The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New En
The Journal of American History; Bloomington; Jun 1995;

Volume:
82
Issue:
1
Start Page:
15
ISSN:
00218723
Subject Terms:
Women
Witchcraft
Theology
Sin
History
Culture
Geographic Names:
New England states

Abstract:
The Puritans believed that Satan could attack the souls of women more easily than those
of men, because women's bodies were considered weaker than men's. More women than
men were implicated in the witch episodes of the 17th century. The cultural construction
of gender in early America is examined in order to understand the intersection of Puritan
theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and these witchcraft episodes.

Full Text:
Copyright Organization of American Historians Jun 1995

Puritans regarded the soul as feminine and characterized it as insatiable, as
consonant with the supposedly unappeasable nature of women. If historians have
noticed the New England Puritans' feminized representation of the soul, they have
failed to comment or to accord the matter much significance. Yet such
representation is crucial to understanding how the soul could unite with Christ
upon regeneration or, alternatively, with the devil through sin.(1)

The body, for its part, also entangled women. Puritans believed that Satan
attacked the soul by assaulting the body, and that because women's bodies were
weaker, the devil could each women's souls more easily, breaching these "weaker
vessels" with greater frequency. Not only was the body the means toward
possessing the soul, it was the very expression of the devil's attack. Among
witches, the body clearly manifested the soul's acceptance of the diabolical
covenant.

Women were in a double bind during witchcraft episodes. Their souls, strictly
speaking, were no more evil than those of men, but the representation of the
vulnerable, unsatisfied, and yearning female soul, passively waiting for Christ but
always ready to succumb to the devil, inadvertently implicated corporeal women
themselves.(2) The representation of the soul in terms of worldly gender
arrangements, and the understanding of women in terms of the characteristics of
the feminine soul, in a circular fashion led Puritans to imagine that women were
more likely than men to submit to Satan. A woman's feminine soul, jeopardized in
a woman's feminine body, was frail, submissive, and passive-qualities that most
New Englanders thought would allow her to become either a wife to Christ or a
drudge to Satan.

Witches, unlike commonplace sinners, took a further damning step. Their feminine
souls made an explicit and aggressive choice to conjoin with the devil. By defining
a witch as a person whose (feminine) soul covenanted with Satan by signing a
devil's pact rather than quiescently waiting for Christ, Puritans effectively
demonized the notion of active female choice. A woman risked being damned
either way: If her soul waited longingly for salvation in Christ, such female
yearning could conjure up images of unsatisfied women vulnerable to Satan; if, on
the contrary, that soul acted assertively rather than in passive obedience, by
definition it chose the devil overtly. Thus, although in Puritan theory women were
not inherently more evil than men, they became so labeled during the practical
process of defining women's souls and bodies in the context of Puritan New
England.(3)

This essay examines the cultural construction of gender in early America in order
to understand the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of
womanhood, and the seventeenth-century witchcraft episodes, in which 78
percent of the accused wee women. The Puritans' earthly perception of women's
bodies and souls corresponded to their otherworldly belief concerning Satan's
powers. New Englanders considered women more vulnerable to Satan because
their image of the soul and its relationship to the body allowed them to associate
womanhood with evil and sin. During the witchcraft episodes, the learned and the
common people alike molded belief and interpreted circumstances, in the end
cooperating in the construction of their natural and supernatural world. Of course,
this seventeenth-century world was influenced by considerations of gender. Not
only did Puritans' understanding of women's and men's bodies and souls reflect
the gendered nature of their social universe, but the supernatural behaviors and
powers that they believed the devil conferred on his female and male witches
echoed the more mundane gender arrangements of colonial New England.(4)

Lay and clerical views of the tortures that Satan's victims endured during the
witchcraft episodes paralleled the sermon literature on the relationship between
the body, the soul, and Satan. The body was the most vulnerable part of one's
total being, its Achilles' heel. Succumbing to Satan's assaults and temptations, the
body could become the Puritan man or woman's own worst enemy. It was the
primary battleground in the struggle between the devil and individual souls. The
Reverend Henry Smith characterized the body as a betrayer. He lamented, "So
soon as we rise in the morning, we go forth to fight with two mighty giants, the
world and the devil; and whom do we take with us but a traitor, this brittle flesh,
which is ready to yield up to the enemy at every assault?" Sinful temptations
devised by Satan, such as carnality, drunkenness, and licentiousness, provoked
the body and threatened to lead it astray, thus allowing Satan an inroad into the
soul.(5)

Puritan sermons asserted that the body and the soul were both essential to
human beings; each had its specific purpose, though the soul reigned supreme.
The Reverend Samuel Willard explained that all the various parts of the body
were made "to be at the Command and under the Government of the Nobler Part
[the soul]." For example, "Here are the Hands, Organs suited to perform the
Devices of the Soul, wherewith many Works are wrought. . . . And here are the
Feet which carry the Body according to the Direction of the Soul." The body did
the soul's bidding; a weak body, one that could not withstand the devil's attacks or
seductions, rendered the soul vulnerable to Satan's extortion. The Reverend
Joshua Moodey referred to the body as "A close Enemy because within thee, and
the more dangerous because so close . . . , an Enemy that lurks in thine own
bosome, and thence is advantaged to do thee the more harm."(6)

It seems ironic that Puritans envisioned the body protecting the soul rather than
the reverse, so that a strong body rendered a person's soul less vulnerable to
Satan's exertions. The body, after all, was usually seen as the weaker link in the
soul/body relationship. However, in a seemingly illogical but nonetheless common
way, the body became the path to the soul. A stronger body was less likely to
submit to the devil's temptations and thus better protected the soul from the
devil's domination.

The body was supposed to protect the soul, but more often than not it failed.
Clergy and laity alike knew all too well that the body's lustful desires frequently
overwhelmed the will, which resided in the soul. And although the body may have
perpetrated the particular sins, ultimately the soul bore the responsibility. It was
the soul that Satan held in bondage. "It is true, the body is employed in it, and all
the members of it are engaged in this drudgery," Willard admitted, "but the
bondage of it lies on the inward man."(7)

Willard's use of the term "inward man" as a synonym for the (feminine) soul drew
on biblical precedent and Puritan speculation that used the names of bodily things
to designate spiritual entities. The metaphor carried more connotation of
femininity in the seventeenth century than it earlier did. Quoting the source of the
trope, the seventeenth-century English minister Richard Sibbes blurred the lines
between the physical and the spiritual, writing that the heart is not "the inward
material and fleshy part of the body; but that spiritual part, the soul and affections
thereof. . . all the powers of the soul, the inward man, as Paul calleth it, 2 Cor. iv.
16, is the heart Paul's phrase gained new significance from seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century ideas of physical anatomy that perceived women's sexual
organs as the same as men's, except insofar as they were contained within rather
than outside the body. If inwardness meant femaleness, the term suggests that
the soul was feminine; it, or "she," ultimately carried the burden of the body's
weaknesses.(8)

Puritans conceived of body and soul as integral parts of the self, yet distinguished
in function and prestige. As a result of the Fall, the body and soul suffered
punishments that had to be endured. Willard explained the distinction to his
congregation. Although the body was merely the instrument of the soul, he
preached, the pair fit together to form a complete person, and so the body as well
as the soul had to suffer for sin. The suffering, Willard reasoned, came in two
forms, "privative" and "positive." Creatures could be denied things that would have
made their lives more comfortable, or they could undergo manifest miseries, both
emotional and physical.(9)

As a consequence of original and subsequent sin, the body endured ill health as
its punishment. The privative suffering manifested itself in a lack of vivacity and a
disposition to illness; the positive suffering in physical ailments that afflicted the
human body. "These evils," according to Willard, "meet the man in the womb
before he is born, and they follow him to his grave; and every affliction gives a
chop at the tree of the life of the outward man, till at last it falls, and he dies."(10)

And yet, "if a man had a thousand bodies," postulated Willard, "he had better lose
them all, than one soul Willard admitted that a person could endure all sorts of
corporal miseries and still be content; spiritual punishment mattered more.
Spiritual miseries, Willard explained, included "all those evils to which the Soul is
subjected in this life." The soul constituted "the most excellent part in Man," and
so the miseries it suffered had to be significantly greater.(11) A strong body could
endure enormous suffering, but the agony of the soul imposed a more lasting
effect on a person's life.

The soul's most excruciating misery resulted when the divine union with Christ,
expected upon conversion, was cruelly subverted and instead a diabolical union
was concluded with the devil as a result of sin. Puritans believed that this was
exactly the devil's intention; Satan aggressively pursued souls, persuading them
to join his minions. Deodat Lawson (preaching in the midst of the 1692 witchcraft
crisis in Salem) proclaimed, "when [Satan] touches the life of the Body, he Aims at
the Life of the Soul." Willard (in more ordinary times) warned his congregation, "It
is the Soul[']s destruction the Devil mainly aims at: it is the precious Soul that he
hunts for." Both Lawson and Willard illustrated their point with the biblical example
of Job; the devil tortured Job's body, but his aim was to devastate the soul. "He
[the devil] little regards the Body in comparison of that," said Willard. Cotton
Mather made the same point. The devil's goal, he wrote, was to "seduce the
souls, torment the bodies."(12)

Prior to conversion, the soul, corrupt and degenerate in its natural state, inevitably
succumbed to Satan's wily ways and surrendered to his domination. Upon
conversion the soul cleaved to Christ, "as moulded into one loafe."(13) The
regenerate souls of both men and women were united with Christ as if in a
marriage. Paradoxically, this matrimony with Christ constituted a heterosexual
union for both men and women. Both Satan and Christ could possess the soul in
this sexually specific way because, as we shall see below, for Puritans, the soul,
as distinct from the body, was inherently feminine. Whether the soul fell victim to
Satan's temptations or instead enjoyed Christ's protection upon conversion, the
bond remained heterosexual because it was literally the soul, and only
metaphorically the body, that Puritans believed converged with either Christ of the
devil.

The marriage between God and a believer was the most common metaphor of
regeneration because it closely approximated the relationship between husband
and wife, the most important human relationship. Puritan ministers drew on a long
Christian tradition in describing the union, in which the soul took the place of the
wife, and Christ that of the husband. Thomas Shepard explained, "The soul hence
gives itself, like one espoused to her husband, to the Lord Jesus." The betrothal
metaphor took on a concrete expression when ministers urged that such sacred
marriages, like profane ones, required consummation. Increase Mather argued,
"In this Life Believers are Espoused to Christ. At his Second coming will be the
Consummation of the Marriage. Christ will then come as a Bridegroom." Jonathan
Mitchel described the union that would occur on Judgment Day: "our present state
is but an Espousal, the consummation of the Marriage is at the day of Judgment;
thence follows the full enjoyment each of other in Heaven, when Christ hath
carried his Spouse home to his Fathers house." The layman John Winthrop wrote,
"God brought me by that occasion in to such a heavenly meditation of the love
betweene Christ and me, as ravished my heart with unspeakable ioye [joy];
methought my soule had as familiar and sensible society with him as my wife
could have with the kindest husbande." The mystical union between the believer
and Christ was analogous, consummation and all, to the relationship between wife
and husband, female and male. In both men and women, the soul was the female
part that bonded spiritually, emotionally, and physically with Christ.(14)

If the feminine soul was to merge with Christ upon regeneration, then it must
possess attributes that prepared it for this union. The historian Margaret W.
Masson has described the Puritans' image of the regenerate Christian as a
passive and submissive convert who exemplified "wifely" traits. The convert was
supposed to wait patiently for Christ's overtures of grace. According to Shepard,
the soul had an obligation to be quiescent. When the lover is Christ, said Shepard,
"it is no presumption now, but duty to give her consent Upon regeneration, Cotton
Mather exhorted, "in this Act of Resignation there must and will be nothing less
than thy very All included. Resign thy Spirit unto Him, and say, O my SAVIOUR, I
desire that all the Faculties of my Soul may be filled with thee, and used for thee.
Resign thy Body unto Him The convert's object was to surrender completely to
Christ's domination.(15)

Masson investigated an apparent paradox. Conversion required men to act in a
contradictory manner; their position as dominant and assertive husbands ran
counter to their role as passive "female" converts. Masson argued that men were
able to assume such passive qualities because the fluid gender identities of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allowed men to adopt typically female
attributes while retaining their masculinity. She contended that the more rigid
sexual differentiation characteristic of the nineteenth century had not yet
emerged, thus permitting this apparent role ambiguity. I argue that the gender
role fluidity was made possible by the gendered split between the body and the
soul. Men were not required to adopt outwardly feminine traits and risk
compromising their masculinity, but man's soul, his inner self, could safely display
female virtues. Passivity and receptivity to Christ's advances resided in men's
souls, but their bodies -- and sense of themselves -- remained masculine.(16)

The ministers' use of the marriage metaphor to explain the bond between Christ
and saints imposed worldly gender divisions on the most important spiritual
process. The matrimony analogy worked so well to explain the bond between
Christ and a believer precisely because the institution was so basic. Puritan
women and men understood what was expected of them in a marriage. Because
the sacred marriage metaphor reflected many of the components of profane
marriage, the metaphor and the institution reinforced one another. The wife
submitted to her husband, just as a female soul gave herself up to Christ. Indeed,
the feminine soul's very happiness depended on Christ's protection, just as a
woman's contentedness was thought to depend, ideally, on her providential
betrothal.(17)

The relationship between the unregenerate soul and the devil paralleled the
conjugality between the regenerate soul and Christ, although in submitting to
Satan, men and women were enslaved rather than joined in a respectful and
benevolent, if necessarily hierarchical, relationship. Slavery rather than matrimony
characterized the possession. Both institutions implied perpetual and powerful
connections, and, interestingly, ministers described the bond between participants
and Christ as well as that between people and Satan by the metaphor of
possession. Thus, the minister William Adams could declare:

If thou art none of Christs, thou art the Devils. The possession of men in the world
is divided betwixt Christ and Satan. What Christ possesses not are under Satans
Power and tyranny. Know therefore that if Christ hath no possession of thee, thou
art possessed of the Devil.

Christ and the devil possessed converted and unregenerate souls, respectively,
but the nature of the possession differed. Possession by Christ assured freedom
and salvation; possession by the devil meant perpetual terror and
degradation.(18)

Ministers preached that Satan held the unconverted soul in bondage; natural man
came completely under Satan's control. Jonathan Mitchel urged his congregation
to come out of the corrupt state of nature, "wherin men are before conversion,
which is here said to be a state of darkness & bondage to Satan & consequently
of perdition." Samuel Willard likewise equated Satan's possession with man's
natural state. "The first possession of the heart is held by the Strong man,"
explained Willard, "whether by him we understand Satan, who is called the God of
the world, and rules in the Children of disobedience; or the body of death, or the
corrupt nature in man." "How fearfull a thing is it to be serving the devill!"
exclaimed the minister Robert Baylie. Those who resisted God in sin "lie captive
like Gally-slaves," remaining separate from God "with their master for ever in his
horrible portion."(19)

The analogy to slavery allowed ministers to speak of the devil's lure as complete
and inextricable. Thomas Hooker said of the wicked, "the Devill rules in them; he
speaks their tongues, and works by their hands, and thinks and desires by their
minds, and walks by their feete." The union, like the matrimony between Christ
and the converted, merged the devil with the soul. Unlike the regenerate soul,
which could expect marital bliss upon its union with Christ, the soul possessed by
Satan remained forever unhappy. Willard stated unequivocally "That this slavery is
a Soul misery."(20)

Implicitly this connubiality presumed an unregenerate feminine soul and an
unrelenting masculine devil. Though they rarely drew explicit attention to the
female character of the soul, clergy and laity used feminine adjectives, such as
barren or fecund, to describe it and overtly referred to the soul using the feminine
pronoun, "she." The soul was also described as insatiable, a negative
characterization more often ascribed to women than to men; the soul was forever
seeking happiness that it could never attain unaided. Indeed, the minister Urian
Oakes spoke of the natural propensity to sin, original sin, in feminine terms.
"Indwelling sin," he explained, was a "home-bred enemy, that mother of all the
abominations that are brought forth in the lives of men, that adversary that is ever
molesting the peace, disturbing the quiet, and endangering the people of
GOD."(21) Bearing within it the "mother" of all sin, the unregenerate, natural soul
submitted willingly to Satan's domination.

John Cotton described the unrepentant soul as a feminine entity. Depicting the
"ungracious frame of nature" with which humankind entered the world, Cotton
recounted the process of regeneration: "So as now the poor soule begins
presently to stand amazed at her former condition, and looks at it as most
dangerous and desperate; and now the soule begins to loathe itself, and to abhor
itselfe, and to complaine and confesses its wickednesse before God."(22) Cotton's
soul is thus ungracious, wicked, self-hating, and female -- as the possessive
pronoun implies. She is enveloped in Satan's embrace, yet eager to confess so
that she can instead be coupled with Christ.

Feminine images of the soul punctuate Puritan sermon literature. In 1679 William
Adams described the minister's work in preparing souls for conversion as
"travailing in birth with Souls till Christ be formed in them." He likened the soul in
its natural state to a wilderness, "barren and unfruitful, bringing forth no fruit to
God, but wild fruits of sin." Once these unregenerate souls shifted their devotion
from Satan to Christ upon conversion, they would "be changed, tilled, converted
and made fruitful, to bring forth fruits of holiness unto God." "Fertile and fruitful"
described the converted soul; the reprobate soul, possessed by Satan, remained
"barren of all grace and goodness."(23)

The representation of the soul as a woman invited metaphors of fecundity and
sexuality. The poet Anne Bradstreet portrayed the eyes and ears as the doors of
the soul, "through which innumerable objects enter," but the soul is never
satisfied. Borrowing an image from the biblical book of Proverbs, she imagined the
soul as "like the daughters of the horseleach"; it "cries, 'Give, give'; and which is
most strange, the more it receives, the more empty it finds itself and sees an
impossibility ever to be filled but by Him in whom all fullness dwells."(24) In
Bradstreet's eyes, the feminine soul needed a virile Christ to satisfy her otherwise
insatiable desires.

An English minister, the Reverend Mr. Simmons, similarly described the soul using
sexual imagery. Like Bradstreet, he conceived of the eyes as the "port-holes" of
the soul, through which "sin and Satan creep in at." He cautioned, "If those doors
stand wide open for all comers and goers, either your soul, Dinah-like, will be
gadding out, or Satan will be getting in, by which the poor soul will be defiled and
defloure" Simmons recalled Dinah, the biblical daughter of Jacob, who left the
protection of her father and brothers and was raped by Shechem, son of Hamor
the Hivite.(25) Like Dinah, the soul, left unguarded, would fall victim to Satan's
invasion; his potent intrusion was best described in sexual terms, as the rape of
the feminine soul.

The feminine soul thus was insatiable, driven by almost physical desires, as
Samuel Willard argued in his Sacramental Meditations: "The soul of man must
have something to live upon, that is the great want, and for this want the creature
hath no supply." Like a growling stomach, Thomas Shepard suggested, the soul
"must have something to quiet and comfort it." Ironically, the active pursuit of
sustenance and spiritual fulfillment was not only futile, given the soul's unrelenting
appetite, but it invited Satan's abuse, conceived as rape and possession.(26)

In the battle between God and the devil, both Christ and Satan stood as
aggressively masculine warriors, battling for the feminine soul's fidelity.
Unconverted souls, ministers warned, unwittingly conspired with the forces of
Satan and "spen[t] all their days in Continual Rebellions against [God] But in his
generalship, Satan showed little regard or mercy for his own troops. The soul thus
occupied a dangerous position; even if she was an unwitting conscript in Satan's
legion, she had to defend herself against the devil himself. As Bradstreet and
Simmons cautioned, the soul had to shield herself from Satan's advances so that
she would not be "defiled and defloured."(27)

During the witchcraft trials the unfulfilled feminine soul, quick to succumb to the
devil's possession, became equated with discontented women, subjects primed
for the devil's intrusion. The ministers taught that Satan tortured and weakened
the body in order to dominate the soul, and the laity interpreted the message quite
literally; that interpretation affected the understanding of sin, the soul, and the
body in unanticipated ways. To lay people's minds, the weaker bodies of women
rendered their souls more accessible to Satan. The clergy did not disagree. The
minister John Cotton had succinctly described the relationship between sin, the
soul, and Satan: "When a man wittingly and willingly commits any knowne sinne,
he doth as actually give his Soule to the Devill, as a Witch doth her body and
soule; we thereby renounce the covenant of God, and Satan takes Possession of
us."(28) Cotton made a distinction between sinners and witches; Satan possessed
the souls of all sinners alike, but witches, whom Cotton assumed were women,
compounded their crime.

The witch's surrender was explicit; not only did her body falter and her soul submit
but the witch also explicitly enlisted to promote the devil's purpose. The witch
acted aggressively. Her soul specifically chose the devil, rather than passively
waiting for Christ, and she purposefully allowed the devil to use her body. She
presumably gave the devil permission to commandeer her body -- her shape -- to
recruit more witches and perform maleficium. Thus, the witch acted assertively,
while the sinner, after falling, suffered passively.

In both old and New England, Puritans conceived of women as the weaker sex. In
seventeenth-century England some debated whether that weakness extended to
women's spiritual or moral state as well. Joseph Swetnam argued in The
Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women that women were
inherently evil. He wrote, "Then who can but say, that Women spring from the
Devil, whose heads, hands, hearts, minds, and souls are evil?" His book came
under attack, but it went through six editions between 1615 and 1702. Meric
Casaubon, an English scholar with a special interest in witchcraft and possession,
disagreed. He contended that women were not evil but, rather, that their brains
were weaker, and so they were more likely to be caught in Satan's traps. He wrote
of women, "all men know [them] to be naturally weaker of brain, and easiest to be
infatuated and deluded." Swetnam blamed all of woman -- not only her body but
her soul -- for her evil nature; Casaubon blamed strictly woman's physical
limitations. A weaker brain was quite different from an evil soul;
seventeenth-century opinion considered the brain a part of the physical anatomy,
like the liver or the spleen, while the soul was an immortal entity.(29)

New Englanders may have shared Swetnam's sentiments, but publicly they
confined their notions of women's weakness to their physical states. The colonists
shared with their English brethren the belief that women's bodies were physically
weaker than men's and subject to more debilitating illness. An English midwife,
Jane Sharp, wrote in a 1671 midwifery manual "that the Female sex are subject to
more diseases by odds than the Male Kind are, and therefore it is reason that
great care should be had for the cure of that sex that is the weaker and most
subject to infirmities in some respects above the other New Englanders
concurred. Cotton Mather explained in The Angel of Bethesda, the only complete
colonial medical guide, that "the Sex that is called, The Weaker Vessel, has not
only a share with us, in the most of our Distempers, but also is liable to many that
may be called, Its Peculiar Weaknesses." He reported that a "Variety of
Distempers" afflicted women's "Tender and Feeble Constitutions."(30)

As we have seen, the feminine souls of women and men were responsible for
sinfulness, and both were all too likely to fall into Satan's deadly embrace.
However, during the witchcraft episodes, the devil consistently and
disproportionately seemed to torture women, trying to obtain their signatures in
his black book, win their souls, and use their bodies to molest and recruit others.
Given the gendered social and theological arrangements of seventeenth-century
New England, we should not find this bias surprising.

Applying the teachings of their ministers rather literally, the laity, I believe,
expected that women's weaker bodies would suffer more severely than men's in a
world besieged by Satan's wrath. Because women's bodies lacked the strength
and vitality of men's, according to popular thought, the devil could more frequently
and successfully enter and possess women's souls, thus bringing them, according
to the minister Deodat Lawson, "into full Submission, and entire Resignation to
[Satan's] Hellish Designs."(31)

The devil pursued souls with particular vigor and success during witchcraft
outbreaks, yet he did not display any new methods or depart significantly from his
well-known devices. Satan perhaps asserted himself more physically and
immediately in these incidents. Indeed, the evocative language that the clergy
used to describe God's wrath toward those who refused to convert may have led
the laity to interpret God's anger and the devil's torments so literally. But the
powers of Satan still corresponded to those detailed by Puritan ministers.(32) The
laity saw Satan in various guises, often in the accused witch's bodily shape. These
specters, as they were called, were the focus of debate. Civic and religious
leaders disputed whether the appearance of a specter indicated that the individual
impersonated had actually made a compact granting Satan permission to appear
in her or his shape and to torment others or whether Satan could appear in the
bodily shape of an innocent person. Either way, the clergy and the laity believed
that when the devil appeared in any form, his goal was to molest the bodies of
potential recruits in order to capture their souls.

Anxious to dominate their souls, Satan harrassed his victims' bodies fist. The
language of the indictments bought against the accused witches illustrates the
extent of the agonies inflicted by the devil. The indictments read that the victims
were "Tortured Afflicted Consumed pined Wasted and Tormented." Presumably,
Satan already possessed the body and soul of his primary victim, the witch, and
so with her permission, and through her body, he attacked yet more victims. The
accused witch Mary Bridges testified that "the way of her afflicting was by sticking
pins into things and Clothes & think of hurting them."(33)

The victims described their tortures more graphically. One woman, Mary Walcott,
swore that the apparition of Goody Buckly came and "hurt me and tortord me
most dreadfully by pinching and choaking of me and twesting of my nick several
times" to convince her to sign a covenant with Satan and renounce God. Likewise,
Susannah Sheldon told the court that "I have very often ben most greviously
tortured by Apperishtion of Sarah Good who has most dreadfully afflected me by
bitting pricking and pinching me and allmost choaking me to death Sheldon
recalled that on June 26, 1692, Good "most violently pulled down my head behind
a Cheast and tyed my hands together with a whele band & allmost Choaked me to
death." The court records abound with women's testimony that the devil, usually
but not always in the shape of the accused, brutally tormented their bodies and
tempted them to sign his book in blood, signifying his possession of their
souls.(34)

The devil's victims usually sought to endure his torture of their bodies and to resist
relinquishing their souls, though with mixed results. Mercy Lewis told the court that
the devil in the shape of the accused, George Jacobs, Sr., came to her and urged
her to join his minions. "Because I would not yeald to his hellish temtations," she
surmised, "he did tortor me most cruelly . . . and allmost redy to pull all my bones
out of joynt . . . but being up held by an Allmighty hand . . . I indured his tortors
that night." The devil could damage her body but not ultimately master it, and so
he would not have her soul. The possessed Mary Warren owned that she
"yeilded," and that she "was undon body and soul," and that she did it "for eas to
her body: not for any good of her soul."(35)

Once the witch inscribed the pact with the devil, Puritans believed, she could no
longer keep Satan's possession a secret; her soul had willfully joined the devil's
camp. The devil often appeared directly to witches, and he could be so persuasive
that some women confessed to giving themselves completely to him. Sarah
Bridges testified that "the Divel Came Sometimes like a bird Som times like abare
Sometimes like aman," and she admitted "Renouncing God and Christ & Gave her
Soul & Body to the Devil." Bridges acknowleged that the devil had threatened to
kill her if she confessed, but still she told the court that she used to "afflict persons
by Squezing her hands & Sticking pins in her Clothes." Mary Barker also
confessed that she was "afrayd She has Given up her Self Soul & body to the
Divel." These two confessors, like many others, admitted that the devil had urged
them to inscribe his book and that they had capitulated. By signing they
renounced baptism. The pact created the same bond between the signers and
Satan as the baptized had with Christ; its significance rested on its voluntary
nature. Upon signing over their souls, they were expected to inflict harm on
others, while the devil seized their shapes to attack, entrap, and recruit additional
witches for his service. Becoming the devil's victim meant enduring affliction,
either from the devil directly or from the shape of a witch.(36)

Women served the devil in ways particular to their sex. It was not unusual for a
witch who had given herself body and soul to Satan to suckle familiars, or imps,
Puritans believed. These little creatures, often animals or small, strange beasts,
were thought to receive nourishment in the form of blood from the witch's body.
Often the familiars sucked at the breasts, but they were as likely to latch onto any
unusual marking, or witches' teat. The West Indian woman Tituba told the court
that she saw a small yellow bird "suck [Sarah] Good betwene the fore finger &
Long finger upon the Right Hand She added that sometimes she saw a cat with
the bird and that she once noticed Good with two bizarre creatures. One, who had
wings and two legs and a head like a woman, subsequently turned into a woman;
the other was "a thing all over hairy, all the face hayry & a long nose & I don't
know how to tell how the face looks w'th two Leggs, itt goeth upright & is about
two or three foot high & goeth upright like a man In Connecticut, the authorities
searched the body of Mercy Disbrough and found "on her secret parts growing
within ye lep of ye same a los [loose] pees of skin and when puld it is near an Inch
long somewhat in form of ye fingar of a glove flatted."(37)

The creatures signified that the devil had taken possession of these women's
bodies, and now they, as well as the devil himself, had the right to suck their
blood. Susannah Sheldon, an eyewitness against Bridget Bishop, testified that
Bishop "puled out her breast and the black man gave her a thing like a blake pig it
had no haire on it and shee put it to her breast and gave it suck and when it had
sucked on brest shee put it the other and gave it suck their then she gave it to the
blak man." Although Sheldon saw this creature suckle at Bishop's breasts, Bishop
still underwent a court-appointed search for likely spots where an imp might
nurse. Five women found on her body "a preternathurall Excresence of flesh
between the pudendum and Anus much like to Tetts & not usuall in women."
Because Bishop's body was seen suckling the devil's familiar and because her
shape was seen tormenting several victims, the court assumed that Bishop's soul
also belonged to Satan. Despite her repeated protestations of innocence, Bishop
was hanged; according to the court she had given the devil both her body and her
soul and had become a witch.(38)

For the witch, sacrificing her soul to Satan could mean yielding her body sexually
to his imps. In medieval folklore, the witch's familiar, or incubus, had intercourse
with the witch. The learned tracts on witchcraft written in the colonies, for
example, Increase Mather's, were skeptical about the possibility of the devil's
familiars having sexual relations with the witches. Increase Mather wrote, "What
fables are there concerning incubi and succubae and of men begotton by
daemons! No doubt but the devil may delude the fancy, that one of his vassals
shall think (as the witch at Hartford did) that he has carnal and cursed communion
with them beyond what is real." On the other hand, Mather went on to admit, "Nor
is it impossible for him [the devil] to assume a dead body, or to form a lifeless one
out of the elements, and therewith to make his witches become guilty of sodomy."
Even on this last point, Mather was ambiguous. Later in the text he concluded,
"But to imagine that spirits shall really generate bodies, is irrational." In the
colonial witchcraft trials, this traditional element was not emphasized, although the
possibility of such behavior was certainly intimated. The creatures that sucked at
women's breasts and at other sexually sensitive areas of their bodies may have
been sucking for sexual pleasure rather than nourishment.(39)

Witches' bodies no longer belonged to themselves; Satan could take them
wherever he pleased to use as he pleased. The devil appeared in the forms of
both men and women witches, but when a specter assaulted a victim in a sexual
way, it was always in the shape of a woman. Most often a male victim (though
occasionally a female one) recounted awaking at night to find the specter of a
witch sitting on top of him in bed. References to sexual activity were veiled but
unmistakable. Samuel Gray reported that he woke up to see Bridget Bishop's
apparition standing between the baby's cradle and his bed. He testified that

he said to her in the name of God what doe you come for. then she vanished
away soe he Locked the dore againe & went to bed and between sleeping &
wakeing he felt some thing Come to his mouth or lipes cold, & there upon started
& looked up & againe did see the same woman.

In a similarly suggestive tale, Bernard Peach claimed that Susannah Martin "drew
up his body into a heape and Lay upon him about an hour and half or 2 hours, in
all which taim this deponent coold not stir nor speake." New Englande did not
typically interpret the devil's intrusion in sexual terms, yet they sometimes
understood his use of women witches in light of tie witches' sexuality and their
female bodies.(40)

Satan also tried to capture men's souls, but his torture of their bodies was
markedly different and less drastic. Men were not as likely to be seen suckling
imps, although their bodies were searched during the trials and the investigations
occasionally found evidence of the potential for such activity. During the
examination of two accused witches, George Burroughs and George Jacobs, both
of whom were eventually hanged, the examiners found nothing unusual upon
Burroughs's body, but Jacobs was not so lucky. The four men reported "3. tetes
w'ch according to the best of our Judgement wee think is not naturall for wee run
a pinn through 2 of them and he was not sinceible of it." As far as the court was
concerned, the three abnormal markings, one in Jacobs's mouth, one on his
shoulder blade, and one on his hip, signified the devil's posession of his body and
soul.(41)

But the devil's possession of men contrasted with his domination of women
because New Englanders expected that men's heartier bodies were more difficult
and less tempting objects of the devil's attacks. The assumption that the devil had
a different relationship with men was never explicitly articulated, but the incidents
recounted at the trials can provide us with insights into Puritans' thinking about
gender and the affliction of evil. First, witches were less likely to seduce men than
women into the devil's service.(42) And when men told of their encounters with he
accused witches, their testimony centered on bizarre acts of maleficence
attributed to he accused, rather than on the physical harm caused by the witches'
shape. Samuel Endicott charged Mary Bradbury with selling the captain of his ship
butter that turned rancid after he and his crew were at sea for three weeks. Either
the heedlessness of the sale, calculated fraud, or her magical ability to transform
good butter into bad implicated her, and he did not doubt that she was a witch. As
additional evidence, Endicott described a violent storm that cost the ship its
mainmast, its rigging, and fifteen horses. The ship sprang a leak and took on four
feet of water, and its crew was forced to unload the cargo. When they came upon
land, Endicott saw "the appearance of a woman from her middle upwards,
haveing a white Capp and white neck-cloth on her, w'ch then affrighted him very
much."(43) Bradbury's shape frightened Endicott, and her misdeeds plagued him,
but he was not subject to her direct, violent, physical abuse.

Often male victims' complaints against an accused witch centered on the harm
inflicted on their personal property, rather than on the bodily pain they endured
themselves. Samuel Abbey told the court that after the accused witch Sarah Good
left his house, he began to lose cattle "after an unusuall Manner, in drupeing
Condition." He lost seventeen cattle in two years, in addition to sheep and hogs,
and he held the devil and Sarah Good responsible. John Roger testified that after
an argument with Martha Carrier seven years earlier, two of his sows were lost
and one of them was found dead near the Carriers' house with both of its ears cut
off.(44)

Even more often men suffered through miseries visited on weaker members of
their families, their wives and their children. Although William Beale testified that
he awoke one morning because "A very greate & wracking paine had seized
uppon my body," his primary evidence against the accused Philip English was that
his son, who had been expected to recover from smallpox, died later that day,
after Beale saw English's shape on the chimney. Samuel Perley complained that
Elizabeth Howe stuck his ten-year-old daughter and his wife with pins. Astonished
at the brutality to which they were subject, he claimed, "i could never aflict a dog
as goode how aflicts mi wife." Perley's daughter "Pine d a wai [pined away] to skin
and bone and ended her sorrowful life." The devil, in the shapes of the accused,
tortured these two men, but not by destroying their own bodies.(45)

When men were direct victims of physical violence at the hands of the possessed,
the scenes were far less dramatic. Samuel Smith, for. example, heeded a threat
from the accused witch Mary Easty, and as he walked past a stone wall on his
way home, he "Received a little blow on my shoulder with I know not what and the
stone wall rattleed very much which affrighted me."(46) That same threat might
have caused a woman untold bodily fits and injuries.

On the rare occasions when male victims complained of severe physical abuse, it
was always at the hands of another man, an accused male witch. Apparently,
even with the aid of the devil, women were not physically capable of doing great
harm to the bodies of men. When Beale told the court of he great pain that seized
his body, he claimed that his attacker was the accused witch Philip English.
Similarly, Benjamin Gould testified that Giles Cory, who was later pressed to
death, induced "shuch a paine in one of my feet that I Cold not ware my shoe for
2: or 3.days." Eighty-one-year-old Bray Wilkins likewise was convinced that the
accused witch John Willard had brought on a painful urinary tract obstruction. He
told the court, "I continued so in greivous pain & my water much stopt till s'd
Willard was in chains." However, after Willard pleaded innocence, Wilkins testified,
he "was taken in the sorest distress & misery my water being turned into real
blood, or of a bloody colour & the old pain returned excessively as before."(47)

Characteristically, Satan granted extraordinary power to his accomplices, either
clairvoyance or great bodily strength.(48) In keeping with seventeenth-century
notions of women's physical limitations, Satan bestowed unequal powers on men
and women. He endowed his male witches with unusual strength and so made
even other men vulnerable to the male witches' physical violence. Satan
empowered women's bodies with only enough strength to torture their female
victims successfully; often, ostensibly through their mere presence and without
any particular bodily force, they produced firs of agony in those afflicted. Female
witches seemed able to abuse only other women, while male witches could torture
naturally weaker women as well as typically robust and potent men.

George Burroughs, a former minister at Salem and a condemned witch,
epitomized the strength that Satan could contribute to male collaborators. During
Burroughs's trial, all of the male eyewitnesses told the court that they had seen
the accused exhibiting enormous force, much more than was characteristic of an
ordinary man; his unusual strength could only have come with the devil's
assistance, they believed. Thomas Greenslit, for example, saw Burroughs "lift and
hold Out a gunn of Six foot barrell or thereabouts putting the forefinger of his right
hand into the Muzle of s'd gunn and So held it Out at Armes End Only with that
finger." Simon Willard concurred with this report; he claimed that "s'd gun was
about or near seven foot barrill: and very hevie: I then tryed to hold out s'd gun
with both hands: but could not do it long enough to take sight." Four additional
male witnesses saw Burroughs carry a barrel of molasses with only two fingers for
some distance without putting it down.(49)

Interestingly, only the male witnesses offered Burroughs's unusual strength as
evidence that he had colluded with Satan and had become a witch; his terrible
strength, in sharp contrast to their own limited abilities, resonated with their
notions of manliness and their expectations about how the devil might empower
witches who were male. The women who testified against Burroughs were victims
of physical violence, but their afflictions were similar to those that women victims
typically received from women witches. The devil needed to provide extra strength
to his male witches only when they afflicted other men.

Since Puritans believed that Satan designed his attacks according to his quarry, it
made sense that the women and men victims whom the witches tried to lure into
Satan's web perceived Satan's tortures differently. Just as female victims were
mote likely to be physically tormented, the women witches themselves -- the
majority of the accused -- also experienced greater bodily distress than did men
as Satan destroyed their bodies to capture their souls. Though men's bodies were
hardly invulnerable, in women the devil sought easier marks.

Curiously, while a weak body and a vulnerable soul left one open to Satan, they
might also encourage one's faith in God. Indeed, Cotton Mather and other
ministers suggested that the frailty of women's bodies, compounded by the
dangers of childbirth, gave women more reason to seek the Lord since death was
more immediate. Anne Bradstreet, bemoaning an illness that had plagued her for
months, hoped that her soul would gain some advantage while her body was
faltering. Believing that God inflicted bodily illness only for the good of the soul,
she mused, "I hope my soul shall flourish while my body decays, and the
weakness of this outward man shall be a means to strengthen my inner man."
Echoing Samuel Willard's biological reference to the soul, Bradstreet called her
soul the "inner man" and tried to dissociate its spiritual strength from her body's
physical weaknesses. She cultivated resignation: "And if He knows that weakness
and a frail body is the best to make me a vessel fit for His use why should I not
bear it, not only willingly but joyfully." Bradstreet went so far as to suggest that
good health might divert her from the Lord. She wrote, "The Lord knows I dare not
desire that health that sometimes I have had, lest my heart should be drawn from
Him, and set upon the world."(50)

Perhaps women's weaker bodies brought them closer to God, as Bradstreet
hoped. Women, then, had a particular potential for goodness. But women's more
fragile bodies also exposed them to Satan, perhaps encouraging a peculiar
potential for evil -- Eve's legacy. In the context of the witchcraft outbreaks, a time
of extraordinary uncertainty and fear, New Englanders focused on the darker side
of womanhood, emphasizing the vulnerability of women's bodies and souls to the
devil, rather than their openness to regeneration. Women as witches wee so
threatening because their souls had made a conscious decision to ally with Satan.
Too impatient or too weak to wait passively for Christ's advance, witches allowed
their bodies and souls to choose, actively, the seductions of the devil. In the
course of living their errand in the North American wilderness, Puritans thus
constructed a gendered ideology and society that made women, ironically, closer
both to God and to Satan.

(Footnotes)

Elizabeth Reis is a visiting research fellow at the Center for the Study of American
Religion at Princeton University, 1994-1995.

She would like to thank Matthew Dennis, Karen Kupperman, David D. Hall, Robert
Middlekauff, Michael McGiffert, John Murrin, Carla Pestana, Richard Godbeer,
Stephen Aron, Anita Tien, John Theibault, Cornelia Dayton, James F. Cooper, Jr.,
Margaret Masson, the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton
University, and anonymous reviewers at the Journal of American History.

1 Scholars have studied the Puritan conception of the soul, but none has
commented on gender distinctions. See, for example, Sargent Bush, Jr., ed., The
Writing, of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds (Madison, 1950);
Charles Lloyd Cohen, God's Care The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience
(New York, 1986); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic
Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York, 1944); Kathleen
Verduin, "'Our Cursed Natures': Sexuality and the Puritan Conscience," New
England Quarterly, 56 (June 1983), 220-37; and Margaret W. Masson, "The
Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching,
1690-1730," Signs, 2 (Winter 1976), 304-15.

Since both men and women possessed feminine souls, ministers would have
contended that the sexes were spiritually equal. Yet Carol F. Karlsen has shown
that women's discontent with their lot in life opened them to witchcraft
accusations. She has demonstrated that the sins for which women were punished
-- pride, deceit, envy signified overall unhappiness, and as the minister John
Davenport suggested, Puritans knew that "a froward discontented frame of spirit
was a subject fitt for the Devill to work upon." See Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in
the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987),
esp. 125.

3 For the prevailing European view that women were more evil than men, see the
influential 1486 work: Heinrich Institorus, The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich
Kramer and James Sprenger; trans. Montague Summers (New York, 1971), esp.
41-47. The book appeared in various languages in almost thirty editions.

4 Approximately 78% of the seventeenth-century witches who could be identified
by sex were female. See Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 48; and John
Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New
England (New York, 1982). On the relationship of lay and clerical thought, see
David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder; Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in
Early New England (New York, 1989), esp. 3-20. See also Richard Godbeer, The
Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge, Eng.,
1992), 154-57.

5 On the struggle between body and soul, see John Downame, The Christian
Warfare Against the Devil, World and Flesh (London, 1634). Thomas Fuller, ed.,
The Works of Henry Smith; including Sermons, Treatises, Prayers, and Poems (2
vols., Edinburgh, 1867), II, 18.

6 Samuel Willard, The Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726), 123; Joshua
Moodey, Soudiery Spiritualized, or the Christian Souldier Order, and Strenuously
Engaged in the Spiritual Warre, and So fighting the Good Fight (Cambridge,
Mass., 1674), 8.

7 Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, 229. On the relationship between the
understanding, the will, the body, and the soul, see Cohen, God's Caress, 34-46.
On the will and the soul, see also Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1939) 181-85, 256-66.

8 Cohen, God's Caress, esp. 37, 39. On ideas of the equivalence of male and
female sexual organs, see Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the
Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations, 14 (Spring 1986), esp. 5,
14-16. On how two genders corresponded to one sex -- the male -- see Thomas
Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990).

9 Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, 224-28.

10 Ibid., 224.

11 Ibid., 227.

12 Deodat Lawson, Christ's Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan's Malignity
(Boston, 1704), 23; Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, 229; Samuel Drake, ed.,
The Witchcraft Delusion in New England, vol. I: The Wonders of the Invisible
World [1693], by Cotton Mather (Roxbury, Mass., 1866), 101.

13 John Cotton, The Way of Life (London, 1634), 375.

14 John Albro, ed., The Works of Thomas Shepard (1853; 3 vols., New York,
1967), II, 31; Increase Mather, Practical Truths Plainly Delivered (Boston, 1718),
54; Jonathan Mitchel, A Discourse of the Glory Which God hath Called Believers
by Jesus Christ (London, 1677), 30; Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John
Winthrop (2 vols., Boston, 1869), I, 105. On the role of Puritan women as wives
and mothers, see Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The
Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York, 1992). See also Morgan, Puritan
Family, esp. chapter 7. On the medieval tradition of matrimonial and sexual
imagery, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on
Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991) 151-79; and
Ann E. Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval
Christianity (Philadelphia, 1990). On the metaphor of maternal love, see Caroline
Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (Berkeley, 1982), 110-69. For the Puritan understanding of marriage, see
John Cotton, A Meet Help: Or, a Wedding Sermon, Preached at New-Castle in
New England, June 19, 1694 (Boston, 1693); Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity,
610-20; Benjamin Wadsworth, The Well-ordered Family (Boston, 1712);
Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (London, 1615);
Thomas Gataker, Marriage Duties (London, 1620). For the historians' view of the
relationship between men and women in marriage, see Morgan, Puritan Family,
29-64; James T. Johnson, "The Covenant Idea and the Puritan View of Marriage,"
Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (Jan.-March 1971), 107-18; Karlsen, Devil in
the Shape of a Woman, 160-68; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image
and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New
York, 1980), 35-50.

15 Albro, ed., Works of Thomas Shepard, I, 197 (emphasis added). See also
Verduin, "'Our Cursed Natures,'" 220-37: Cotton Mather, Glorious Espousal: A
Brief Essay Illustrate and Prosecute the Marriage, Wherein Our Great Saviour
Offers to Espouse unto Himself the Children of Men (Boston, 1719) 26. See
Masson, "Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate," 304-15; and
David Leverenz. The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature,
Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, 1980), 148-56.

16 Masson, "Typology of he Female as a Model for the Regenerate," 313-15.
Perhaps notions of masculinity were changing even earlier than Masson
suggested; men's increasing reluctance to convert in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries may reflect an avoidance of the "feminine qualities"
required conversion. This issue needs further exploration.

17 Ulrich, Good Wives, 110-23.

18 William Adams, The Necessity of the Pouring Out of the Spirit from on High
Upon a Sinning Apostatizing People, set under Judgment, in order to their Merciful
Deliverance and Salvation (Boston, 1679), 38; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's
Daughter: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800
(Boston, 1980), 41-51. The metaphor of possession is a reminder that, although
Puritan marriages may have aspired to spiritual equality, the reality dictated a
power imbalance between husband and wife. In some marriages, at least, the wife
felt herself to be a virtual slave to her husband. The legal relationship between
husbands and wives connoted possession. When a woman married she became
a feme covert, who could not own property or sign contracts and did not legally
own any wages she earned. In 1694 in London, Mary Astell anonymously
published Reflections upon Marriage. She bemoaned the fate of "poor Female
Slaves" who "groan under Tyranny" and would grow unavoidably weary of the
"matrimonial yoke." See Margaret George, "From 'Goodwife' to 'Mistress': The
Transformation of the Female in Bourgeois Culture," Science and Society, 37
(Summer 1973), 152-77. On the legal status of wives, see Norton, Liberty's
Daughter, 45-47; Marylynn Salmon, omen and the Law of property in Early
America (Chapel Hill, 1986); Joan R. Gundersen and Gwen Victor Gampel,
"Married Women's Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (Jan. 1982), 114-34; and Norma Basch, In the
Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteen-Century New York
(Ithaca, 1982), 19-26.

19 Jonathan Mitchel, "From the Power of Satan unto God," sermon, Aug. 15,
1655 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.). See also Edward Trefz,
"Satan as the Prince of Evil," Boston Library Quarterly, 7 (Jan. 1955), 3-22.
Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, 170; Robert Baylie, Satan the Leader in Chief
to a who Resist the Reparation of Sion (London, 1643), 37.

20 Thomas Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (London, 1637), 35; Willard,
Compleat Body of Divinity, 229.

21 Urian Oakes, The Unconquerable, All Conquering and More than Conquering
Souldier: or the successful warre which believer wageth with the enemies of his
soul (Boston, 1674), 2 (emphasis added).

22 Cotton, Way of Life, 5 (emphasis added).

23 Adams, Necessity of the Pouring Out of the Spirit, A4, 4, 18. For other uses of
the metaphor of birch, including one quoted from a layman, see Willard, Compleat
Body of Divinity, 230; and George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley, eds., Thomas
Shepard's Confessions (Boston, 1981), 61. On descriptions of landscape in terms
of female sexuality and motherhood, see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land:
Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill,
1975).

24 Anne Bradstreet, "Meditations Divine and Moral." in The Works of Anne
Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 282. See Prov.
30:15 Revised Standard Version: "The leech has two daughters;/ 'Give: says one,
and 'Give', says the other./Three things there are which will never be satisfied,/
four which never say, 'Enough!'/The grave and a barren womb,/ a land thirsty for
water and fire that never says, 'Enough!'"

25 Rev. Mr. Simmons, "How may we get rid of spiritual sloth, and know when our
activity in duty is from the spirit of God?," in Puritan Sermons, 1659-1689: Being
the Morning Exerciser at Cripplegate, St. Giles in the Fields, and in Southwark by
Seventy-Five Ministers of the Gospel In or Near London, ed. James Nichols (6
vols., Wheaton, Ill., 1981), I, 434-57, esp. 439. For a similar description of the
relation of eyes and soul, see Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, 123. For the
Dinah story, see Gen. 34 RSV.

26 Samuel Willard, Some Brief Sacramental Meditations, Preparatory for
Communion, at the Great Ordinance of the Supper (Boston, 1711), 21-22; Albro,
ed., Works of Thomas Shepard, II, 28. On the nearly physical desires of the soul,
see Verduin, "'Our Cursed Natures,'" 236.

27 Cotton Mather, "Triparadisus," [1712-1726], pt. III, sect. VIII, octavo vol. 49,
Mather Family Papers, 1613-1819 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,
Mass.). On the dare of this work, see Reiner Smolinski, "An Authoritative Edition of
Cotton Mather's Unpublished Manuscript 'Triparadisus'" (Ph.D. diss.,
Pennsylvania State University, 1987).

28 Cotton, Way of Life, 5.

29 For Joseph Swetnam's statement, see Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel
(New York, 1984), 2. Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, As it
is an Effect of Nature: but is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or
Diabolical Possession (London, 1655), 119. See also Cohen, God Caress, 39.

30 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book. Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered.
Directing Childbearing Women how to Behave Themselves In their Conception,
Breeding, Beating, and Nursing of Children (London, 1671), 250; Cotton Mather,
The Angel of Bethesda (1725; Barre, Mass., 1972), 233. It is estimated that one
woman died for every 150 births until as late as 1930. Today one woman dies for
every 10,000 births. See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "'The Living Mother of a Living
Child': Midwifery and Mortality in Post-Revolutionary New England," William and
Mary Quarterly, 46 (Jan. 1989), 27-48. See also Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A
Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New
York, 1990).

31 Lawson, Christ's Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan's Malignity, 27.

32 Adams, Necessity of the Pouring Out of the Spirit, 10.

33 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers:
Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of
1692 (3 vols., New York, 1977), I, 57, 135. The quoted indictment is found in most
of the trials.

34 Ibid., I, 149, II, 374.

35 Ibid., II, 483, III, 797.

36 Ibid., 1, 139, 141, 60. As far as we know, no one actually signed a devil's book
in blood. Indeed, modern historians can hardly entertain such a notion. Yet many
of the accused admitted doing so. See Elizabeth Reis, "Witches, Sinners, and the
Underside of Covenant Theology," Essex Institute Historical Collections, 129 (Jan.
1993), 103-18. Giving oneself "soul and body" did not necessarily have a sexual
meaning, although the devil was considered capable of using the witch's body
sexually.

37 Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Witchcraft Papers, III, 752; John Taylor,
The Witchcraft Delusion in Connecticut, 1647-1697 (New York, 1908), 45. On the
relationship between the humoral theory of medicine and the understanding of
breastfeeding during the colonial period, see Paula A. Treckel, "Breastfeeding and
Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 20
(Summer 1989) 25-51. For the argument that the witch and her imp presented a
perverted picture of human motherhood, see Demos, Entertaining Satan, 179-81.

38 Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Witchcraft Papers, I, 106, 107.

39 Increase Mather, Remarkable Providences Illustrative of the Earlier Days of
American Colonization (Boston, 1684), 124-25.

40 Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Witchcraft Papers, I, 94, II, 562.

41 Ibid., I, 159.

41 Carol Karlsen noticed that 86% of possession cases in colonial New England
involved women but did no explain why. See Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a
Woman, 135.

43 Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Witchcraft Papers, I, 122-23.

44 Ibid., II, 368, I, 190.

45 Ibid., I, 317-18, II, 439. A few men testified to bodily harm. Benjamin Abbott, for
example, suffered a painful sore and was scheduled to have it lanced by a doctor,
but it disappeared when the accused woman, Martha Carrier, was led away by the
constable. See ibid., I, 189.

46 Ibid., I, 301.

47 Ibid., I, 244, III, 848.

48 On the powers that Satan bestowed, see D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits:
Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1981), 9-17. See also Increase Mather,
Clues of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (Boston, 1693); and Increase Mather,
Remarkable Providences.

49 Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Witchcraft Papers, I, 160-78, esp. 160-61.

50 Cotton Mather's suggestion may help explain why more women than men
became church members, especially late in the seventeenth century. See Cotton
Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Boston, 1692); and Benjamin
Colman, The Honour and Happiness of the Vertuous Woman (Boston, 1716).
Bradstreet did not consistently refer to the body as male. In "The Flesh and the
Spirit," she posited the body and the soul as feuding twin sisters. See Hensley,
ed., Works of Anne Bradstreet, 255, 254, 216. On the colonists' attitude toward
illness and prayer, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, 198-210.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited
without permission.