broomstick or black cats, connect with the
Speaker 1: sale which trials or do they? One of the one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting to meet pieces of this is
Speaker 1: how the flight gets into um, the entire panic, the
Speaker 1: entire delusion in there had not been um, there had
Speaker 1: not been flying, which is in New England for um,
Speaker 1: and it would see and they were not flying, which
Speaker 1: is an English witchcraft either. So this is really an
Speaker 1: import from the continent. And it would seem that we
Speaker 1: get that idea UM from a narrative that cotton Mouth,
Speaker 1: by one of the most influential ministers at the time,
Speaker 1: includes in an earlier text of his, and he writes
Speaker 1: about a Swedish witchcraft epidemic in which a little girl
Speaker 1: UM is on her way to a satanic meeting to
Speaker 1: two young children in fact set off this witchcraft crisis,
Speaker 1: and a little girl falls off her broomstick. He writes
Speaker 1: about all these wonderful details which we will then see
Speaker 1: transpost to Massachusetts. But he writes about things that had
Speaker 1: never before happened in New England, a satanic meeting UM
Speaker 1: in a meadow at which people signed satanic pacts into
Speaker 1: which they fly on sticks. Um. And that is really
Speaker 1: there were French flight French flying, which is before six
Speaker 1: nine two there had never really been English flying witches.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty pretty much seems to be where that
Speaker 1: aspect of it comes from. Black hats. I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time I live with a black cat, so
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time on black hats, and
Speaker 1: they seem to have been the devil since in Quddy.
Speaker 1: They've we've had a bad wrap all along. And if
Speaker 1: you look at the Salem testimony, the court testimony, you
Speaker 1: see a tremendous number of cats. They're translucent cats, they're
Speaker 1: gleaming cats, they're black cats, they're red cats. They're all
Speaker 1: over the place. And it does it does seem to
Speaker 1: be it's a seductive creature. It's a female seeming creature
Speaker 1: in many many people's minds, and a black cat will
Speaker 1: detach itself from the darkness without any warning, and it's
Speaker 1: a cat is unpredictable. So there's that sense that you
Speaker 1: can caress a cat and be rewarded with scratches, and
Speaker 1: all of those things seemed to add up to something
Speaker 1: that people are very uncertain about and often taken aback by.
Speaker 1: So there are many number of theories as to how
Speaker 1: black cats get get wrapped up in the witchcraft, but yes,
Speaker 1: that is a constant from day one. This episode of
Speaker 1: Unobscured was executive produced by me Matt Rederick and Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: with music by Chad Lawson and audio engineering by Alex Williams.
Speaker 1: The Unobscure website has everything you need to get the
Speaker 1: most out of the podcast. There's a resource library of maps, charts,
Speaker 1: and links to Salem document archives online, as well as
Speaker 1: a suggested reading list and a page with all of
Speaker 1: our historian biographies. And as always, thanks for supporting this show.
Speaker 1: If you love it, head over to Apple podcasts dot
Speaker 1: com slash Unobscured and leave a written review and a
Speaker 1: star rating. It makes a huge difference for the show's growth,
Speaker 1: and as always, thanks for listening.