Malcolm Gaskill > Quotes

“Dreams extended a real world danger into an imaginary one.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“The worst of it was that there was no easy way to act against witches, or escape them. It didn't matter how detested Hugh and Mary had become: there they were, following the same routines, persistently present - not predators to be trapped or Indians to be shot at, or even homicidal colonists who could be dragged into court. They were ordinary neighbours, difficult to shun in a social world of mutual dependence.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Fear incubated guilt, which was projected and returned as anger—much as colonists in New England imputed their own aggression to Indians, easing their own consciences and justifying drastic countermeasures. A vengeful God could only be humbly appeased; but a vengeful witch could be righteously repelled, and even, using the law, killed.[79]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“History had shown that judicious governors tended to take witch fears more seriously when their own equilibrium was threatened.[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Contrary to English assumption, these Native Americans had long been farmers as well as hunter-gatherers, based in villages on higher ground to the south and west, but more peripatetic than sedentary. They valued seasonal access to natural resources, not exclusive ownership or despoliation, which only confirmed English prejudices about their ignorance and idleness.[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Most people believed in witches; the thornier question was whether an individual could reasonably be hanged on the testimony of her neighbours.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Public confession had a dark, divisive side: it was, after all, the process by which the drowned were separated from the saved.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Colonial homesickness was firmly attached to place and only loosely to nation.[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Her deepening misery went beyond what was considered normal among Springfield’s hard-pressed women. It became clear that what she needed was not just the spiritual counsel of Reverend Moxon but a physician.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“But mainly the mood that made witchcraft plausible settled in New England because by the mid-1640s its economic and social woes had reached Old World levels.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“day of penitence and prayer to beg God’s forgiveness. Now six months pregnant, Mary desperately needed to rest. Her husband wanted her to work. He resented what he saw as her idleness, and she felt isolated, oppressed, exiled again—this time from her new life, even from herself.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Hugh explained solemnly that he had been “loath to express any sorrow before his wife, because of the weak condition that she was in.” Struggling to contain himself, he had fled the piteous scene where his child lay dead, returning to the fields to weep alone. In turmoil, his first thought had been that family and neighbors would think him unmanly for crying—not acting like a man should. He had thought his devastation was implicit: it had literally gone without saying.[45]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Protestants knew the age of miracles had passed, yet they continued to interpret comets, eclipses, storms, plagues and birth deformities as expressions of heavenly anger.[32] Living in New England heightened the paradox. This wild, godless world struck colonists as a natural breeding ground for witchcraft.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“The same spirit infused a new edition of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a treatise by the Elizabethan skeptic Reginald Scot, which argued that confessed witches were in fact harmless melancholics in need of food and medicine.[69]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Before the Reformation, religion had been a Catholic monopoly; now it was a free market, swarming with different Protestant interpretations—including of the Holy Trinity, and the identity of God and Christ—which governments on both sides of the Atlantic refused to tolerate.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Jones’s crime was “lithobolia”—hurling stones supernaturally.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans

“The infamous witch trials of 1692 would be similarly rooted not in premodern hysteria or the madness of crowds, but in reckless ambition and simple failings of compassion toward others.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Mostly, however, they clashed with their own neighbors, competing furiously for material advantage: farmland, livestock, wealth and power.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“In the wake of harvest bonfires, Hugh and other men collected and boiled the ashes, which the women made into soap—some thought it the hardest day’s work of the year.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“The heart may have sensed Satan’s presence, but the mind’s eye saw him: his ravening glare and beckoning finger. Witches went further, reifying evil in human form—usually, but not exclusively, as women.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Norton also observed that by relocating God’s wrath, and so responsibility for the Crucifixion, to the devil, Pynchon credited the devil with more power than any Christian could stomach. To regard Satan or man as anything other than God’s hapless instruments was heretical.[49]”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“But in the late 1630s it was Lewis who departed, leaving Mary alone in the world. They had wasted a childless decade, for which he may have blamed her (even though, considering her later fertility, the problem probably lay with him).[”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“They were not therefore surprised when the Antinomian figurehead, Anne Hutchinson, miscarried: “for as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Witches were tangible symbols of this chaos.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Melancholy, everyone knew, was the mother of all terrors of the night, and Hugh was the kind of melancholic soul whose humors doctors said were flooded with black bile.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“England’s population had doubled in a century, causing widespread poverty, hunger and dependence on charity. Young men struggled to set up their own households, and tenants were evicted to make estates more profitable in an era of soaring inflation.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Business was civil and brisk, the logic of supply and demand a solvent for cultural difference.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Suspected bewitchment and demonic possession were not, however, merely spiritual matters: they were matters of law.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“Witchcraft was not some wild superstition but a serious expression of disorder embedded in politics, religion and law. Witches were believed to invert every cherished ideal, from obeying one’s superiors to familial love.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

“On a wall next to a discount supermarket, a colorful mural asked: “What Makes a Man?” This was also the question asked of Hugh Parsons as he struggled to meet local expectations—a question that, in the end, he failed to answer to anyone’s satisfaction.”
― Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World