The Witches: Salem, 1692 - novelonlinefull.com
You’re read light novel The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 10 online at NovelOnlineFull.com. Please use the follow button to get notification about the latest chapter next time when you visit NovelOnlineFull.com. Use F11 button to read novel in full-screen(PC only). Drop by anytime you want to read free – fast – latest novel. It’s great if you could leave a comment, share your opinion about the new chapters, new novel with others on the internet. We’ll do our best to bring you the finest, latest novel everyday. Enjoy
Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford, 1986.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Penguin, 1991.
Thompson, Roger. The Witches of Salem. London: Folio Society, 1982.
Trask, Richard B. "The Devil Hath Been Raised": A Doc.u.mentary History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Outbreak of March 1692. Danvers, MA: Yeoman, 1997.
Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft. 1867. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000.
Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ma.s.sachusetts. Amherst: University of Ma.s.sachusetts Press, 1984.
Notes.
Three centuries of doc.u.mentation can add up to as many pages of source notes. Volumes that have shaped the text as a whole or that I have consulted regularly appear in the selected bibliography; they are cited below by author's last name and abbreviated t.i.tle. Most accounts of 1692 have been printed and reprinted; I have tried to note them in their most readily accessible editions. The supporting seventeenth-century texts are available on Cornell University Library's Witchcraft Collection website; most sermons are online; the bulk of the original Salem doc.u.mentation can be found at the University of Virginia's excellent Salem witch trials website. Princ.i.p.al sources-like the magisterial 2009 Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, which for the first time offers up the extant record chronologically, lending the hunt its shape-are rendered as follows: B&N Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Doc.u.mentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England Burr Narratives of the New England Witchcraft Cases CM Diary Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather Magnalia Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana MP Mather, Memorable Providences WOW Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World IP Mather, Ill.u.s.trious Providences JH John Hale: A Man Beset by Witches SPN Cooper and Minkema, eds., The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris RFQC The Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Ess.e.x County R Rosenthal et al., eds., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt SS Diary Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall Sibley Sibley's Harvard Graduates EIHC Ess.e.x Inst.i.tute Historical Collections Thomas Putnam-among the most prolific court reporters but by no means the most creative-alternately wrote "witch" and "wicth." An apparition was an "apperishtion," a "daughter" a "dafter," "melancholy" was "malloncely." For readability's sake I have modernized spellings and taken occasional liberties with punctuation. All proper names conform to the spellings in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. John Hale, Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, and Samuel Parris are abbreviated as JH, CM, IM, and SP; NE is New England. Names of princ.i.p.al archives appear as follows: MHS Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society AAS American Antiquarian Society DAC Danvers Archival Center, Peabody Inst.i.tute Library NEHGS New England Historic Genealogical Society PEM Phillips Library, Peabody Ess.e.x Museum PRO Public Records Office, Kew
I: THE DISEASES OF ASTONISHMENT.
"We will declare": Anton Chekhov, Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 8.
voodoo arrived later: The nineteenth-century historian was Charles W. Upham. For t.i.tuba and the voodoo, Bernard Rosenthal, "t.i.tuba," OAH Magazine of History (July 2003), 4850; Rosenthal, Salem Story, 1031; Rosenthal, "t.i.tuba's Story," New England Quarterly (June 1998): 190203. On the educational eminence of Ma.s.sachusetts: Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 207. Gretchen Adams makes the fine point that the South supplied the witch-burning in the contentious 1850s: The Specter of Salem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9596.
exact number: It is elusive, given mistaken ident.i.ties and impartial records. Boyer and Nissenbaum, in Salem Possessed, put it at 141; Rosenthal, Salem Story, at 156; Emerson W. Baker, in A Storm of Witchcraft (New York: Oxford, 2015), at 169 or 172; Koehler, Search for Power, at 204. A contemporaneous account indicates that more than two hundred were accused. If so, far more doc.u.mentation has been lost than we realize.
a careful chronicler: Magnalia, 2: 411. It may have been a printer's error.
Might you be a witch: R, 392; the guilty innocent, R, 145.
Nearly as many theories: Scholars have weighed in from every discipline. In lieu of a complete bibliography and among the best overviews of the immense literature: John Demos, The Enemy Within, 189215; David D. Hall, "Witchcraft and the Literature of Interpretation," New England Quarterly (June 1985): 25381; John M. Murrin, "The Infernal Conspiracy of Indians and Grandmothers," Reviews in American History (December 2003): 48594; Trask, "The Devil Hath Been Raised," x. For generational hostility, Demos, Entertaining Salem; for regional difference and ethnic hostility, Elinor Abbot, Our Company Increases Apace (Dallas: SIL International, 2007), and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (New York: Harper, 1996); for economic hostility, Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed; for residual, imported regional hostility, Cedric B. Cowing, The Saving Remnant (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); for s.e.xual hostility, Koehler, Search for Power; for an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica, Laurie Winn Carlson, A Fever in Salem (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); for ergot, Linda R. Caporael, "Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?," Science 192 (April 1976): 2126; for ecclesiastical strains, Richard Latner, "'Here Are No Newters': Witchcraft and Religious Discord in Salem Village and Andover," New England Quarterly (March 2006): 92122. Benjamin C. Ray debunks the neat east-west split conceived by Boyer and Nissenbaum in Salem Possessed in his "The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village," William and Mary Quarterly 65 (July 2008): 44978. On taxes: Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama, "Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France," MPRA, working paper no. 34266, October 2011; conspiracy, Enders A. Robinson, The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692 (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991). Emily Oster makes a case that frantic witch-hunting coincides with a little ice age in "Witchcraft, Weather, and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe," Journal of Economic Perspectives 18 (Winter 2004): 21528; the atmospheric conditions are from James Sullivan, The History of the District of Maine (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1795), 212. Ask today's female reenactors at Plimoth Plantation what they consider the most punishing month of the year; without hesitation, they will say February.
"There are departments": Chadwick Hansen, "Andover Witchcraft and the Causes of the Salem Witchcraft Trials," in The Occult in America, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1983), 53.
"with more purity": Nicholas Noyes, New-England's Duty and Interest to Be an Habitation of Justice and Mountain of Holiness (Boston, 1698).
"New English Israel": CM, Small Offers Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (Boston, 1689).
what offended them: The "resistance to something" trope is from Henry Adams. See Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 312.
"neither drive a bargain": Edward J. Ward, Boston in 1682 and 1699: A Trip to New England (Providence, RI: Club for Colonial Reprints, 1905), 54. Sewall and the courtship: SS Diary, 2: 966. New Hampshire's lieutenant governor: John Usher Papers, Ms. N-2071, 102, MHS. Danforth cites Saint John the Baptist in Roger Thompson, Cambridge Cameos (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2005), 146. The prisoner is from Perley, History of Salem, 3: 186; the killer cat from R, 436; the ax in the hand (testimony in both cases against Susannah Martin) from R, 276.
church went flying: Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 54.
very different dark: No one is better on the subject than A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime (London: Weidenfeld, 2005). I am grateful to John Demos for having called my attention to the book. Also for a sense of the wilderness among modern sources: Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill and w.a.n.g, 1983); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). The rabid hog: R, 359. Very often in the literature New Englanders refer to themselves as "ear-witnesses"; words-and sound-reigned supreme.
agents had stolen them: CM Diary, 1: 17173. Outwitting the devil, he preached without them from memory. It was September 1693; CM had journeyed to Salem in part to see to it "that the complete history of the late witchcrafts and possessions might not be lost."
rest of the Bible intact: John Hull, The Diaries of John Hull (Boston: John Wilson, 1857), 231.
"diseases of astonishment": CM in Burr, 101.
"peevish and touchy": John Bowle, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2: 235. For a fine account of that "restrained hostility," Michael Garibaldi Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 16761703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
venerable Salem minister: John Higginson to his son, August 31, 1692, Fam. Mss. 433, Higginson Family Papers, PEM; Norton, In the Devil's Snare, 13, maintains that SP burned his notes.
"a very wicked, spiteful manner": R, 127. On the multiply auth.o.r.ed testimonies and records, their transcriptions and lacunae, see especially Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London: Routledge, 1999); Peter Grund's superb "From Tongue to Text: The Transmission of the Salem Witchcraft Records," American Speech 82 (Summer 2007): 11950; Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012), in particular essays by Matti Peikola, Matti Rissanen, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka; Grund et al., "Editing the Salem Witchcraft Records: An Exploration of a Linguistic Treasury," American Speech 79 (Summer 2004): 14667; Grund, "The Anatomy of Correction," Studia Neophilologica 79 (2007): 314.
"I will tell": R, 19697.
minister at odds: Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston: B. Green, 1726), 627.
II. THAT OLD DELUDER.
For the best portraits of the uncomfortable edge on which the Puritan lived: David D. Hall, "The Mental World of Samuel Sewall," Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 92 (1980), 2144; Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization: From England to America in the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon, 1959); Eve LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall (New York: Harper, 2007); Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather; Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the G.o.dly (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). For the dark, the cold, and the external climate: Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness; Ekirch, At Day's Close. For the liturgical details, Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). No one has ransacked the historical record for the texture of day-to-day life better (if with less notation) than Alice Morse Earle in her various works. See also George Francis Dow, "Domestic Life in New England in the Seventeenth Century," Topsfield Historical Collections 29 (1928); Jonathan L. Fairbanks, ed., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982); Roger Thompson, s.e.x in Middles.e.x: Popular Mores in a Ma.s.sachusetts County, 16491699 (Amherst: University of Ma.s.sachusetts Press, 1986); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives (New York: Vintage, 1991); and Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill. For the lay of the land, Katherine Alysia Grandjean, "Reckoning: The Communications Frontier in Early New England" (PhD diss., Harvard, 2008). The sound: Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). To Danvers town archivist Richard B. Trask, I owe countless other details.
"But who can tell": CM Diary, 1: 144.
Skimming groves: The flight is reconstructed from Foster and Carrier's testimony and that of their children and grandchildren: R, 46775; Hale in Burr, 418; WOW, 158. The landscape derives from Cronon, Changes in the Land, 2231; Joshua Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting of the Ma.s.sachusetts Colony, Anno 1628 (Boston, 1694); Hull, Diaries, 225; interviews with Richard Trask, November 28, 2012, and February 8, 2015. Glanvill reprinted the Swedish crash from Anthony Horneck, An Account of What Happened in the Kingdom of Sweden (London: St. Lownds, 1682), 10. Charles MacKay, The Witch Mania (extracted from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds [London, 1841]), 550, adds the tremendous height. On Andover and the Scots, Abbot, Our Company. The impa.s.sable path: RFQC, 9: 69.
Sound echoed: For the eerie quiet, Ekirch, At Day's Close. The beaver's tail is from John Giles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc. in the Captivity of John Giles (Cincinnati: Spiller and Gates, 1869), 40; "hideous noise with roaring": John Josselyn, New-England's Rarities (Boston: William Veazie, 1865), 48; screech of the crowd, SS Diary, 1: 509; flock of pigeons, CM in Silverman, Selected Letters, 34. Josselyn reported they were so thick they could obscure the sun. The freakish bellow: SS Diary, 1: 288; crack of timber, Gildrie, The Profane, xi; RFQC, 9: 58084; tortoises propagating: Giles, Memoirs, 42.
phantom Frenchmen: Magnalia, 2: 53740. See also Marshall W. S. Swan, "The Bedevilment of Cape Ann," EIHC 117 (July 1981): 15377.
glow-in-the-dark jellyfish: R, 244; moved the landmarks: R, 25859; a saucer: R, 412; the broom: R, 409.
lame Indian: SS Diary, 2: 750. The blinking went both ways. CM claimed that when Indians first saw a man on horseback, they took the "man and the horse to be one creature"; MP, 7.
The Sewall incident: SS Diary, 1: 331. Baxter had long before noted that lightning more often struck churches than castles, an observation to which CM would refer in A Midnight Cry (Boston, 1692). He insisted on its preference for ministers' homes in Magnalia, 2: 313.
"Horrid sorcerers": Magnalia, 2: 537. Four armed Indians: RFQC, 4: 230. House in ashes: Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 16751699 (1913; repr., New York: Barnes and n.o.ble, 1959), 83.
"It is harder to find": Magnalia, 2: 515.
"Our men could see": Daniel Gookin, cited in Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 207. Ess.e.x County suffered proportionately more casualties than the rest of the colony. "I believe no town in this province has suffered more by the war than Salem," John Higginson Jr. wrote his brother in 1697; Higginson Family Papers, MHS Collections, 1838, 202. For King Philip's War, see Jill Lepore's superb The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Ident.i.ty (New York: Vintage, 1999).
devastating raids: See Emerson W. Baker and James Kences's fine "Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Ess.e.x County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692," Maine History 40 (Fall 2001): 15989. Casualties on the other side were yet more dreadful. By the best estimates, the Indian population of NE numbered around 100,000 in 1600. By the century's end-with some 90,000 Englishmen in America-it had fallen to about 10,000.
"The whole race": John Dunton, John Dunton's Letters from New England (Boston: Prince Society, 1867), 293.
"I Stand Here": RFQC, 5: 290.
murderer repented: Hugh Stone in Magnalia, 2: 35662.
"spread the distemper": Cited in Karlsen, The Devil, 100; earlier suspicions of Carrier, R, 734.
late January: t.i.tuba testified on March 2, 1692, that the enchantment had begun just over six weeks earlier; R, 135.
"invisible agents": JH in Burr, 413. JH reported the symptoms conformed exactly to those of the Goodwins; CM makes them more acute in Magnalia, 2: 409.
"foolish, ridiculous speeches": Robert Calef in Burr, 342.
"exemplary temper" to "intolerable anguish": Magnalia, 2: 396403. Such epidemics had broken out at least three times previously; Koehler, Search for Power, 175. Since CM had set down the Goodwin history, another case of witchcraft had emerged. The Goodwin children had also relapsed. The "aerial steed": MP, 29. "Grievous fits" were not uncommon: see RFQC, 3: 54, and Demos, Entertaining Salem, 16672; they were a.s.sumed to be sent by the devil. According to Joshua Moody, both Glover women were accused and jailed; letter to IM, MHS. The convicted Glover appears to have been Mary; Ma.s.sachusetts Archive Series, vol. 35, 9596, 254, Ma.s.sachusetts State Archives.
"agitations, writhings": Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (London: Felix Kyngston, 1629), 45.
knitting, spooling: For Puritan ch.o.r.es, see Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days (Stockbridge, MA: Berkshire House, 1993); David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America (New York: Harper and Row, 2003).
Others allotted: "Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard," Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 5 (1836), 187. SP would not be remembered today for his sermons alone.
In a Connecticut case: See Richard G.o.dbeer's concise and elegant Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25. In a post-Salem case CM too made a point of rounding up "disinterested witnesses." For how seldom the sick were left alone, see for example Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS. On sickbeds, Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 197.
"odd postures": Calef in Burr, 242. CM noted that as many as fifty observers gathered around Mercy Short in 1693. The prayer and psalms, CM in Burr, 276.
"perniciously bad": Sanford J. Fox, Science and Justice: The Ma.s.sachusetts Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 55. There were "wise, tender, and faithful" physicians, but they were physicians of the soul; doctors had often trained for the ministry.
basic medical kit: Harriet S. Tapley, "Early Physicians of Danvers," Historical Collections of the Danvers Historical Society 4 (1916): 7388. The hedgehog fat is from Lawrence Hammond, Diary Kept by Captain Lawrence Hammond, 16771694 (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1892). For the raw state of medicine: George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1935), 17498; Patricia A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); and "Z. Endicott Book of Remedies," Frederick Lewis Gay Papers, Ms. N-2013, MHS.
William Griggs: See Anthony S. Patton, "The Witch Doctor," Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin (Winter 1999): 3439. See also Robinson, The Devil Discovered, 11718.
"Am I bewitched": Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (Boston, 1656), 120.
seizing, strangled Groton girl: Samuel Willard, "Samuel Willard's Account of the Strange Case of Elizabeth Knapp in Groton," Mather Papers, MHS.
"evil hand": JH in Burr, 413.
witchcraft versus possession: Mather on the affinity, Burr, 136; "It is an ordinary thing," David C. Brown, "The Salem Witchcraft Trials: Samuel Willard's Some Miscellany Observations," EIHC 122 (1986): 228. IM in IP, 198, a.s.serted that you could suffer the two simultaneously. David Harley, "Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession," American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 30730, is best on the subject; as he notes, "New England at this time had no tradition of demonic possession" (313). Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (Boston, 1678), listed seven signs of bewitchment; IM offered six of possession. They overlap. Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle, in "Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England," Journal of British Studies 47 (October 2008): 73867, note that the symptoms are identical.
"angry and sending" to "spiritual enemies": SPN, 18890.
"I am a man": CM Diary, 1: 471.
"If we want" and "den for devils": Goodwin in Burr, 131; "school of piety": CM Diary, 2: 265.
the concoction: John resorted to an old English recipe cited in previous cases on both sides of the Atlantic (and explicitly denounced by IM in IP). See Roger Thompson, "Salem Revisited," Journal of American Studies 6 (December 1972): 332. A variation on the experiment would come up again in Salem testimony, R, 318 (in that version, the healer suggested you would find the witch dead the next morning). SP was explicit; the idea was Sibley's and the execution John's. He had no reason to minimize t.i.tuba's role, especially as she was at the time he discussed the incident already in prison. She nonetheless comes down to us as a witch-cake baker, beginning with JH in Burr, 413, and Lawson in Burr, 162. JH either misremembered or elicited some information from t.i.tuba on his own; see JH, 44. SP would later apologize for the behavior of his servants-plural.
"going to the devil": Parris in B&N, 278; "she has done": SP in the church record book for March 27.
town of Salem: See Richard Trask's invaluable "The Devil Amongst Us: A History of the Salem Village Parsonage," Danvers Historical Society (1971): 112; Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, 16261683: A Covenant Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975); and Gildrie, "Salem Society and Politics in the 1680s," EIHC 114 (October 1978): 185206. There is much granular detail in the Higginson Family letters, MHS, 1838.
"in a wilderness" to "have been absent": B&N, 22931. The pet.i.tion dates from 1667.
"not seldom great": SPN, 184. For CM's twist, CM Diary, 2: 581.
Bayley meanwhile filed a slander suit: RFQC, 7: 24849.
"that in case any difference": Salem Village Book of Transactions, November 25, 1680, DAC. See Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 18794, on the rise of contractualism in ministers' contracts.
John Putnam had lent Burroughs funds: RFQC, 9: 3032, 4749. "When brother": B&N, 171; see also Perley, History of Salem, vol. 2, 172. Burroughs was not alone in borrowing money from the congregants who elected not to pay him.
"given to G.o.d": Lawson, October 6, 1713, Ms. Rawlinson, D839, Bodleian Library. There is no record of Lawson's having studied at or graduated from Cambridge, Oxford, or Trinity College, Dublin, although he claimed he had attended Cambridge, the center of Puritan learning. I am grateful to Suzanne M. Stewart of the NEHGS and Tim Wales in England for extensive Lawson research. For his turns of phrase, see May 22, 1680, Ma.s.sachusetts Archives Collections, vol. 39, 658, Ma.s.sachusetts State Archives. "G.o.d is not moved": Lawson, The Duty and Property of a Religious Householder (Boston, 1692). See also Charles Edward Banks, The History of Martha's Vineyard (Boston: George H. Dean, 1911), vol. 2, 14950.
"uncharitable expressions" to "If you will unreasonably": B&N, 34445.
pastor and flock: Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 332.
warming pan: RFQC, 9: 448.
the Topsfield-Ipswich line: See George Francis Dow, History of Topsfield, Ma.s.sachusetts (Topsfield, MA: Topsfield Historical Society, 1940), 32030.
the demoralized clergy: Willard to IM, July 10, 1688, MHS; cheating and starving: CM, "New England's Choicest Blessing," 1679, 8; CM, "A Monitory Letter Concerning the Maintenance of an Able and Faithful Ministry, 1700; Konig, Law and Society, 98108.
Harvard tuition: Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 1: 1036.
"Are you, sir, the parson": From Claude M. Fuess, Andover: Symbol of New England (Andover, MA: Andover Historical Society, 1959), 105. Hall, Faithful Shepherd, thinks the story apocryphal. The sentiment was very real.
"some nebulous and distant": Gildrie, The Profane, 148. Also on the ministers' maintenance, see Samuel Swett Green, The Use of the Voluntary System in the Maintenance of Ministers (Worcester, MA: Charles Hamilton, 1886).
"that might render": CM Diary, 1: 351.
"sit and sleep": IM, "Practical Truths Tending to Promote the Power of G.o.dliness," 1682.
"useless whispering" and "unnecessary gazing": SPN, 290.
hours of sermons: Stout, New England Soul, 4. Stout estimates the average to have been 7000 sermons in a lifetime, for 15,000 listening hours.
On Parris: See Gragg, Quest for Security, and Gragg, "The Barbados Connection," New England Historical and Genealogical Record 140 (April 1986): 99113; Gragg, "Samuel Parris: Portrait of a Puritan Clergyman," EIHC 119 (October 1983): 20937. For the economic climate, Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964); Richard S. Dunn, "The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America," William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969): 330. In fairness, Parris's timing was lousy. The Barbados years were ones of devastating weather and, at the end of his stay, a smallpox epidemic. NE trade was next to impossible under Andros, who had strangled it with strict enforcement of the Navigation Acts. Interviews with David Hall, November 29, 2012, and September 21, 2013.