Mary Beth Norton on Salem Witch Trials Research – Witch Hunt
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Show Notes
In this episode of “Witch Hunt,” we are privileged to share the expert insights of Mary Beth Norton, a distinguished historian specializing in early American history. Mary Beth shares her profound research on the impact of frontier warfare on the dynamics of the Salem Witch Trials, offering a unique perspective that centers on the accusers. Mary Beth gives insights from her experiences teaching this intriguing topic of history at Cornell University, alongside the compelling witch trial research her students undertook. Join us as we discuss key takeaways from her groundbreaking book, In the Devil’s Snare, and hear firsthand about the innovative research conducted by her students. Don’t miss this deep dive into one of the most mysterious chapters of American history.
Buy: In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton
Buy: Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt by Bernard Rosenthal, editor
The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection
Salem Witchcraft In The Classroom
Support Us! Buy Book Titles Mentioned in this Episode from our Book Shop
Transcript
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Witch Hunt. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today we have a very special episode for you. We are honored to be joined by the renowned historian Mary Beth Norton.
Josh Hutchinson: Mary Beth Norton is an expert in early American history and has made significant contributions to our understanding of the Salem Witch Trials. Her groundbreaking book, In the Devil's Snare, focuses on the accusers rather than the accused.
Sarah Jack: In today's episode, we will dive deep into Mary Beth's research, explore the impact of frontier warfare on the witch trials, and discuss the fascinating dynamics of the accusations. Plus, we'll hear about her experiences teaching about Salem at Cornell University and the research done by her students.
Josh Hutchinson: So get ready for an enlightening and thought provoking conversation. Let's welcome Mary Beth Norton to the Witch Hunt podcast.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, Mary Beth [00:01:00] Norton.
Sarah Jack: Hi, everybody.
Sarah Jack: Hi, Josh. It's good to see you.
Josh Hutchinson: Hi, Sarah. Good to see you, too.
Sarah Jack: We have a very special guest today, Mary Beth Norton. Thank you for joining us for this special talk. What would you like us to know about your interests and contributions to history research?
Mary Beth Norton: Well, I focus on the early American period, which I define as anything before 1800, and I've written books on a number of topics that cover American material before 1800. I don't really deal with Native American material except as they coincide with or conflict with European settlement. But, so I don't do Native American stuff, but I do do just about anything else and I like to focus particularly on gender and women, which is what led me to Salem.
Josh Hutchinson: And you wrote this wonderful book about the Salem Witch Trials, In the Devil's Snare. Why do you think that has resonated so strongly [00:02:00] with readers?
Mary Beth Norton: I think one of the things I did was something very different from what most people have done about Salem Witchcraft. Most of the books about Salem Witchcraft define themselves as studies of the law, or studies of the way accused women, who accused women are, or why they're accused. Um, I got interested in not so much the accused, which a lot of people had worked on, but the accusers. Because the accusers, after all, are the people who are, are starting everything off. It's true they're picking the accused, but they, they have the motivation and the accused are simply responding to them.
Mary Beth Norton: And so I thought I wanted to focus on the accusers and the judges and, and I did. And I think that just led to a very different way of thinking and looking at the Salem witch trials than other people have done. And it also led me [00:03:00] away from the courtroom, although the courtroom is an important part of everything, but one of the questions I was particularly interested in had to do with, um, a previous book I had done, which is called Founding Mothers & Fathers. That's a study of society in 17th century North America comparing New England and the Chesapeake based on legal records.
Mary Beth Norton: And one of the things I learned from that study of legal records was that young, when young women made accusations in court, they usually were not believed. And so what was interesting to me about Salem Witchcraft is that there are young women who are making accusations, and they are believed, so that the question that I wanted to answer was, why? Why did people in 1692 believe these accusations from these young women?
Mary Beth Norton: And I discovered that, in fact, among other things, there are older women who also make accusations, and so we're wrong to think about the hysterical girls or something like that. In fact, a lot of the things I [00:04:00] argue in the book have to do with the fact that older people, both men and women, then support the young women in their accusations, and that it's, if you look at the timing carefully, it's often not until the older people weigh in that the courts actually pay a lot of attention to the younger accusers.
Mary Beth Norton: So I was very interested in the dynamics of everything, in a way that other people have not been. I think that's why, to answer your question, why my work has resonated with others, and in particular also the fact that I really developed the, um, the, um, context of the Indian War, which I think is absolutely crucial. I should say that I didn't start out to write about the Indian War. It emerged from the documents as I found more and more references in the materials, not just in the legal records, but in the correspondence to, um, to the Indian wars on the northern frontier.
Josh Hutchinson: And [00:05:00] that work has definitely resonated with me. Uh, that was the first book about the Salem Witch Trials that I read, and that got me started on this current trajectory into learning more about witch hunts.
Josh Hutchinson: And, um, your focus on the accusers I thought was so great because they're the ones you need to understand to know why it happened and why did those adults believe the children? Why did the other adults believe the afflicted adults?
Josh Hutchinson: And then the influence of the Native American warfare on the frontier has really reshaped my thinking about the Salem Witch Trials.
Mary Beth Norton: I'm glad to hear that.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. It really made an impact on me. Definitely.
Sarah Jack: I really love how those who cherish your book, the conversations that I see online [00:06:00] about the material is always so enriching, so it's just really apparent, you know, it's not just a book we have in our hand or a title that's out there to purchase, there's conversation about it. And it's just...
Mary Beth Norton: I'm glad to hear that, because I don't know anything about that. That's good to know too, that people are not out there criticizing it.
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Right. I have a Facebook page for Salem Witch Trials information, and I share your book, and it gets so much positive feedback.
Mary Beth Norton: Right. I don't do Fa, I don't do Facebook. I'm not on Facebook. If anybody has looked for me on Facebook, you don't find me. So I just don't want to be involved with Mike Zuckerberg.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah. Might be good not to be on there.
Sarah Jack: So your curiosity led to lots of new information that probably really impacted your ongoing research, [00:07:00] um, the dynamic of how you did your next project.
Mary Beth Norton: Yeah, sure. I mean, the book that I, that I published in 2020, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, is also organized chronologically, and that's in part because of what I learned from organizing the Salem records chronologically. Um, that turned out to be so crucial.
Mary Beth Norton: I mean, I remember when I first started working on Salem Witchcraft, and I would tell my friends in early American history this, that I was doing this, and they would say, "what? Why are you doing that? Everything has been discovered already." and then I would make a point about, about the chronology. And then they would be astonished. And they would say, "oh my God, nobody ever thought of that." For example, the fact that a lot of accusations came on Mondays. Guess what? After people heard Samuel Parris's Sunday sermons, and nobody had ever put the dates up against an actual physical calendar. So when I did the [00:08:00] book, I created an entire calendar for the Julian year 1774, I mean, not 17, obviously, 1692, so that I could, I could tell what the days of the week were active and what days of the week were not active in terms of hearings and trials and accusations and so forth. So I had this huge file of, huge file on my computer of, of the chronology.
Mary Beth Norton: Uh, that was all before the new witchcraft, uh, book appeared, that is the Bernie Rosenthal edited vision, version of the Salem Witch Trial records. And that too is organized chronologically, but in it, it's organized differently chronologically. That is, it's organized chronologically in terms of the legal records, um, what the legal chronology is. What I was tried to do was to create an, a chronology of when things actually happened rather than when they turned up in court. So it [00:09:00] would have been a great help to me if the Rosenthal edition had been ready when I was working on my book, but it wasn't. I had to use the old records edited by Boyer and Nissenbaum and basically, um, derived from the WPA transcripts of the 16, of the, of the 1930s, which had a variety of, of errors in them, as I discovered when I compared them against the original manuscripts.
Mary Beth Norton: So my, my book has weird footnotes, you know, for today, because a lot of them are to the older edition of Boyer and Nissenbaum's edition of records. Um, they're also a lot related to the original documents that I saw, um, either in Salem or other places, um, some at the Mass Historical Society in Boston and so forth, uh, where I discovered, by the way, apparently the person who transcribed the records that have ended up in the Mass [00:10:00] Historical Society never turned the pages over. So what you get is one side of the transcript. You don't get what's on the other side, which is often the docket, which often tells you a lot, but more than the docket on occasion, there are notes and things on the other side of the pages that are not in the, um, that are not in the transcripts that appear in the Boyer and Nissenbaum edition. So you have to go, or I had to go look at the originals at the Mass Historical Society. To see those, although I didn't realize that those were missing until I went to the Mass Historical Society to check, check the availability of the transcripts, and then realized, oh my god, there's all this stuff that is not published.
Mary Beth Norton: But they're all now in the, in the Rosenthal edition. I mean, the Records of the Salem Witch Hunt are really good. It's really good. It's very comprehensive. I think one thing has turned up since it was published in 2009, so it's very, very good. [00:11:00] And I can say that because I was not one of the editors. I was only a consultant. I was not deeply involved in the project at all.
Josh Hutchinson: I happen to have that sitting right here beside me.
Mary Beth Norton: Oh, that's a good thing to have sitting right there.
Josh Hutchinson: It's very comprehensive. Look how thick it is.
Mary Beth Norton: Yes, it is. It's very good. And actually, uh, some of, uh, when my, when it became available, my students made great use of it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, imagine that was very important for them to have those new transcripts rather than having to look at images to understand.
Mary Beth Norton: Yes, I had, I had, when I first started teaching about Salem witchcraft, I had to spend a couple of weeks teaching the kids how to read 17th century handwriting, because I didn't want them to rely wholly on the inadequate WPA transcripts that ended up in the Boyer and Nissenbaum edition.
Mary Beth Norton: We have a, um, Cornell has a, um, a, [00:12:00] um, requirement for students to take seminars, um, at least two during the course of their, um, undergraduate careers, and these would be small seminars. Um, I started off teaching about Salem witchcraft, actually, in a wider, uh, kind of a topic called, uh, Witchcraft in Early Modern England and America, and, and that was for a senior seminar. Um, uh, these are things, uh, a course that all senior history majors had to take before they graduated. I mean, they could take other people's courses, but that was one of their options, was mine.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, but, uh, then Cornell added a lower level seminar to a freshman, sophomore seminar, and so later on, what I did was freshman, sophomore seminars. I did not do the senior level seminar, although some seniors took it, but it was really aimed at a lower level, um, and I I should say that I started the Witchcraft in Early Modern England and America [00:13:00] seminar specifically because I was going to write about Salem witchcraft and I wanted to get my hands on and understand the literature very well. And this is something that professors often do. If you're going to teach, if you're going to write about a topic, one of the ways to prepare yourself to do that is to teach a class in it. There's nothing like having to explain something to other people to make sure you understand it yourself. And so, um, so I originally started the class, um, because I was planning to write about Salem witchcraft. This is years before I actually did it.
Mary Beth Norton: And then, once I had written about Salem witchcraft, I thought, oh gosh, I can't teach this anymore. But then I realized that because I did know the material so intimately, I could point, again, the lower level students, not people writing senior seminars, writing senior theses or something like that, that would be 50 or 60 pages, but people writing short papers of 10 to 12 pages, that I could point that at [00:14:00] specific things that had not been studied.
Mary Beth Norton: And that worked out really, really well because my students turned out wonderful research, really fabulous. I became so proud of them. Um, and, um, arranged eventually to post them, um, at the online on the Salem witchcraft web, uh, the Cornell, um, Witchcraft Collection website.
Josh Hutchinson: Can you tell us a little about that Cornell Witchcraft Collection?
Mary Beth Norton: Sure. Um, the Witchcraft Collection actually dates back to practically the beginning of the university. Um, uh, it's very interesting. Um, the founders of the university, which are in, the university is founded in 1865, and they're very interested in, um, intellectual history, and they're very interested in the enlightenment, and they're very interested in the unenlightenment, that is, witchcraft.
Mary Beth Norton: They, um, they chose to focus on witchcraft documents from [00:15:00] Europe, um, specifically because they wanted to show what the world, what, what, what superstition was like before the Enlightenment.
Mary Beth Norton: So Cornell has actually three major documents collections that were started at, with the very beginning of the university. One is the witchcraft collection. Um, one of the early members of the faculty was sent to Europe, specifically to purchase as many witchcraft documents as he could. And he did. He purchased a hell of a lot of them and books too. Um, and um, also another collection on the enlightenment and and and, and on the French Revolution, which is deeply connected to the Enlightenment, and another collection on abolitionism in America on the, the movement to abolish slavery.
Mary Beth Norton: So the idea is to have these major, uh, documentary collections that um, combat, um, superstition, and, um, bad stuff, in which case slavery is [00:16:00] obviously involved, and so, um, so anyway, the Cornell Witchcraft Collection is mostly European witchcraft, mostly, um, a lot of it's in German, um, a lot of it is, um, books. Um, there's also a lot of documents, uh, records of witchcraft interrogations, um, in, in Germany, in particular, Switzerland, to a certain extent, and other places, um, Cornell has digitized over a hundred books that are in English so that people can get access to them, get access to the English books. The European witchcraft stuff has not really been digitized in the same way, because it's just not the demand for that as there are for works in English, at least not in the U. S. So, but people can come to Cornell, um, and work in the rare and manuscript room at, on, um, the witchcraft collection.
Mary Beth Norton: And when I was doing In the Devil's Snare, I decided to look at the [00:17:00] papers of George Lincoln Burr, who people who are familiar with witchcraft publications in the U. S. know that Burr published a very good collection of narratives of the witchcraft trials in the early 20th century. And he was, in fact, one of the faculty members who was involved in trying to collect the witchcraft information for the, for the witchcraft collection.
Mary Beth Norton: And I knew his papers were here at Cornell, and so I looked, I looked at them. There was not a lot for me in it, but I did find a couple of things that had not been published. In fact, one that ended up in the 2009 collection because it had been thought not to be about Salem, but it turned out to be that it was about Salem.
Mary Beth Norton: And, uh, and then, um, I found the very interesting statement in Latin by a Church of England minister in New York who was asked by the, uh, witch trials, [00:18:00] uh, judges in Salem to, um, consult on definitions of witchcraft and so forth, and it had never been translated into English. So I, I have a colleague, I had a colleague, he's now dead, but a medievalist, who I said, here, can you translate this for me? And he did. So I was able to quote some of it in the book.
Mary Beth Norton: So a few, a few rare things in the, in the, uh, in the collection were of interest. And they did have a copy, the witchcraft collection does have a copy of John Hale's narrative, um, and a few other publications that relate to northern, to, relate to Salem, but mostly it's not about Salem.
Mary Beth Norton: However, anybody can get at this by just Google, um, Salem Witchcraft Collection. It's easier than trying, I mean, I could give you the URL, but it's, it's easier just to Google Salem Witchcraft Collection, and you will get to the front page, the home page, which will tell you, um, what, [00:19:00] what's what, uh, give you a description of the collection, and then there is a link on the front page to, um, student research, and those are the papers of my students.
Sarah Jack: Would you like to tell us about, um, how your students approached this research or picked their topic? What, what was that project like for them?
Mary Beth Norton: They used very different, very different things to, to choose their topics. I mean, I just tried to point them at things that other people hadn't written about.
Mary Beth Norton: And, um, of course there were papers that were written in the class that I did not post online. I only posted the ones that were most, um, that were best done and that, and they were best written and, uh, and so forth. The students really worked hard on them. Um, basically they did three drafts, um, two drafts during the course of the, the, the course itself, and then a third draft [00:20:00] in response to my final critiques before we posted it online.
Mary Beth Norton: So they're very well researched, they're very well written. They're, in fact, some of them have been cited in subsequent books on Salem Witchcraft. Um, um, Tad Baker, Emerson, officially Emerson Woods Baker, um, did, uh, cite at least one of them, and I think maybe two of these papers in his book, um, A Storm of Witchcraft, which came out after mine.
Mary Beth Norton: So, um, uh, I I'm just very proud of the kinds of things they did, and they picked topics that were of interest to them. Um, for example, a young man who was going to go to law school, and did go to law school, um, wrote a book, wrote a book, wrote an art, uh, a paper specifically about something that nobody had ever looked at, which was the times that grand juries refused to indict people, not wholly refused to indict people, but refused to issue certain [00:21:00] indictments, and this was known as ignoramus.
Mary Beth Norton: When a, when a grand jury did not indict somebody, they, they wrote on it ignoramus, and that means "we do not know" in Latin, and so they refused to indict these people. Now, no one had ever focused on this because In fact, the same people were indicted for other reasons. And so, but the question that intrigued my student, Patricio Martinez, was, what was it about these pay, about these particular cases that made the grand juries not indict people for those offenses? You know, what was, what made these offenses more dubious, shall we say, than others that they were willing to indict people for? So, um, I thought that was an absolutely fascinating paper.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, another, uh, student who was interested in legal matters, although she's just recently completed her Ph. D. elsewhere, um, she wrote this paper as a freshman originally. She, um, I was interested in the [00:22:00] two, uh, the two prosecutors, and so she wrote a, there's Annie Powell, she wrote a wonderful paper called "Salem Prosecuted," where she looks specifically at the two prosecutors, the successive prosecutors.
Mary Beth Norton: Everybody thought that the second prosecutor was a lawyer. The first prosecutor was a lawyer. Um, everybody thought the second was, was too, and she discovered no, he wasn't a lawyer at all. He was just a recently arrived Brit who had some knowledge. And, um, they both had, both the prosecutors had deep connections to the judges. And nobody had ever looked at the prosecutors in detail before, so she chose, she showed how, how much of a detail, you know, how much connection they had with the judges, which I thought was also really excellent.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, so there's a bunch of these papers that turn things up, um, that other, that, you know, other people haven't noticed. I mean, other, other papers that I particularly liked were a couple of papers that dealt with particular kinds of evidence that were presented at the trial, um, at the [00:23:00] trials. One person looked at when people at the trial produced actual material things, like a knife or something like that, that the witch tried to stab me with this knife. Um, and she discovered that early on in the trials, that kind of thing was much more common than it was later. Again, someone taking a real attempt to look at the chronology of things. And, um, and she discovered that, um, and she thinks that this evidence turned out to be somewhat problematic. And so people abandon it later on.
Mary Beth Norton: And the same thing was true with the search for witch's marks on the accused's body. There's a lot of attention to witch's marks early in the records, but then that disappears. And again, my student argued that it became problematic in terms of the presentation of the evidence, and so that goes away. And again, people hadn't really looked at the trials chronologically.
Mary Beth Norton: And, um, another witness, another student, what [00:24:00] I like, used the new edition, which identifies the handwriting, tracked specifically the role of Samuel Parris as a recorder in the trials. So that was something that was made available because of the new edition. Um, so some of them made it, some of these were before the new edition, others made very explicit, um, you know, attention and, and to the new edition. Um, and that was great.
Mary Beth Norton: Although the most of the students who took the course were either history majors or American studies majors or feminist, gender, and sexuality studies majors, because for all of them, the course could fulfill a requirement. Not everyone came from those groups.
Mary Beth Norton: I had a witch descendant in the class, Dave Estey, who was a descendant of Mary Easty, and we call her Easty, but he said the family's always pronounced it Estey.
Mary Beth Norton: And, um, [00:25:00] the one of the more interesting and unusual students I had was Joe Featherly, who was a student in plant pathology who was interested in the ergot hypothesis. And so he, in his paper, investigated the ergot hypothesis. And as I say in the introduction to these papers, I think he makes a better case for ergot than anybody else I've ever seen, read, uh, online or, uh, in print, even though I feel I'm very skeptical, but I thought it was more persuasive than others. And it was because of his background as a, as a major in plant pathology. He was a senior when he took the course. Um, so I thought that was, that was really interesting.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, it was just fun. I had students from all over, uh, all over the university. And, um, Uh, they, they did great research. They really did. Uh, and they worked so hard on putting the papers into final form. I, when I would pick the papers at the, [00:26:00] from the universe of papers at the end of the semester, usually I had, um, anyway, between 12 and 15 students in the seminars, and I would pick three or four or five papers as the best ones to potentially post online. And in all the years that I did it, I only had one student who said, no, she wouldn't, didn't want to have her paper posted online.
Mary Beth Norton: They had to sign a, uh, because of the, um, federal law, they had to sign a release form and that's actually online along with the paper itself, their signature on this release form, making it posi making it possible.
Mary Beth Norton: They've said that it was so thrilling to them to have a quote, online publication that they could put in their CV and, um, and their resumes and, um, their parents were thrilled. They were thrilled. They were very pleased, and they deserve to be very pleased, by the quality of their work. So I, I encourage anyone who's listening to this podcast or watching to take, check out these papers because they really are good.
Mary Beth Norton: [00:27:00] Um, and I will say one of them, um, some of them, I was kind of skeptical when the student came to me and said, I want to do this. And I would say, "I'm not sure you can do that, but go ahead and try." And they usually came up with something really good. And in particular, one of those was Tamar Weinstock, who went on and got a master's degree later, but did not continue. Um, who, who said she wanted to do a paper on the men who were hanged as witches, and she wanted to study the other evidence about them, because she thought, she recognized that they were being abusive husbands, and I was dubious about that, even though I paid a lot of attention to these guys. Well, it turns out she was right. Of the six men hanged at Salem, five had been accused of abusing their wives. And so she makes a case that that has something to do with why they're accused as witches.
Mary Beth Norton: And another class, [00:28:00] another one I, I particularly would call attention to is the absolutely fascinating case, this was a very late, um, case, uh, of, uh, Timothy Swan of Andover, who was reputedly afflicted by a number of witches. And people would attest from people, when people from Andover were confess, confessing to being witches, they would say they went out and they afflicted Timothy Swan along with other people.
Mary Beth Norton: But Timothy Swan never actually testified. He never actually said, "I was afflicted by witches." It was all these other people who said they were afflicting Timothy Swan or said that other people were afflicting Timothy Swan. So my student really wanted to know why this was and he discovered that Timothy Swan was thought to be a rapist. Timothy Swan had been charged and, and cleared, uh, earlier in his life. For a rape charge. And clearly, I mean, he titled the paper, [00:29:00] "It Takes a Witch to Catch a Rapist," which I thought was a great title. So, I mean, that's another, another paper that I thought really turned up things that just other people had not discovered.
Josh Hutchinson: I just want to say, uh, Sarah and I are cousins of one of your authors, because we're descendants of Mary Easty, also.
Mary Beth Norton: Oh, great. Okay.
Josh Hutchinson: So, that's part of why we got involved in this, our ancestors.
Mary Beth Norton: Well, good. Well, you know, I'm a descendant of, um, Mary Bradbury, so.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, that's great.
Mary Beth Norton: I say it somewhere. I'm a descendant of Mary Bradbury. And in fact, the fact that I am allowed me in In the Devil's Snare to understand something in her trial that was otherwise obscure to people. Because I'm descended from a marriage that, that had aroused a great deal of controversy and comment and was a part of the accusation against her. And I understood the backdrop, although nobody ever said it was because her son [00:30:00] married this woman that everything happened.
Mary Beth Norton: I'm also descended from a foster, well, a stepdaughter, not a foster, a stepdaughter of, um, of, um, of Martin. What's her first name? Susannah. Martin, Susannah Martin. Yes, I originally thought I was descended directly from Susannah Martin, but then I discovered that she married her husband, um, Mr. Martin, um, within a month of his first wife's death, and his first wife died giving birth to my ancestor. So she was basically the only mother my ancestor ever knew, but she was not the biological mother.
Sarah Jack: Wow. Those are really interesting ties to that saga.
Mary Beth Norton: And there are people out there who think that's why I did it. I mean, you said you got interested in it because of your connections. I didn't. I got interested in it for, for scholarly reasons, for academic reasons because [00:31:00] as I said, I'm interested in, well, I'm interested in the role of women in the public realm, and so I'm interested in, as I said earlier, why the judges believed these women who, when they were making their accusations. So, um, it was not the fact that I'm a descendant of a Salem witch that led me to do it.
Sarah Jack: I'm not very pleased that Stoughton told Rebecca that she made the mistake and so she was convicted.
Mary Beth Norton: Yeah,
Sarah Jack: right,
Mary Beth Norton: right. Yeah, Stoughton is not a great guy, although we hope that Margo Burns will figure him out.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, she's gonna do a good job with that.
Mary Beth Norton: Yeah, right.
Josh Hutchinson: Right, we've had her on and talked to her about that before, so we have confidence.
Mary Beth Norton: She keeps me updated on what she's doing with Stoughton.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, that's great.
Sarah Jack: I'm really anticipating it. I think, you know, whatever we can know more, it just helps us see.
Mary Beth Norton: I mean, there's [00:32:00] always so much more to see, but he's a very critical person. He's a very critical person, right? And I didn't have anybody who worked on Stoughton. So I had people who worked on, on nobody actually worked on, now I'm thinking about it, nobody actually worked on individual judges, although they worked on witnesses, individual witnesses. I mean, one I mentioned, didn't mention earlier, um, is a very interesting study of Sarah Vibber, who kind of recedes into the background, but is, testifies in an enormous number of cases, and my student decided that, um, the judges, for some reason, we couldn't figure out quite why, um, believed that she was particularly stressful, trustworthy, because unlike a few witnesses who appear in only a few cases, she's called up constantly, even though she is basically a kind of a me too witness. She doesn't, she's never the first person to accuse somebody. She's always saying, Oh, yeah, that happened to me too. I mean, she's that kind of a witness. Um, but maybe that's what they wanted, you know, some kind of backup or support [00:33:00] for that. I don't know.
Josh Hutchinson: Right. And didn't people testify against her that she was lying?
Mary Beth Norton: Yes. Yes. I mean, she was, she was, she did not have a great local reputation, which is why this is, why it's interesting why the judges believed her, um, why the judges, um, um, were willing to, um, go along with what she was saying. Uh, cause she, she was a relatively low status person in, in town.
Sarah Jack: Would you like to, um, tell us about their trip? to Massachusetts for research? Sure.
Mary Beth Norton: I, I won a teaching prize here at Cornell some years ago, and it, it carried with it, um, a substantial amount of money to use for teaching possibilities, you know, and so I could have dinner with students. I once, I took a whole bunch of students to a concert, you know, that sort of thing.
Mary Beth Norton: I could do all sorts of stuff, and I thought, and my students were always so interested in Salem [00:34:00] that I decided one year, um, to. I had, I'd had, you know, three or four classes, um, of students who were still on campus and I had one year. So I thought, well, what if I, you know, charter a bus and take these students to Salem?
Mary Beth Norton: And would they be interested? So I did. Um, I recruited, I mean, I asked a whole bunch of students and we set up a time that would be good for them, which was the last couple of days just before spring break one year. And so they could leave for their homes from Boston, from the Boston area. Um, but we, so anyway, I hired a local boss and driver and he took us to Salem.
Mary Beth Norton: We stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel, of course. And walked around town. I arranged for a special tour of the Rebecca Nurse House, which was technically not open yet for the season because it was early in March because it was in March. I arranged for a special tour of the quote [00:35:00] witch house, which of course is not the witch house. It's the home of court of Judge Corwin.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, uh, we, um, Uh, we met with Margo who talked about her research and the, and the creation of the, um, the Rosenthal edition. So it was really a lot of fun and the students, I think, got a lot out of it. They said they did.
Mary Beth Norton: And one of the things they, we did was something that I always do whenever I go to Salem. I took a whole bunch of votive candles and matches and I made sure that we put a candle on every bench in the, in the witchcraft memorial there in the heart of Salem, which I find extremely moving and better than the one in Danvers. Um, and, um, and so that was, that was very interesting, um, it was good to do that, and the other thing I should say, we also went to the, um, the hole in the ground where the, where Paris's house was, where the, where the, um, Salem Village [00:36:00] parsonage was.
Mary Beth Norton: So, so they did a number of things in, in a couple of days, and, um, then everybody dispersed. Some came back here to Ithaca. Some went off to their spring breaks, various places, but I thought it was very successful and they did too. Some of them were surprised that Salem is a big bustling city. They still thought it was a, uh, you know, a tiny village somewhere. So, but then there were people who were from the area who know, but, um, it was, it was interesting.
Mary Beth Norton: I thought it was a big success.
Josh Hutchinson: That's wonderful.
Mary Beth Norton: And I was glad that I had, that the university had allowed me to use the money that way. I mean, that was the perfect use of some of the money that I was given for that, for that prize.
Sarah Jack: And I'm sure, you know, um, Margo Burns getting the opportunity to speak directly with these researchers who were using the materials that she'd been buried in, that must have been [00:37:00] wonderful engagement.
Mary Beth Norton: Yes, I think that, yeah, I think it meant a lot to her and I know it meant a lot to them, too.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we have to set up an ergot debate between Margo and your student.
Mary Beth Norton: Well, you'll have to track him down. He graduated some years ago, you know.
Josh Hutchinson: Right.
Mary Beth Norton: That sounds like a, like a great one.
Josh Hutchinson: What advice would you give to students who are aspiring historians?
Mary Beth Norton: Um, don't think that all questions have been answered. Formulate your, formulate new questions. I mean, think, think seriously about what you're reading and think about what, what isn't done in these, and what, what could be done. You know, it was my reading of all these previous Salem Witchcraft books that I was teaching in the, in the senior seminar early on, that made me realize that everybody had been focusing on the accused and not on the accusers, and made me realize how much it was oriented around legal processes.
Mary Beth Norton: I mean, um, [00:38:00] For all that I really like Bernie Rosenthal's book, Salem Story, that he published in 1993. I think it's a terrific book, but it is really about the law and, and I wanted to widen the, the scope of the, um, process beyond that.
Mary Beth Norton: And I'll, I'll just say that that had, what I, the way I did the research had a lot to do with my previous experience in dealing with records in London at the public, the public record office slash national archives, they've moved them and changed the name and everything. But I realized from previous work that, that ordinary people wrote to, wrote to the British government, wrote to British government ministers to try to curry favor, to give, Inside information about something.
Mary Beth Norton: And so these were not just official documents, they were random letters, in some cases, from merchants or other people, [00:39:00] and, um, you really learn a lot from this. And that's actually what led me to understand the importance of the Indian War, because so many of the, uh, letters had to do with what was going on on the frontier.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, I really thought when I looked for letters from early 1692 that I was going to find a lot of letters about Salem witchcraft. I did not find many letters about witchcraft. I found all these letters about the Indian War, and so at first I was very disappointed. Uh, why aren't they writing about the witch trials? There are only a few that actually wrote about the witch trials.
Mary Beth Norton: But then, I suddenly, the penny dropped and I thought, oh my God, they're writing about the Indian War. That is so crucial to them and that is the crucial background to the book. What happened in Salem that other people haven't recognized because, uh, they haven't been reading all these doc these random documents in London that I was reading of, um, of, um, uh, people writing from Maine, people writing from Massachusetts, and giving the latest [00:40:00] news, um, from the frontier.
Mary Beth Norton: You know, the research oftentimes leads you in places you don't expect it to go.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, and in my case, it led me to the Wabanakis. Um, and I never really thought it would, you know, just not. It was not one of my focuses, one of my foci, one of my focuses.
Sarah Jack: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Mary Beth Norton: Well, the one thing I would say is that people look at the, well, I think I already mentioned that the, that, um, the when I did write a paper, I did write an article in the online journal commonplace.org about the class, but those links don't exist anymore. They're broken. So you can't follow those. So don't try. Commonplace.online exists, but the, they changed the system. So, um, it's just, [00:41:00] it's gone. The way things go on the internet. Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: But we'll have the working links that you've shared with us in the show notes for everybody to follow. Okay, good. So we'll have links to the witchcraft collection and so forth.
Mary Beth Norton: Okay, good. Yeah. And actually, anybody can, you can find all the papers they're connected to. They're all on the, there's a link to student research on the homepage of the witchcraft collection. And I don't know how often people do access them, but I know that, as I said, some of them have been cited. And I thought it was great that they were cited.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, well, I'm definitely going to read all those. I've used the witchcraft collection before trying to look up the English writers, especially about witchcraft that the early ministers and magistrates in New England would have read.
Mary Beth Norton: Yeah, I looked at those. I looked at [00:42:00] those. That's something I did do with the witchcraft collection materials. I looked at those early English. Early English materials that both the legal and the religious materials. Yeah, I did read those there. I could have forgot that earlier, but yes, because we do have those.
Mary Beth Norton: Um, but, uh, anyway, the, the, the bulk of the collection is European. Um, it's, it's mainland Europe, you know.
Josh Hutchinson: Would you like to tell the audience about your new book project?
Mary Beth Norton: Oh, well, it's a little strange. Um, the project, the book, I'm just finishing up and it will be out, we hope, a year from now with Princeton University Press.
Mary Beth Norton: It's an edition of letters to the world's first personal advice column. I refer to it as Ann Landers or Amy Dickinson or Carolyn Hax, depending on who you read, um, for the 1690s. It was started in London in the 1690s by a printer and his two [00:43:00] brothers-in-law.
Mary Beth Norton: And they didn't really intend to write a personal advice column. What they did was they, they intended to write or to publish a series of broadsheets, um, that would be kind of like Wikipedia for the 17th century. That is, they would, they said, we will answer any question on any topic. And so people wrote in with many, many questions on many, many topics. Um, a lot of them religious, a lot of them, um, um, historical, mathematical, scientific, you name it. Um, not political. They would not answer political questions. It was a fraught period politically, so they knew enough not to deal with politics. But, um, uh, they were, and people finally, it was, they, the questions were all anonymous. And so people started to write in anonymous questions about their personal lives, or they would say, a friend of mine has this problem, and they, the Athenian, [00:44:00] they call themselves the Athenians, so that was the, the publication is called the Athenian Mercury.
Mary Beth Norton: It's available online through a couple of different, um, process, a couple of different online, um, systems. And there are print copies available various places, not a lot, but some. And, um, so the Athenians, um, described themselves as a group of experts, but it was actually the printer and his two brothers in law.
Mary Beth Norton: And they answered, um, probably about 20 questions a week. They published, um, two broadside, two broadsheets a week, two, two sided, each of them two sided, each two sided broadsheet would have eight to 12 questions, and so maybe 20 or so for the, for the week.
Mary Beth Norton: And, um, people started asking these questions, personal questions. Um, and they started answering them, and originally they were really only aimed at an audience of men, but after six weeks, a woman wrote [00:45:00] in and said, "will you answer questions for ladies?" And they said, "why, yes, we will." It was clear they never really thought of it, because they were really aiming their publication at the guys who hung out in coffee houses, um, in London in the 1690s.
Mary Beth Norton: And, um, because the printer, John Dunton, hung out in coffeehouses, so it was clear he understood that men in coffeehouses had lots of questions. I mean, the example I use is that these guys hung out in coffeehouses, they talked about all kinds of things, we know that, and they, um, and so topics would come up and people wouldn't know the answer to the question. And so, like today, we would pull out a smartphone and everybody would Google something and find out the answer to this name we can't remember or this date or something. They didn't have that. So what they did was they, they could ask these questions, and then the answers would be printed, and then people could look at the past [00:46:00] issues and see the answers.
Mary Beth Norton: And so, John Dunton, being very entrepreneurial, after about 20 issues, started to bind these into big, big books, and he had Mercury Women, he called them, who went out and hawked them to the owners of coffee houses and said, okay, coffee house owners, people will sit here and read the books and drink more of your coffee.
Mary Beth Norton: So, um, it, it lasted for seven years. This publication, um, was, people say it was the longest lasting periodical in 17th century England. I, I didn't do that myself. The literature people who thought about it say that, so.
Mary Beth Norton: But anyway, it was really fun. I, there's a lot of questions about all kinds of things like, like religion, for example, who did Cain marry? Or, um, did Adam and Eve eat actual apples? Or, um, or science questions like, um, [00:47:00] why, uh, what causes smallpox? That was an issue that they were concerned about at the time. That sort of stuff. Um, so there were all those kinds of questions, but I didn't focus on those. I focused on the courtship, marriage, um, negotiating marriage, those kinds of questions, because there were lots and lots of marriage negotiations that people wrote about.
Mary Beth Norton: I think that the readers were, many of them, young. Um, these guys who hung out in coffeehouses were pretty much young guys, and they were interested in, you know, getting the best, um, the wife with the best property and how to organize, how to negotiate a family, um, a family, um, property settlement, you know, that sort of thing. Um, how to get permission from their parents to marry the person they wanted. It turns out that a lot of parents did not like the people that the young person, male or female, had chosen to marry. So there's lots of, of, lots and lots of letters about parental consent, complaining [00:48:00] about parents.
Mary Beth Norton: And I'll just say, I'll give you a specific example. One woman wrote in and she said, my parents will, she's devastated. My parents will not let me marry the man I love. So how can I deal with this? He's not, he's not, she's not asking them, how can I persuade my parents to marry, to let me marry the man I love? She's asking them, how can I survive this desolate depression that I'm in, because I'm not allowed to marry the man I love?
Mary Beth Norton: Well, they give her a whole series of things to do, but the one that I love especially, and I'll end this little conversation with that is, read history, parenthesis, nothing amorous.
Sarah Jack: Mary Louise Bingham is back with A Minute with Mary.
Mary Louise Bingham: About three years ago, I was honored to see the actual notebook that my eight times great grandfather, Ephraim Wildes, kept from 1692 through the early [00:49:00] 1700s. This is the picture you see covered over my face. The notebook has not been digitized and is only available at the Phillips Library Reading Room in Rowley, Massachusetts.
Mary Louise Bingham: I know by looking at his notebook that Ephraim was intelligent and wrote with a clear hand. He knew science, as he wrote of the four elements. More so, Ephraim wrote extensively on the solar system. I also get a glimpse as to with whom he did business and with whom he had personal connections. Most important, I got to actually touch my history when I placed my hand on the same book he placed his hand. That experience cannot be easily described.
Mary Louise Bingham: For those of you who are serious about research, do yourself a favor and go look at original documents. Please reach out to Sarah, Josh, or myself if you need help to find the location for any documents you are [00:50:00] searching. If we can't locate them, we can put you in touch with someone who can.
Mary Louise Bingham: Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with this week's edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for spending this time with us today learning from Dr. Norton and Mary. We look forward to hearing from you.
Sarah Jack: Stick with me for a few more minutes, and I'm going to show you one of the ways that you can support our projects through our nonprofit End Witch Hunts.
Sarah Jack: This is bookshop. org and End Witch Hunts has a bookshop online here. If you would like to buy today's book or one of our other guests' books from us to help support the operations of our projects, you can go to bookshop.org, and then up here if you type in slash, shop, slash endwitchhunts, [00:51:00] it will bring you to our bookshop, and we have organized an amazing collection of books and any purchase you make here supports our work.
Sarah Jack: Here is today's book, In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton, under Guests of Witch Hunt. You would just go here and it is backordered, but we would still love your support, and we want you to get a hold of this book.
Sarah Jack: This one is on backorder, but Records of the Salem Witch Hunt is available. Let me show you where that is. We just scroll right down through here. Here is Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. Click on that. You can get a paperback version or a hardcover version. And this purchase supports our nonprofit and your research. You want to have a copy of this at your fingertips. Josh uses this [00:52:00] every day. I'm in it regularly.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for letting me show you our bookshop.
Sarah Jack: Have a great week, and we look forward to spending time with you next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
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Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.