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THE SALEM TRIALS

The original materials on this website dealing with witchcraft prosecutions in the late
seventeenth century in Essex County and the Massachusetts Bay Colony include a number of
texts from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain whose influence and arguments extended
into North America.  They represent the tension between the sceptical tradition and the belief in
spirit activity.  Thomas Ady --probably a physician in Essex, England--represents a
powerful, sceptical voice in the tradition of Johann Weyer and Reginald Scot.  His
works (A Candle in the Dark, 1656; second edition retitled A Perfect Discovery of
Witches, 1661) expressed considerable doubts about the reality of witchcraft and greatly
criticized physicians who attributed physical afflictions too readily to demonic interference. Ady
and the sceptical tradition were echoed in the work of John Webster, The displaying
of supposed witchcraft, of 1677, and the dissenting minister George Burroughs, one of the
victims of the Salem Village prosecutions in 1692, quoted Ady favorably.
   
Conversely, the reality of witchcraft and spirit activity generally were also asserted with
considerable passion. In the context of apocalypticism in England, the work of Nathaniel
Homes (Holmes), Daemonologie and Theologie, in 1650, expressed millenarian
ideas similar to those of Cotton Mather a generation later. Spirit activity was illustrated
in the work of  Richard Baxter (1615-1691), a Puritan divine, millenarian, and friend of
Increase Mather, who was contemptuous of popular religion but convinced of the
reality of spirit activity. Part of a movement in late seventeenth-century England more generally
identified with Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, he was seeking to justify
belief in the activities of the spirit world by identifying as many authentic cases of spirit activity
as possible against the sceptical tradition represented by Weyer, Scot, Ady, and Webster.26 Increase Mather also drew upon the continental
literature on witchcraft and demonology, both for arguments and for sources. He knew the work
of the sceptic Johann Weyer, and he drew for patristic sources on the early
seventeenth-century work of Petrus Thyraeus among others.27
 
The sceptical tradition, however, continued into the early eighteenth century. The earlier debates
are reflected in the work of Francis Hutchinson, Bishop of Down and Connor
(1660-1739), whose highly sceptical Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft appeared in
1718 and was expanded in 1720, and Richard Boulton (fl. 1697-1724), who enthusiastically
defended the reality of magic and witchcraft specifically against the criticisms of
Hutchinson.
    
Both sceptics and believers were heard in British North America, and the trials at Salem Village
throughout most of 1692 became their focus.  There is no need here for yet another narrative
historical account of the trials and their repercussions, nor for a full reproduction of materials
now readily available in print, although many theological pamphlets of the period shed
considerable light on the specific discussions of witchcraft and need to be consulted by the
specialist. This website offers examples of a number of different positions and opinions held both
by those who participated in the trials and those who opposed or later criticized them.

THE PRIMARY WORKS PRODUCED BY THE SALEM TRIALS

This website includes works by Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and
Deodat Lawson representing what might be termed the Calvinist/Congregationalist
position: that witchcraft actually occurred, and that it was permitted by God at a particularly
urgent and troubled time in the history of New England, although each case ought to be
evaluated on its own terms.  Neither fully committed to the abstract notion of a "witch-hunt," nor
able to disengage themselves from their interpretation of the particular cases in Salem Village,
the Mathers and Lawson may be said to represent the theoretical and guarded theological
justification for what was, after all, an essentially secular prosecution.
 
The works of Robert Calef, John Hale, and Thomas Maule, the
latter being a Quaker who knew well the consequences of witchcraft accusations directed against
Quakers, represent the critical literature from both lay and clerical perspectives.28  Calef's More Wonders of the Invisible World, a
reply to Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, is perhaps the best
known, longest, and most sustained attack on theological assumptions in late seventeenth-century
New England. Hale and Maule offer two distinct theological perspectives on the position taken
by Cotton Mather.

The plaintive claim of William Good for damages endured as the result of the
execution of his wife, Sarah, on July 19, 1692, suggests that the Salem stories, having originated
in a legal and theological worldview applied to particular circumstances, ended in a legal
world-view in which damages could be sought from the authority of a mistaken court.

-notes-

26W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the
Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London, 1979).  It is worth
pointing out that, for all of his creative use of the New England past, Whittier seems to have been
fairly well acquainted with some of both the English and continental literature of the sceptical
tradition. See The Supernaturalism of New England.
 
27On Thyraeus, see Lea, Materials, II,
624-627.
 
28On Quakers and earlier witchcraft accusations, see
Peter Elmer, "‘Saints or Sorcerers': Quakerism, demonology and the decline of witchcraft in
seventeenth-century England," in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 145-179.