Table Of ContentManhood, Witchcraft and Possession in Old and New England
by
Erika Anne Gasser
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History and Women’s Studies)
in The University of Michigan
2007
Doctoral Committee:
Professor Carol F. Karlsen, Chair
Professor Susan M. Juster
Professor Michael P. MacDonald
Associate Professor Susan Scott Parrish
© Erika Anne Gasser
All rights reserved
2007
Dedication
To my parents
Gary and Nancy Gasser
ii
Table of Contents
Dedication.......................................................................................................................ii
List of Tables..................................................................................................................v
Introduction.....................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1 MANHOOD, WITCHCRAFT AND POSSESSION......................................14
Writing about Witchcraft-Possession.................................................................28
Writing about Men.............................................................................................40
Writing About Men and Witchcraft....................................................................47
Chapter 2 A MAN UNMADE: JOHN SAMUEL AND WITCHES OF WARBOYS........61
The Female Witches in Warboys........................................................................69
Gender and Hierarchy in Warboys.....................................................................80
John Samuel: Manhood in Warboys...................................................................93
A Family Unmade............................................................................................104
Chapter 3 GENDERED LANGUAGE IN ENGLISH WITCHCRAFT-POSSESSION 108
Manly Credit....................................................................................................120
Manly Reason, Unmanly Excess......................................................................136
Trade and Occupation......................................................................................145
Manhood and Social Order..............................................................................151
Chapter 4 PASSING A CENTURY, CROSSING THE ATLANTIC...........................164
Men, Women, and Witchcraft-Possession........................................................174
Possession and Religio-Political Propaganda...................................................185
Healing and Testing Possessed Bodies.............................................................205
Chapter 5 TO UNMAKE A MINISTER: GEORGE BURROUGHS IN SALEM........226
Foundations of New England Witchcraft-Possession........................................232
The Trial of Reverend George Burroughs........................................................236
Historians and New England Witchcraft-Possession........................................247
Sacrificing One for the Credit of All................................................................254
iii
Chapter 6 GENDER IN NEW ENGLAND WITCHCRAFT-POSSESSION................263
Cotton Mather, Margaret Rule, and the Question of Credit...............................271
Contesting Manhood: Debating Margaret Rule’s possession...........................280
Contesting Manhood: Defending the Mathers.................................................295
Patriarchy and Possession................................................................................308
Epilogue...........................................................................................................................317
Bibliography...............................................................................................................322
iv
List of Tables
Table
1 Total Possessed Individuals.....................................................................................179
2 Total Male Possessed...............................................................................................180
3 Total Female Possessed...........................................................................................181
v
INTRODUCTION
From the end of the sixteenth century to the start of the eighteenth, struggles
among English Anglicans, Puritans and Catholics resulted in warfare, the execution of
royals, and riots over prayer books and altars. The same controversies that dominated the
political, religious, social and cultural climate of early modern England and colonial New
England shaped witchcraft and demonic possession cases, which in turn revealed local
versions of these tensions in smaller battles, executions, and riots. To be sure, legal
prosecution of witches was relatively rare in the Anglo-American world. But witchcraft-
possession cases—because of the way they merged crucial sectarian arguments with a
subject of considerable popular interest—were widely published and disproportionately
influenced political and religious discourse. Each instance of suspected witchcraft or
affliction by devils had the potential to reveal cosmic truths about the extent of the
Devil’s powers, the possibility of miracles in a post-apostolic age, and God’s favor for
those He empowered to restore order.1
English witchcraft differed from that of continental Europe in several ways, the
most important of which were related to Catholic doctrine and law. In much of Europe,
for example, inquisitors interrogated accused witches without requiring the presence of
1 To differentiate their practice of dispossession from Catholic exorcisms, Puritans claiming their emphasis
on prayer and fasting rather than holy water or relics more precisely reflected the rite as it was described in
the Bible. In Mark 9:14-20, when a young afflicted man was brought to Jesus, Jesus stated that such a
demon was only expelled through prayer and fasting.
1
those who accused them.2 In many cases, applications of torture were used to extract
confessions from the recalcitrant. The image of the European witch being burned at the
stake persists today; many presume that witches in England and New England were also
burned, rather than hanged.3 This archetypical witch image is invariably female. While
historians differ about the precise ratio of male to female witches across Europe, scholars
agree that approximately seventy-five to eighty per cent of executed witches were
women.4 Unlike European witches, Anglo-American witches faced trials under
England’s accusatorial legal system. Witnesses were required to appear in court to testify
2 For a comprehensive view of England’s laws in comparison with Europe, and Catholic versus Protestant
witchcraft overall, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 521-559. For the influence of continental witchcraft
on England, see Cecil L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism: A Concise Account Derived from
Sworn Depositions and Confessions Obtained in the Courts of England and Wales (London: Heath
Cranton, ltd., 1933), 41-48. For an explanation of the particular role of Catholicism in
European—particularly French—witchcraft-possession cases, see Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and
Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), 4; 64-69; 125-126.
3 Keith Thomas explains that witches in England were hanged, except in cases of petty treason such as
murdering their husbands or masters. See Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scriber, 1971),
443, 2n.
4 This ratio fluctuated considerably depending upon the location and outbreak. At times the executed were
nearly exclusively female; in certain areas of Scandinavia and Russia, however, witches were
predominantly male. For estimates on the numbers of executed witches, see G.L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in
Old and New England, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 277-284; Thomas, 535-536; Norman
Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (London: Chatto, 1975),
253-254; Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed., (London: Longman Press, 1995),
25; 124; Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary
History, 2nd ed., revised by Edward Peters (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 17-
19, and James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England, (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania University Press), 1996, 125. For the gender ratio in European witchcraft, see E. William
Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1976), 118-121 and H.C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern
Germany 1562-1684 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 178-186. For broader regional
comparisons, see Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt, eds., Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and
magic in Enlightenment Europe (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. See also Valerie
Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century
Muscovy,” in Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, Christine D. Worobec, eds., Russia’s
Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 74-
94. Kivelson writes that the “judicial process in Russia had elements in common with both the European
Inquisitorial and the gentler English mode of investigation. As in England, the initiative in filing suits
against witches remained the prerogative of the community, not the church or state…Women comprised
only 32 percent of the 136 accused witches in Russian cases examined here, whereas in Western Europe
and North America on average 80 percent were women,” 81; 83.
2
against those they charged—in itself a regulating mechanism on the volume of cases that
went to trial. The surviving records demonstrate that in popular belief and elite discourse
English witchcraft was predominantly associated with maleficium: the practice by which
witches (particularly female ones) used supernatural power to harm.5 In England, male
and female witches were more likely to have spirit familiars in the shape of real or
fantastic animals, and were less likely than their European counterparts to confess to
having had sexual relations with the Devil.6 Furthermore, the Protestant emphasis on the
cosmic significance of visions, dreams, and personal temptation changed the articulation
of the motives for and results of witchcraft.7 Puritans’ obsession with the individual’s
struggle to resist temptation, moreover, helped create a climate in which possession cases
took on particular religious and political significance.8
As in Europe, though, English witch trials reflected the common belief that
women were more susceptible to supernatural influence, and more often witches than
men. Men and youths were also found guilty of the crime, and by shifting from
witchcraft trials to representations of witchcraft-possession, this project extends its
analysis to three main groups of participants and observers: men who were accused of
witchcraft by possessed people, men who acted as if they were possessed, and men who
published propaganda about possession cases. By examining men and possession, this
dissertation pursues a broader view of the explicit and implicit cultural ideals at work
5 Thomas has shown that maleficium was far more central in England than in continental witchcraft belief,
438; 441-449.
6 Ibid., 443-446.
7 See for example Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Early Modern England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000),
40-57.
8 Nathan Johnstone writes that Protestant demonic possession was increasingly “understood to be an
internal dialogue in which Satan sought to undermine pious instincts by appealing to man’s natural
corruption, and, most threateningly, by introducing doubts as to election.” See The Devil and Demonism in
Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3.
3
during these exceptional moments. It focuses on witchcraft-possession cases in England
and New England, and asks specifically about continuities and changes in how
participants and observers understood the cases’ implications. Recognizing that
witchcraft belief was fundamentally gendered, but that the scripts drawn upon by male
and female actors were not necessarily gendered in the same way, it argues that manhood
played more of a role—and more complicated a role—in witchcraft and possession than
previously recognized or explored.
Understanding these groups of men first requires an explication of the phenomena
with which they were involved. I use the term “witchcraft-possession” to describe cases
in which individuals performed the symptoms of demonic possession and accused human
intermediaries of causing them. As D.P. Walker has pointed out, demonic possession
cases so frequently involved at least some hint of witchcraft that it is difficult to separate
the two.9 Cases of straightforward demonic possession in which no human was
named—or recorded as being named—were even more rare than witchcraft-possession
cases, but explosively controversial because of the justification such performances
offered to its supervisors. Men and boys who acted as if they were possessed were often
young, apprentices, and/or religiously fervent. Like their female counterparts, possessed
men had convulsive fits, and some combination of unnatural limitations (choking, an
inability to eat or pray, an aversion to holy words or objects) or abilities (divination,
flying, strength, flexibility or rigidity). Others channeled strange voices from within,
spoke in languages they had never learned, or preached with astonishing eloquence about
sin and redemption. Some performed drunkenness, blasphemy, and frivolity, while
9 D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries (London: Scholar Press, 1981), 8-10.
4
Description:The Female Witches in Warboys. John Samuel: Manhood in Warboys. Chapter 6 GENDER IN NEW ENGLAND WITCHCRAFT-POSSESSION.
