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The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
Early New Englanders used magical techniques to divine the future, to heal the sick, to protect against harm and to inflict harm. Protestant ministers of the time claimed that religious faith and magical practice were incompatible, and yet, as Richard Godbeer shows, there were significant affinities between the two that enabled layfolk to switch from one to the other without any immediate sense of wrongdoing. Godbeer argues that the different perspectives on witchcraft engendered by magical tradition and Puritan doctrine often caused confusion and disagreement when New Englanders sought legal punishment of witches.
268 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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163 people want to read
About the author
Richard Godbeer
14 books10 followersRichard Godbeer received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1989. He specializes in colonial and revolutionary America, with an emphasis on religious culture, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Godbeer was born in Essex, England, and grew up in Shropshire and Gloucestershire. He then lived in Oxford for three years as an undergraduate before crossing the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1984. He moved to southern California in 1989, where he taught for fifteen years at the University of California, Riverside. He moved to southern Florida in the summer of 2004 to join the Department of History at the University of Miami. He offers courses on a broad range of topics, including sex and gender in early America, witchcraft in colonial New England, religious culture in early America, and the American Revolution.
Godbeer is author of The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press and winner of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Award for the Best First Book), Sexual Revolution in Early America (published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press and a featured selection of the History Book Club), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (published in 2004 by Oxford University Press), The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (published in 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (published in 2011 as a volume in the Bedford Series in History and Culture). Godbeer is currently working on a joint biography of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, a Quaker couple who lived in Philadelphia during the second half of the eighteenth century. He is grateful to have received research fellowships from a range of institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Godbeer is author of The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press and winner of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Award for the Best First Book), Sexual Revolution in Early America (published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press and a featured selection of the History Book Club), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (published in 2004 by Oxford University Press), The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (published in 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (published in 2011 as a volume in the Bedford Series in History and Culture). Godbeer is currently working on a joint biography of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, a Quaker couple who lived in Philadelphia during the second half of the eighteenth century. He is grateful to have received research fellowships from a range of institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
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January 1, 2016
There are two problems that I complain about persistently when I'm reviewing books about the Salem witchcraft crisis. One is the tendency of Salem historians to go around proclaiming that they have found the One! True! Cause! The other is the failure of modern historians to cope with witchcraft beliefs.
Godbeer avoids complaint #1; this is only partly a book about Salem, and his scope--magic and the occult in seventeenth-century New England--is broad enough that he avoids the temptation of Salem-specific hobby-horses (although he has a hobby-horse or two of his own, as I'll discuss further down the page). In fact, one of the most useful things about The Devil's Dominion is the chapter in which Godbeer looks at the broad spectrum of causes for anxiety in Essex County in the two decades leading up to the trials: raids by Native Americans, hostile micromanagement by the English government, Quakers (seriously--Quakers were as threatening to Puritans as Catholics), smallpox.
On the other hand, he falls down absymally over complaint #2. He criticizes John Putnam Demos for his psychoanalytic model of witchcraft affliction, without seeming to realize that his own model of how affliction expressed anxieties about salvation and personal responsibility for sin does exactly the same thing, and even more meretriciously. For example:
The boy's repeated attempts to confess indicate a sense of personal culpability, yet his very belief that he was tempted by the Devil placed him in a passive role. Eventually he redefined the situation by becoming possessed. Possession constituted both abdication and recognition of responsibility. The boy [...] had transformed himself into a victim and became the recipient of much public sympathy. (113)
And:
Local communities became gripped by the spectacle of the possessed because it spoke to a central spiritual issue: liability for sin. The struggle of the victim struck a resonant chord in the community at large: through another's possession, people could experience vicariously the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan. (119)
1. "he redefined the situation by becoming possessed": here and elsewhere, Godbeer is very sloppy about respecting the worldview of his subjects. The suggestion that the boy consciously chose to become possessed means that, really, this book should be about conmen and gulls. Throughout, while Godbeer acknowledges that "ordinary people" believed in magic, he tends to assume implicitly that cunning folk and confessing witches and afflicted and possessed people, deep down in their heart of hearts, knew better. For example, in talking about Katherine Harrison's prediction that Elizabeth Bateman would not marry the man who was currently courting her, but would marry a man named Simon: "There could be any number of explanations for Harrison's accuracy: she may have realized that their master's opposition to the marriage was unshakeable; she may have been using the medium of fortune-telling to lobby on Simon Smith's [Bateman's eventual husband] behalf. What matters for our purpose here is that townsfolk not privy to such explanations automatically assumed that Harrison had occult powers" (33-34). He assumes there has to be an "explanation," that Harrison must have been basing her prediction on psychology or on a preference for a different man (although from Godbeer's very brief discussion, I notice that we, as readers, have no evidence that Harrison knew Simon Smith at all; nor do we know how much time elapsed between prediction and marriage). In Godbeer's view, Harrison must have been scamming Bateman. At another point, talking about Puritan intellectuals' habit of collecting weird occurrences (or "especial providences," in Puritan vocabulary), "Hull did not try to interpret these wonders; nor did Winthrop. [...] But neither did they express any doubt as to the objective reality of these bizarre phenomena" (58).
"Objective reality"? That's a post-Enlightenment yardstick, and it very emphatically needs not to be applied to pre-Enlightenment thinkers. It puts the discussion in terms that none of the people involved would have used or been comfortable with. Or, to use another post-Enlightenment term, grokked.
Now, I am not saying that historians of seventeenth-century New England have to believe in divination or witchcraft or any other point of their subjects' cosmology. But I am saying that they have to approach that cosmology, and all those beliefs, with respect and without trying to explain them away for post-Enlightenment readers. Because in so doing, all the historian accomplishes is to put another layer of obscuration and confusion over his or her analytical lens. And implicitly to encourage the belief that his or her pre-Enlightenment subjects were a bunch of gullible fools. Which they were not.
2. "a central spiritual issue: liability for sin": this is Godbeer's hobby-horse. He insists on viewing all occult practices and fears in New England through this lens, which I think makes him twist a lot of things out of true.
3. "the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan": this seems to me GRIEVOUSLY to misinterpret and misrepresent Puritans. I don't want to commit the same mistake in reverse, so I'm trying to resist the impulse to an equally sweeping generalization. But my reading of and about Puritans has indicated that their worldview was all about the struggle between good and evil. That if spectacles of witchcraft affliction struck a resonant chord in local communities (which I actually tend to agree it did), it wasn't because there was any relief of any kind in the "temporary fusion of self and Satan" (a very modern idea, and one that dismisses any layers of meaning of the concept of Satan beyond the psychological) but because the spectacle was a direct representation of the cosmic struggle Puritans believed themselves to be principal actors in.
4. "Possession": Godbeer's use of this term irritated me into yelling at the book, partly because he was very close to doing something clever, innovative, and extremely useful and he booted it.
What Godbeer was gesturing toward was a comparison of witchcraft affliction and spirit possession. I think this is a fascinating idea and potentially useful, like the comparisons with nineteenth-century hysterics. The problem is that Godbeer rushes his fences: he doesn't lay out the parameters of the comparison (which means he elides the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as well as benevolent and malevolent), and rather than making a careful and nuanced analysis, he collapses affliction and possession into one thing, whereas for New England Puritans, they were very different things (even though they might look quite similar) and belonged in different categories. Affliction was what happened when you angered a witch, or when the Devil was trying to coerce you into serving him. Possession was what happened when you agreed to serve the Devil. One was a sign of virtue, the other a sign of evil. Girls like Elizabeth Knapp and Mary Warren wavered back and forth across that line, confessing and recanting having signed the Devil's covenant, and it has been clear to me, from what I've read, that those two states were recognized and treated as distinct by those around them. Conflating them makes it easier to talk about witchcraft, but it also muddles the very thing you're trying to understand.
As with Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692, the other book of Godbeer's that I've read, The Devil's Dominion is competent to very good research-wise: he's read a lot more Puritan divines than I could ever bear to, that's for sure, and he did an excellent job of laying out primary evidence for the schism between the legal definition of witchcraft (a covenant with the Devil) and the popular definition of witchcraft (maleficium: doing harm to others by occult means), and I only wish he'd done a better job of talking about why that schism persisted and its causal relationship to the history of witchcraft proceedings. Analytically, the book ranges from plebeian to reductive to what I would call out and out wrong.
Tl;dr: interesting but frustrating, and I cannot condone his analytical model.
Godbeer avoids complaint #1; this is only partly a book about Salem, and his scope--magic and the occult in seventeenth-century New England--is broad enough that he avoids the temptation of Salem-specific hobby-horses (although he has a hobby-horse or two of his own, as I'll discuss further down the page). In fact, one of the most useful things about The Devil's Dominion is the chapter in which Godbeer looks at the broad spectrum of causes for anxiety in Essex County in the two decades leading up to the trials: raids by Native Americans, hostile micromanagement by the English government, Quakers (seriously--Quakers were as threatening to Puritans as Catholics), smallpox.
On the other hand, he falls down absymally over complaint #2. He criticizes John Putnam Demos for his psychoanalytic model of witchcraft affliction, without seeming to realize that his own model of how affliction expressed anxieties about salvation and personal responsibility for sin does exactly the same thing, and even more meretriciously. For example:
The boy's repeated attempts to confess indicate a sense of personal culpability, yet his very belief that he was tempted by the Devil placed him in a passive role. Eventually he redefined the situation by becoming possessed. Possession constituted both abdication and recognition of responsibility. The boy [...] had transformed himself into a victim and became the recipient of much public sympathy. (113)
And:
Local communities became gripped by the spectacle of the possessed because it spoke to a central spiritual issue: liability for sin. The struggle of the victim struck a resonant chord in the community at large: through another's possession, people could experience vicariously the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan. (119)
1. "he redefined the situation by becoming possessed": here and elsewhere, Godbeer is very sloppy about respecting the worldview of his subjects. The suggestion that the boy consciously chose to become possessed means that, really, this book should be about conmen and gulls. Throughout, while Godbeer acknowledges that "ordinary people" believed in magic, he tends to assume implicitly that cunning folk and confessing witches and afflicted and possessed people, deep down in their heart of hearts, knew better. For example, in talking about Katherine Harrison's prediction that Elizabeth Bateman would not marry the man who was currently courting her, but would marry a man named Simon: "There could be any number of explanations for Harrison's accuracy: she may have realized that their master's opposition to the marriage was unshakeable; she may have been using the medium of fortune-telling to lobby on Simon Smith's [Bateman's eventual husband] behalf. What matters for our purpose here is that townsfolk not privy to such explanations automatically assumed that Harrison had occult powers" (33-34). He assumes there has to be an "explanation," that Harrison must have been basing her prediction on psychology or on a preference for a different man (although from Godbeer's very brief discussion, I notice that we, as readers, have no evidence that Harrison knew Simon Smith at all; nor do we know how much time elapsed between prediction and marriage). In Godbeer's view, Harrison must have been scamming Bateman. At another point, talking about Puritan intellectuals' habit of collecting weird occurrences (or "especial providences," in Puritan vocabulary), "Hull did not try to interpret these wonders; nor did Winthrop. [...] But neither did they express any doubt as to the objective reality of these bizarre phenomena" (58).
"Objective reality"? That's a post-Enlightenment yardstick, and it very emphatically needs not to be applied to pre-Enlightenment thinkers. It puts the discussion in terms that none of the people involved would have used or been comfortable with. Or, to use another post-Enlightenment term, grokked.
Now, I am not saying that historians of seventeenth-century New England have to believe in divination or witchcraft or any other point of their subjects' cosmology. But I am saying that they have to approach that cosmology, and all those beliefs, with respect and without trying to explain them away for post-Enlightenment readers. Because in so doing, all the historian accomplishes is to put another layer of obscuration and confusion over his or her analytical lens. And implicitly to encourage the belief that his or her pre-Enlightenment subjects were a bunch of gullible fools. Which they were not.
2. "a central spiritual issue: liability for sin": this is Godbeer's hobby-horse. He insists on viewing all occult practices and fears in New England through this lens, which I think makes him twist a lot of things out of true.
3. "the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan": this seems to me GRIEVOUSLY to misinterpret and misrepresent Puritans. I don't want to commit the same mistake in reverse, so I'm trying to resist the impulse to an equally sweeping generalization. But my reading of and about Puritans has indicated that their worldview was all about the struggle between good and evil. That if spectacles of witchcraft affliction struck a resonant chord in local communities (which I actually tend to agree it did), it wasn't because there was any relief of any kind in the "temporary fusion of self and Satan" (a very modern idea, and one that dismisses any layers of meaning of the concept of Satan beyond the psychological) but because the spectacle was a direct representation of the cosmic struggle Puritans believed themselves to be principal actors in.
4. "Possession": Godbeer's use of this term irritated me into yelling at the book, partly because he was very close to doing something clever, innovative, and extremely useful and he booted it.
What Godbeer was gesturing toward was a comparison of witchcraft affliction and spirit possession. I think this is a fascinating idea and potentially useful, like the comparisons with nineteenth-century hysterics. The problem is that Godbeer rushes his fences: he doesn't lay out the parameters of the comparison (which means he elides the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as well as benevolent and malevolent), and rather than making a careful and nuanced analysis, he collapses affliction and possession into one thing, whereas for New England Puritans, they were very different things (even though they might look quite similar) and belonged in different categories. Affliction was what happened when you angered a witch, or when the Devil was trying to coerce you into serving him. Possession was what happened when you agreed to serve the Devil. One was a sign of virtue, the other a sign of evil. Girls like Elizabeth Knapp and Mary Warren wavered back and forth across that line, confessing and recanting having signed the Devil's covenant, and it has been clear to me, from what I've read, that those two states were recognized and treated as distinct by those around them. Conflating them makes it easier to talk about witchcraft, but it also muddles the very thing you're trying to understand.
As with Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692, the other book of Godbeer's that I've read, The Devil's Dominion is competent to very good research-wise: he's read a lot more Puritan divines than I could ever bear to, that's for sure, and he did an excellent job of laying out primary evidence for the schism between the legal definition of witchcraft (a covenant with the Devil) and the popular definition of witchcraft (maleficium: doing harm to others by occult means), and I only wish he'd done a better job of talking about why that schism persisted and its causal relationship to the history of witchcraft proceedings. Analytically, the book ranges from plebeian to reductive to what I would call out and out wrong.
Tl;dr: interesting but frustrating, and I cannot condone his analytical model.
February 24, 2017
This book does a nice job of explaining the beliefs surrounding magic and witchcraft held by Puritans, as well as putting them in their historical, theological, and social contexts. I appreciated that the author focused on the differences in belief between clergy and citizens, and I enjoyed reading accounts of witchcraft trials and magical practices. The book did repeat itself at times, and there were a few issues that I wish the author would have explained in more depth. However, overall, this was an interesting read and a good primer for my research into New England witchcraft for a potential upcoming novel.
April 8, 2024
A very clearly written book but one that oftentimes presents itself as a thesis in search of an argument, being very over-reliant upon secondary literature only tangentially related to his main contention regarding popular magic in New England.
December 9, 2015
Ever since the beginning of time, human beings have been fascinated with magic and the concept of supernatural beings. In "The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England," author Richard Godbeer explores the topic of magic mixed with Christianity in New England in the seventeenth century. When the English set foot in America in the 1600s, they brought their beliefs along with them. The practice of magic was not uncommon back then, as many villagers used it to "predict the future, to heal the sick, to destroy their enemies, and to defend themselves against occult attack". (7)
In England, folk magic like so has coexisted with Christianity for over a thousand years, albeit not without causing some unease and rifts. In the medieval periods, it was normal for families to have practitioners to provide them magical services like healing and divining. The medieval church taught the general public that through rituals, human beings could harness the powers of the supernatural. However, many followers confused Christian rituals with non-Christian rituals.
In 1692, however, there was a surge of panic that spread through the communities of Massachusetts that changed their perspective on witchcraft and magic. Early that year, several girls in Salem village began to suffer from odd fits. Their local physician examined them and claimed that they were "under an Evil Hand." In that year, charges of formal witchcraft were brought against one hundred and fifty-six people, ending the fascinating time of witches.
I enjoyed reading this book because author Richard Godbeer explores the themes of magic and religion quite thoroughly and explains their relations excellently. It also informed me on the occult practices that happened in early seventeenth-century New England, and how it relates to the English folk traditions that it originated from. I think that it was somewhat tedious to read sometimes but overall a good explanation of the events.
In England, folk magic like so has coexisted with Christianity for over a thousand years, albeit not without causing some unease and rifts. In the medieval periods, it was normal for families to have practitioners to provide them magical services like healing and divining. The medieval church taught the general public that through rituals, human beings could harness the powers of the supernatural. However, many followers confused Christian rituals with non-Christian rituals.
In 1692, however, there was a surge of panic that spread through the communities of Massachusetts that changed their perspective on witchcraft and magic. Early that year, several girls in Salem village began to suffer from odd fits. Their local physician examined them and claimed that they were "under an Evil Hand." In that year, charges of formal witchcraft were brought against one hundred and fifty-six people, ending the fascinating time of witches.
I enjoyed reading this book because author Richard Godbeer explores the themes of magic and religion quite thoroughly and explains their relations excellently. It also informed me on the occult practices that happened in early seventeenth-century New England, and how it relates to the English folk traditions that it originated from. I think that it was somewhat tedious to read sometimes but overall a good explanation of the events.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 2, 2015
Godbeer is no stranger to the topic of the Witch Trials that occurred across New England in the seventeenth century. In his first book, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England Godbeer develops an interesting argument for the relationship that Puritanism held with magic during colonial New England. In developing his argument Godbeer pulls from the rich historiography that preceded him. He exhibits an impressive familiarity with the topic he is discussing. Godbeer also employs an impressive amount of primary sources to provide rich context for his work. In one of the most impressive feats of this work, Godbeer moves beyond Salem and Massachusetts applying sources from multiple colonies to provide a wide scope for the witch trials. There is a slight foible, in the form of a fourth chapter that seems out of place and a little unnecessary. All in all Godbeer’s first work is a well researched, well written, highly approachable, refreshing foray into a topic that is well worn and trodden. A good read for anyone who wants to learn about the intricate relationship that the New England Church held with the magic that it fervently prosecuted in the 17 century.
February 4, 2017
For a revised dissertation, this book reads like a polished history. Noting that other scholars have argued that magic permeated early American culture, Godbeer gives further evidence of how deeply ingrained magical thinking is, even in an educated and rational world. He argues that the pervasive Calvinism of early New England unwittingly played into this with its insistence that nobody really knew the state of their own soul. He uses this to provide a backdrop to the Salem Witch Trials.
This isn't a comprehensive treatment of the subject, but it is a very capable one. It won't substitute for other books on Salem, but for those who want an explanation of why highly educated people continued to believe in magic, this is a solid first step on the path to discovery. The reader will learn about beliefs in the Devil and in the supernatural in general, in the context of a claustrophobic faith that kept believers wondering if they would end up in Hell.
I discuss it also on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
This isn't a comprehensive treatment of the subject, but it is a very capable one. It won't substitute for other books on Salem, but for those who want an explanation of why highly educated people continued to believe in magic, this is a solid first step on the path to discovery. The reader will learn about beliefs in the Devil and in the supernatural in general, in the context of a claustrophobic faith that kept believers wondering if they would end up in Hell.
I discuss it also on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
April 5, 2009
As the subtitle says, it covers magic and religion in Early New England. The views of witchcraft by the clergy and by the populace differed. To the clergy all witchcraft (magic) was 'heresy' whether done for good or evil it was done at/with the Devil's behest. Commoners felt there was a difference between white magic and black magic and a witch was bad if she caused 'maleficium'. The author also posits that the Salem Witch trials occurred because of economic and political occurrences in New England.
April 15, 2009
Godbeer does a good job of describing the tension between the official religious proclamations and the popular retention of folk magic traditions from England. The dual development of a popular retention of a set of beliefs that we now term magical and the official religious denouncement of those beliefs created an ideological reality which not only permitted but likely made the witch trials inevitable. Godbeer also does an excellent job in describing the social and political conditions that provided the fertile ground for the 1692 witch hunts.
August 22, 2014
Fantastic analysis of occult and magical traditions in New England during the 16th and 17th centuries. I especially found his examination of the dichotomy between how ministers and the courts defined witchcraft and magic, and how layfolk defined it. This book really expanded how I understand early New England society.
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