In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton Page A

room for challenge if a physician rendered such a verdict and thus lent credibility to accusers, as Dr. Griggs did in Salem Village. Then, too, Bernard’s “presumptions,” especially those involving spectral visions, were difficult to interpret; indeed, any of the indicators he listed could be read either restrictively or expansively. A prime example lay in his treatment of the question that would eventually be of great significance in the 1692 crisis: Could Satan send the apparition of an innocent person to someone he afflicted? The apparition of
any
innocent person? Even Bernard’s careful language on that matter, quoted above, implied through omission that a regenerate (church member) innocent could not be so represented by the devil, thereby suggesting that a specter of such a person could infallibly reveal guilt. In short, despite the existence of Bernard’s lengthy treatise and other similar works, people wishing to investigate witchcraft accusations had to confront many questions for which the answers remained unclear.
    Affliction stories aroused great interest among seventeenth-century clergymen and the general public, often finding their way into print. Accordingly, many published accounts of the agonies experienced by young people in the relatively recent past, and of the ways in which those torments had been handled by legal and clerical authorities, were available to the adult men and women who confronted the challenge posed by the “strange fits” of the suffering youths in Salem Village. Such narratives joined the works by authors such as Bernard in providing New Englanders with guides for handling the afflicted.
    In the 1680s Increase and Cotton Mather, father and son clerics, both published compilations of witchcraft cases, most of them from New England. The books, which recounted tales of affliction and malefic bewitchment, constituted the Mathers’ contribution to a contemporary English debate over the existence and nature of witchcraft, a debate with no colonial counterpart. The Reverend Increase Mather’s
An Essay for the Recording of
Illustrious Providences
(1684) revealed to the world the story of Ann Cole and the Hartford outbreak of 1662, along with other cases such as that of John Stiles, a young Newbury boy who had fits in late 1679. Stiles, like the later Salem afflicted, complained of pinching and pricking sensations, experienced unusual bodily motions, and occasionally fell into swoons. The elder Mather also described the possession of Elizabeth Knapp, a sixteen-year-old servant of the Reverend Samuel Willard, in Groton, Massachusetts. Knapp had fits for about three months in the late fall and early winter of 1671–1672; she moved in peculiar ways, shrieked loudly, and was often struck dumb. Cotton Mather’s
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
(1689) added another tale of a tormented young person, whom he identified as a boy from Tocutt (Branford), Connecticut. He had found the account (possibly thirty years old) among the papers of one of his grandfathers, Mather indicated; it again described a youth troubled for months by fits that caused him to move and speak strangely. 53
    The stories of Elizabeth Knapp and the Tocutt boy are useful to examine in greater detail because of their differences from the later Essex County cases. Most important, neither led to a prosecution; they were both handled entirely by ministers. Indeed, the Tocutt boy never accused anyone of bewitching him, for his was a classic instance of possession by Satan. He, the son of a “godly Minister,” carried on long conversations with the devil in his fits. Satan promised that “he should live deliciously, and have Ease, Comfort, and Money” if he would enter into a diabolic covenant. When the boy refused to succumb to such temptations, “the Devil took a corporal Possession of him,” tormented him “extremely,” and answered those who thereafter spoke to the boy, barking or hissing