Description
Primary sources include court depositions in addition to excerpts from the diaries and letters of contemporaries. They cover trials for witchcraft, reports of diabolical possessions, suits of defamation, and reports of preternatural events. Every section is preceded by headnotes that describe the case and its background and refer the reader to necessary secondary interpretations. In his incisive introduction, David D. Hall addresses quite a lot of necessary issues: witchcraft lore, antagonistic social relationships, the vulnerability of women, religious ideologies, popular and learned understandings of witchcraft and the devil, and the role of the legal system. This volume is an extraordinarily significant resource for the study of gender, village politics, religion, and popular culture in seventeenth-century New England.