S1 – INTERVIEW 5: Jane Kamensky

summer and we had a wonderful conversation. So, without further delay, let's get on with the show. This is the Unobscured Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey. Hi, I'm Jane Kamensky. I teach history at Harvard University, and I'm also the director of the Lessinger Library on the History of Women in the United States. I'm gonna start us off with a really well, deceptively simple question, but it's pretty complex. I'm sure what was a witch in um?

Which was somebody who made unexpected things happen? Puritans lived in a world of portents and wonders and almonds. They're always watching the sky, They're watching their earth Um there you know, Uh, God speaks to them. And I think a which was somebody who made almonds and portents and signs happen in ways that um seemed to reside in a appropriately in a human form, which is in purit. New England were not thought to wear black pointy hats,

although they sometimes did ride around on brooms. Um. And they acted in a whole manner of inappropriate ways or were present at times when inexplicable things happened. Um. Small harms you know, milk curdling sour side or going sour. Um. Big harms. Uh you know, somebody saying, oh, what a pretty child that is, and the child soon sickens and dies. Um. Women who spoke out of turn, uh you know who whose tongues went on like fishwives in ways that um really seemed to sort of stick out of the fabric

of conversation at the time. Um. People who said things that later seemed to be ominous. Um. It's a world in which, you know, science is quite primitive, and a great deal of what unfolds in any given season is inexplicable. Right. Crops fail, animals die, um, And sometimes in the search for supernatural explanations UM, which included God and the devil Um, which is as the handmaidens of the devil um were

were faulted. It's hard to see looking backwards whether there were individuals who cultivated that reputation UM, who had sort of family businesses in curative arts that flirted with the edge of of the supernatural. You know, there there are some instances in Salem where UM women are found with poppets that seemed to be a little little cloth dolls that seemed to be used in UM in some kind

of ritual. One thing that's quite different in UH in the early New England witchcraft cases than in a lot of more ancient witchcraft cases is that Puritans are very concerned with the idea that some which is consort with the devil um. You know, there's a there's a black mass that surfaces in accounts of Salem that's not typical in run of the mill witchcraft cases UM, where it's where it's really more about livestock or about what we

would now think of as a nightmare. I woke up with a sensation of somebody pressing on my chest, and I thought of my neighbor, and it must have been her um bewitching me um so, a whole range of unexpected happenings that didn't have an easy narrative cause that could fasten on somebody who, for whatever reason um stuck out in a fabric of society that was supposed to be smooth, very which brings us to the idea of gender, because when you talk about smooth society, there's orders and rules.

There's a quote from George Webb who said the tongue is a witch. What did he reveal about women's voices, how they were understood in in the seventeenth century society when he says that the tongue as a witch? Like, what does that mean? Um? So? George Webb is an Anglican cleric uh and um. He's one of a host of people at that time, Reformed Protestants of one kind or another um writing about the power of speech, um and uh, and often about the power of women's speech

in particular. This is what my first book, Governing the Tongue was about. Um. Puritans are famously people of the word uh. They are, you know, devotees of the Bible and vernacular language. They take utterances very very seriously. They're over a hundred kinds of speech crime policing the boundaries of proper speech. In Puritan New England, everything from a child cursing a parent was technically a capital crime because

it was a violation of the Fifth Commandment UM. Speaking against authority in various ways slander, defamation, UM, scolding, railing, and UH, and a significant number of speech in fractions UM. Ways of speaking out of turn hung on women. In particular, the idea of of the scold as a female figure UM the railer as a female figure UM was was old in England and was highly salient in early New England.

So UM when I was when I was doing my research on speech in New England society, UM, I focused on cases not just in Salem, but in the long run of New England witchcraft from the sixteen parties forward, where UM some of what neighbors said about people accused of witchcraft was UM ways in which they had spoken out of turn. UM. Women who were women who were saying things that they shouldn't have or in places they

shouldn't have, in tones that they shouldn't have. UM. A woman's role in Puritan society was a vitally important role UM. But it was a vitally important role in a in a marital partner, in a marital partnership, um as a help meet. UM. You know a uh, it's what what would now in evangelical rhetoric be called a complimentarian philosophy. UM. Uh you know, the sort of uh yen to the

husband's yang. Women who weren't married were anomalous. UM. You know, there's a there's a significant number of women accused in Salem who are either um postmarried or unmarried in uh in some way, so helpmate who was a crucial partner in a marriage and in a household, but also the junior partner, the non speaking partner, the partner who didn't serve on juries or vote. Um. Because male house headship was thought to cover everybody in the house um, and

that interest was assumed to be indivisible. Um. There are definitely suspects in Salem who rise to community notoriety because the husband and wife are fractious against each other. UM. So uh there were I guess the channel for the virtuous woman um was a pretty narrow channel. UM. At the same time, and this is something other scholars have dealt with as well. UM. Women had enormous generative power

in society. Right that if you're if or a uh, if you're a society that's unraveling mysteries, the mystery of birth is is profound right um, and is the the sort of root stock of society. UM. So one thing that which is are often accused of is processes that UM that interrupt generation in one way or another UM, things that are supposed to come to fruition that misfire UM.

Another scholar, Carol Carlson out at University of Michigan, found UM that a significant number of suspects in New England witchcraft cases were women who had unusually direct lines to property holding, either because they didn't have living husbands, or they didn't have sons, or they didn't have brothers. Some

unusually direct relationship to property in Land. UM. John de Moss and his great work enter Attaining Satan tracked the number of female witchcraft sub suspects who were post menopausal, who were through their childbearing years, so who had completed their great function in Puritan society UM, but nevertheless persisted in ways that were UM uncomfortable or could get uncomfortable for UM for their fellow townsfolk. About four out of five witchcraft suspects in New England was female, so way

outscale for the proportion of the population. And when we look at the percentage tried and the percentage executed, um, the predominance holds. I'm thinking of the story of Mary Webster and Hadley in the I think the sixteen eighties. She was accused of witchcraft, taken to Boston. It was a quit and brought back. But you know, the complaints were what you'd expect. She was, she was cranky, she

spoke out for herself, she wasn't religious. Um. And And there's a one of the themes that's popped up in all of the interviews we've been doing is that there's this what seems to be the tight normal focus on suspects. At the start, you know, the the typical other Sarah Good, Sarah Osburne um and obviously a slave Titsuba Um. You know, Sarah Good was as you said, she was a mumbler. She was she would she would mutter things under her breath, corn cob pipe exactly right. She didn't fit those norms,

and that bothered people. But but then that circle starts to get wider, and you you start to get people like Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, And do you have your own view on why that circle started to move outside of the normal others and move on to people you wouldn't expect. I mean some of these were covenant members of the church, um, and it starts to spread in a way that you wouldn't expect. Does that seem to still follow these rules of women should be behaving

one way but now they're not? Or I you know, I think one of the reasons we keep going back and back and back to Salem um which um, I don't have the numbers at the tips of my fingers, but I think it's it's under ten percent of the people who are accused of witchcraft in the in the seventeenth century in New England. Right, it's a it's a spasmodic incident. It's not the only uh, it's not the only spasm there's uh, there's one in hard for their

other you know, there are other clusters. But the reason we keep going back and back and back to Salem is because of the ways that it jumps the tracks. Um, it goes outside of the normal abnormal witchcraft suspects. UM. There are a higher proportion of men suspected and UH and tried and even executed in Salem than there are elsewhere at other times in the colonies. And it goes up and up and up the social spectrum, touching eventually

even the governor's wife herself. UM. And that's one of the reasons that people have looked so intensively at the structure of that community. UM. The instability in church headship that we see both in Salem Town and Salem Village, where that covenant community is fervent in the way that many New England towns are, but is also repeatedly rocked

by ministers coming and going. UM. Some of the military upheaval and economic upheaval that we see in the sixteen eighties, the political upheaval UM around Massachusetts's response to UH England's overreaching the dominion of New England that results in the revocation of the first Charter. So UM, it's an it's

a a volatile place at an unstable moment um. We know from Marybeth Norton's work that there are also particular UH familial connections between the traumas that are inflicted by the Indian Wars, the the sort of backcountry frontiers of Britain's Imperial Wars. UM in the northeast. It's it's overdetermined the reasons why, um, that community would be at risk

in various ways. UM. And yet still uh, there's enough, there's enough mystery in it, right, you could do a control Well what are all the what are all the places that have similar instability? And um? And why does you know? Why aren't you know why isn't there a massive witch hunt in New Haven at the same time? Or um? Uh, it's certainly not that people in Salem are less learned than they are other places. Um. Their leadership is um is lacking right that that they have

hindsight is always um. You know, looking back, if you had had a minister unlike Samuel Paris who had chosen to preach on peace and love and quiet the flames rather than to um poor, it wouldn't have been gasoline for them. But you know, pine tar on a on a smoldering set of embers. Um you could have had you could have had a different outcome. You can think of people who could have intervened all along the way to say, but wait, isn't this God telling us to

love one another or UM. You know, isn't this a call for um? The greatest of these is love or charity? UM? Should we look to this scripture instead of that scripture to guide us? UM. I don't think even Samuel Paris thought from week to week. Oh, if I do this this week, in two weeks, it's really gonna get going. UM. It's a It's an interesting instance of how UM, without I think, without any concerted malign action, UM, good people failing to um to to step up can result in

a kind of conflagration UM. A conflagration only related to its time and place. Right, It's it's hundreds of people, not thousands of people who are drawn into its web. Although UM, that conflagration is large enough and is late enough in the history the long history of European and Anglophone witchcraft that it sticks out almost immediately right that by three UM, you have people knowing that Salem is

a is a black eye UM. For for the whole New World experiment, that New England is going to be called New witch Land is one of the first things that's UM that's said ex post facto about it, and UM people continuing to write about it in the you know, in the seventeen forties, in the era of the American Revolution. It very quickly enters the domain of metaphor. Why was why was the slave woman Titsuba's testimony so powerful to

this community? I would have, I mean, my my, looking back, you know, twenty one century attitude is was she She seems to be so far of an outsider that she shouldn't have voiced at all, and yet here she is, and it seems to matter so much. Why do you think that was? I think, um, I will answer your question,

particularly about Tichiba. I think what you've just said hangs over the whole of Salem in general, right, like, why are the most powerful men in the West tern hemisphere listening to these girls in their teen years, in their early twenties. There's a whole flipping of whose word counts and who's doesn't. I think Tichubus speech, at least as we have it come down to us, you know, through a court clerk's hand, whose um probably uh to some

degree over exoticizing her dialogue, her dialect um. It's just incredibly vivid, right, you know that she uh, she decides um. You know, possibly tactically in some way. Oh you want a witch. You know, here's you. You've told me to sing like a canary. I Am going to sing in the Song of the Tropics. It's gonna have it had just if you just look through Tichubus speech for the color um. You know, the the birds, the tawny man,

the uh. It's a scholars have studied UM. Here seems to be some fusion of what she must have picked up of um New England lore, which in Paris's household she would have had abundant access to. UM. She must be hearing him walk around practicing his preaching even before he's doing it UM, and what she's brought with her,

we think from Barbados. UM. So you know, you could have called central casting for somebody to make the riveting intervention in a drama and not have conjured up somebody who could do so with more alan than she winds up doing UM. At other points in New England jurisprudence, I think it would have been quickly relegated to the side like just just uh, it doesn't follow, it doesn't follow conventions, right, um. Uh, there's a lot of leading the witness, um is there this. Yes, there's that, and

let me give you a little more. Um. She plays her role very well. And UM, it's it's interesting, I think unknowable ultimately. UM. One of the things that happens in Salem is the conventions of witchcraft trials and jurisprudence flip to some degree. So UM, in sixteen sixty in Boston, if you had made a heartfelt confession of your involvement, uh in witchcraft, that would have perhaps yielded you absolution in the world beyond. But what it would have yielded

you in this world is death. UM. In Salem, confession liberates people from the news. And UM, she can't know that yet when she's testifying, she's testifying too early. UM. You know, maybe that what she says is so narratively compelling that she begins to set that pattern in motion. UM. But that's one of the many things that goes topsy turvy in Salem. We're listening to people were not supposed to listen to. Um, And kinds of utterances that would

get you killed ten years before. UM make you a sort of star of the confessional circuit in well, and you mentioned the girls, the you know, the afflicted accusers who are there at the front of the meeting house and they're you know, going into convulsions, and and that it's odd that they too are being listened to, you know, as opposed to the grown adults in the room. Right. Is there a nuance to that or is is it just more of the same. It's just more of the

conventions being flipped on its head, you know. I think that is to me the great mystery of the Salem proceedings is how in a world that devalues women's utterances and that tends to keep um, maybe especially young women within their channels. Uh, this group of UM adolescent that's anachronistic term, but UM, women in their teens and early twenties, UM come to be this this sort of star witness

coterie UM is completely ineffable. UM. I think there is pretty convincing evidence that they are to a certain extent, coordinating with each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. UM. This is what the scholar Bernard Rosenthal believes that UM. Uh, you know, you can't A pin doesn't come out of nowhere, right, UM, it's a there's a kind of stagecraft to what they're doing.

UM that in the normal run of Puritan punishment and social sanction, UH should land them in the stocks UH in either private or public shaming right UM, either chastening in their families or by their congregations UM, or punishment for scolding and raillery and speaking against their betters, right the speaking out of fifth commandment order the younger against the older, UM, women against men, women against ministers in some cases UM with George Burrows. So how that happens?

You know, it seems like a moment where UM, the normal sources of authority holds so poorly, and the need for answers to questions that seem profound UM feels so urgent that UM people begin listening. Two unexpectedness is who say they have answers. It's so out of it's so out of the ordinary. When you have magistrates, you know, the judicial rulers who are also the business rulers, and they're from families that have been cultural and social patriarchs.

But they're the leader in every aspect of life. And yet they're deferring to these children in a sense, you know, tell me, tell me the truth, right, I mean, they wouldn't have seen themselves as deferring right, they would have seen themselves as using these female youths as the conduit to UM, you know, scouring into the marrow of God's justice. UM. But if you look even a handful of years before UM, there's a possession case in Massachusetts, the case of Elizabeth Knapp,

which John de Moss writes about at length. She's a young female servant in a minister's house, and UM undergoes many of the same kinds of UM traumatic manifest manifestations that the afflicted accusers do in Salem, including UM, you know, saying vile things to the to the minister, maybe even speaking in a voice that sounds like UM, a voice not her own. And you know, the the seal is put on the box really fast. You know she is.

She's possessed, UM, not afflicted, not a witch herself. And UH, we're gonna we're gonna get her cured, and nobody's gonna listen to her. For Heaven's sake, you know, nobody is going to listen to her. We're going to get her the help that she needs, UM, which in our time would be some kind of psychiatric intervention, and in their time is a religious one. UM. That's that's a moment

and a happening that extremely close in both time and place. Right, it's not I think it's not a full ten years before. I think it's the sixteen seventies. I think it's actually sixteen seventy two. It's Willard, right, we're talking. I think it's twenty years before. But Willard has his own connections to Salem as well. Yeah, but Willard is a skeptic.

I mean Willard is a thorough going skeptic. UM. I think Willard is one of the people who represent a kind of um secularizing is too strong, but who represent a kind of cosmopolitan urbanity UM that is nibbling at the edges of Salem. I I did a piece of work at one point that I never published, UM about the image of the Devil's Book in the Salem, which trials, you know, what does it look like? Oh, it's it's you know, it's small and they hide and it's red.

It's not read. Um and looking at the book trades in New England at the time where um, you know, this is a moment in the late sixteen eighties and early sixteen nineties where small secular print materials, um, you know, histories, geographies, satires, joke books, playing cards, UM are coming into the bookstores in the ports cities, and UM are undermining the kind of unitary authority that ministers who had less of the urbanity that Willard uh happened to have UM had experienced before.

UM at the same time increasing Cotton Mather, UM, who were fundamental to Salem unfolding the way it did. We're also part of that urban world. You know. Cotton Mather was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UM. You know was it was a fancied himself, a scientist of

international connection. UM. So it's not education or intellect that explains where people came down and and how because Cotton Mather at the same time would publish works collecting supernatural occurrences and treat them in that sort of scientific and historian minded view of well, here's this thing that happened. Let's let's not do that, right. Well, I mean this is a world in which UM, science and religion and

UM ghost stories all are are very much of a piece. UM. I've been reading in the last week or so the first volume of Deborah Harkness is All Souls Trilogy, which is called a discovery of which is Um. I started reading it, you know, I thought, I had thought, these are books about which is in vampires? This is not something I'm going to read. And I did a panel

with her a couple of weeks ago. She's an early modern historian of science, and she said that the conceit of the books was what if the world actually works the way that people thought it did in the fifteen and six and much of the seventeenth century. And I thought, that's a great conceit. Um. You know, they had they had a particular cosmology, parts of which we believe we

have proved wrong. Um, we also have a cosmology right that there are certainly things in our conceptions of science are totalizing conceptions of science that people in two hundred or three hundred years will wonder, how on earth did they believe that? How did they think? You know, this is something that we're already starting to question. How do they think that bombarding the body with poison was going

to cure cancer? Right? I mean I one of the things that we can take from a Salem into the present day are what are the things that we believe ardently and with the backing of all of our um scripture and science and uh and learning that are just going to be revealed as wrong. So yes, science and magic and almonds and portents and a message in every eclipse would have been true for mother, you know, who lives on the edge of the world of Newton. Absolutely

side note. What I love about Elizabeth knapp story is that she moves on and she marries a man named Samuel Scripture. Well, how can I redeem my name as best as I can? His last name is Scripture. I think he was the slave next door. In your book Governing the Tongue, you argued that which hunting was in part of policing of speech. Well, young me said that I don't know whether old me would say that, so, um was witch hunting in part of policing of speech?

I mean I think that, um, the ways that social norms are policed is that there are a set of consequences when um, when people overstep or um or misspeak and um. The you know, most witch hunting is informal, right, UM, so saying to a neighbor UM or complaining in church or taking to court an accusation that um that somebody has done something to make you very uncomfortable, and that's something gets the name of witchcraft. UM is a way of enforcing norms. I want to shift over to the courtroom,

the meeting house at least this. You have this unique thing happening in the first examination with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. How they're husbands are brought in and give testimony against them, um. And it might be coerced out of them, they might be freely giving it. I'm not sure.

But how would their testimony against their wives have have matched up with I guess expectations for the Puritan husband, you know, the type of role that they're supposed to have, you know, with this kind of testimony against a spouse have been unusual in a courtroom. UM. I think that the goal of puritan a goal of parent religion, and a goal of jurisprudence in a place like Massachusetts where

it's an inquisitorial system not an advocacy system. UM. So the goal of a proceeding is to get to the truth, not to defend one side against the other. UM. I think those are instances where the charges at hand and the testimony of neighbors had made people questioned the behavior of those they lived with intimately, and it would have been expected in the community that they would come forward with their doubts. Um. You know there's UM, there's a unity of husband and wife as a UM, as a

political person, as an economic person. UM. But I think, UM, you know, in spiritual manners like that, if there UM, if there is a need to delve into error, UM, you know they I think they don't realize at that moment that they're on the leading edge of a mortal battle that's gonna encompass scores and then hundreds of people and and bring all the towns around it. Um. You would have joined the court in uh, trying to get

to the bottom of a search for error. UM. In a perfect world, I mean in a you know, UM, I haven't done the research to be able to say husbands in x percentage of cases would demure when asked about about their wives in discretion. But UM, in theory, that's the way jurisprudence in an inquisitorial system should work.

And and when brought before magistrates or whether we're talking you know, the meeting house kind of village trial, or we go to oy or in termin or where things get very serious, is there a difference in gender with how people are represented. Just thinking about about the dynamics of gender. When a suspect or accused is brought into

the courtroom, is it different for a man or a woman. Well, I think, Um, the situations in a place like seventeenth century Massachusetts where a woman would have been called upon to speak publicly and officially for herself are are extremely few. Um. Uh you know, there's a pretty lively debate in Puritan meeting houses about whether women should narrate their own conversions. Um you know when they're when they're uh you know, when they're describing how they experienced in dwelling grace to

become full members of the congregation. And um some uh as I recall dimly when I did this work on seventeenth century New England. Um, some ministers preferred to take those narratives in longhand um or in chambers in some way to having a woman come in and profess openly. Um, you know, famously in New England and Hutchinson in sixteen thirty six, not all that long ago, right from sixto uh is banished from the colony for um preaching to

mix audiences. Um. You know, women, women in uh can enticles that did Bible study, woman on woman, UM, women in birthing chambers, women in household working groups would have had, you know, very free speech in front of each other. But the number of times that you would call a female speaker to depose herself in any official proceeding would

be UM would be you know, pretty rare. A defendant in a court trial, UM, a witness sometimes in a court trial, a jury person, never a preacher, never UM, a political candidate or giver of a political opinion, never UM. A poet on occasion. Right, Ann Bradstreet has published her poetry in England and it has come back and been republished in New England by the same time that Salem

breaks out and Um speaks in those poems. Got those beautiful poems mostly on the combination of domestic and spiritual matters, but takes up even in poetry the question of um am I obnoxious to each carping tongue who says um, a woman's hand better needle than a pen fits UM. So this this, you know, this question of speaking out loud, writing out loud, beyond the domestic context, it would have

been an extraordinary scene. Well, you know, it's interesting. We were, um, we were at the Pvody Institute library and Damer's talking to Richard Trusk and he has a number of things in the vault, one of which is the he has the Minister's notebook, which you can watch things such as the handwriting of Samuel Parris Degrade over eight months, you know, from Neaton Clean to he's just trying to get everything on the page. But there's the church notebook as well.

And evidently after Reverend Green came in and took over for forever in paris Um and Putnam, one of the accusers, one of the afflicted accusers, wanted to become a member in the church and had to confess, you know, and apologize because so many people in that congregation been affected by her words. And so there's this large book that

we can still open up. And he opened up the page right to us, and and her confession has been written out by Reverend Green, not by her, it's but it's been it's been recorded, Longhand like you said, and then there's her signature, that's hers, it's in a different hand. So he just hands her the pen and she she signs her name. Well, she probably couldn't have written anything of that degree of elaboration, right, So UM, reading and writing are separately taught skills at the time, UM and uh.

Women in in Puritan New England have an unusually high level of reading literacy UM because it's thought to be so important for everybody to be able to read the Bible and for mothers to be able to read the Bible to their children. UM. But they have a pretty low level of what's called sign literacy. UM. So she can sign her name. She has some rudimentary UM written literacy, but probably not the fluency to write an entire document. I guess one of the things that I find fascinating

about that um uh post hoc confession around Salem. I mean, uh so people remember, right how what a what a terrible uh scar on the community it's been in her role in it. UM. But she's kind of able to sew it up and resume a normal life, if I recall correctly, she goes on to Mary's. UM. You know, you would think that you would have um a sort of lifelong staying on your reputation and on the informal

um economy of the marriage market. UM. You know, social life ability to speak kindly to your neighbor and vice versa. Um and um, you know, I think some of them remain unmarried, but not in a not in an extreme proportion. Um. So the ability and and this is Puritanism as it's supposed to work, to write, the ability to make a heartfelt repentance and um and go on in forgiveness no matter how big the no matter how big the mess

up was. We tind to look back at Salem and kind of snicker at them for their obsession over witchcraft and things like that. But Monty Python, yeah right, yeah, Um, but how different are we today? Well, I mean we're, um, we're at a moment where I think we're looking for others under every rock, right. Um, We're we're acutely sensitive to um uh to threats from the outside to American civilization, whatever that is. Um. I think we're uh, we're an

extremely tribal moment in American politics and public life. Um uh. I'm you know, I think we're at a moment where it's pretty easy to see how the wheels come off the bus of society, right um, and to begin wondering about questions like how does the community heal after a period of UM mutual recrimination, profound upheaval UH shifts in the dynamics of power that seem unpredictable and anomalous in

the UH. In the span of history that you can look at closely with the tools that you have to look UM, you know what will our UM confessions and uh UM reconciliation look like. UM. I think one of the things that makes Salem so perennially interesting UM that brought hundreds of thousands of people to UM, the sort of makeshift UM memorial that was created for the three anniversary in UM. I hope one of the things that brings them is a humility around how close to the

surface such moments of spasmodic intolerance are. It's easy to feel smug, right, you know, how do I know she was a witch? She turned me into a new UM? I got beta right, UM. It's it's easy to um UH to put them in high hats and UM shoes with buckles and and put it in the back then. UM. I think one of the reasons that we come back and back and back to it after three centuries is because UM the idea of of such of the danger of society tearing its helpful part um being so close

to the surface. Um is it's a perennial absolutely. If there's one thing that you hope people can walk away from. UM. Sort of the takeaway, you know, as as you learn about the whole experience, what is there a lesson every Yeah?

I mean I the the um. The lesson that I think a lot of popular history misses and that calls for humility and empathy in all of us, is that many of the accusers, especially as um uh, many of the accused, that many of the accusers, as the conflict ripples from beyond Salem Village eventually to bring in the great minds of of Boston and New England. Um. These are the best minds of their generation, right. Um. These

are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists. Um. Uh, the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically in their universe. Um. They cannot be laughed off. Um. You know they are the smartest, uh, most privileged people of their times. Confronted with uh, something that is awful to them, and they act in ways that come to seem even within a couple of years. Um, almost miraculously,

terribly Um. And yet they do it with the best of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If that doesn't encourage a kind of radical humility um. And uh second guessing and um uh you know, checking in with each other about who's doing what to win who why? Um, I don't know what does. So that's that's the thing I think is easiest to miss. Hey, folks, it's Aaron here. I hope that today's interview helped deepen your understanding of everything involved in the Salem witch trials. But we're not

done yet. We've got more interviews to share with you, so stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear a preview of next week's interview. I'm Stacy Chiff. I'm the author of The Witches, um in narrative history of what Happened at Salem, to which I came because I was surprised by how little most of us really know about what happened in Um Salem, which trials seemed like a shorthand, but none of us really understands to what

it is a shorthand. UM. I had written a book about Cleopatra before this and it was the same kind of dynamic of just a name that a name brand, something that everyone recognizes without really having any grasp of the actual history. Well, when you talk about the misunderstanding, I think the place to start here is almost the

most obvious question, what was a witch in Salem? And you're right, that's the question over which we stumble because our definition, the twenty one century definition of a which

is not the seventeenth century definition of a witch. So so which at the time witchcraft is a Biblical construct and which at the time has a concrete reality because she's mentioned in he or she has mentioned in the Bible, and which is understood to be any figure male or female, but primarily female, who is in league with the devil, and who works his or her magic by means of little imps or a menagerie of little animals who can do his or her bidding. Um. And that was something

that was imported to the colonies from England. It was an extremely rampant It was extremely common concept in in the Old World and actually throughout the Old World, although by the idea of witchcraft has pretty much fallen out. Um in Europe, the colonies are in a little bit of a time work of their own, and they haven't quite got the message that this this the witchcraft concept is a little antiquated by now, Um, but you see it throughout the colonial record there, which is really from

the very beginning of New England. And the only difference with two is that um is the prosecution, is that you get this um feverish set of accusations and you get a real onless prosecution. In earlier cases, UM, there had been tremendous leniency. Often someone who brought in a charge of witchcraft was accused of lying and was sent home with a whipping. Um. Things were not necessarily taken seriously.

In obviously the opposite happens. Going back to these differences in our perception, there's how we imagine it to be and there's the reality of it. How do some of the common symbols of witchcraft that we have today, like flying on a broomstick or black cats, connect with the

sale which trials or do they? One of the one of the most interesting to meet pieces of this is how the flight gets into um, the entire panic, the entire delusion in there had not been um, there had not been flying, which is in New England for um, and it would see and they were not flying, which is an English witchcraft either. So this is really an

import from the continent. And it would seem that we get that idea UM from a narrative that cotton Mouth, by one of the most influential ministers at the time, includes in an earlier text of his, and he writes about a Swedish witchcraft epidemic in which a little girl UM is on her way to a satanic meeting to two young children in fact set off this witchcraft crisis, and a little girl falls off her broomstick. He writes about all these wonderful details which we will then see

transpost to Massachusetts. But he writes about things that had never before happened in New England, a satanic meeting UM in a meadow at which people signed satanic pacts into which they fly on sticks. Um. And that is really there were French flight French flying, which is before six nine two there had never really been English flying witches. So that's pretty pretty much seems to be where that

aspect of it comes from. Black hats. I spent a lot of time I live with a black cat, so I spent a lot of time on black hats, and they seem to have been the devil since in Quddy. They've we've had a bad wrap all along. And if you look at the Salem testimony, the court testimony, you see a tremendous number of cats. They're translucent cats, they're gleaming cats, they're black cats, they're red cats. They're all over the place. And it does it does seem to

be it's a seductive creature. It's a female seeming creature in many many people's minds, and a black cat will detach itself from the darkness without any warning, and it's a cat is unpredictable. So there's that sense that you can caress a cat and be rewarded with scratches, and all of those things seemed to add up to something that people are very uncertain about and often taken aback by. So there are many number of theories as to how black cats get get wrapped up in the witchcraft, but yes,

that is a constant from day one. This episode of Unobscured was executive produced by me Matt Rederick and Alex Williams, with music by Chad Lawson and audio engineering by Alex Williams. The Unobscure website has everything you need to get the most out of the podcast. There's a resource library of maps, charts, and links to Salem document archives online, as well as a suggested reading list and a page with all of our historian biographies. And as always, thanks for supporting this show.

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