Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Paul B. Moyer (review)

What if we attempted to understand the nature and contexts of witchcraft accusations in colonial New England outside of Salem? Paul B. Moyer's Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World places what the book defines more broadly as "occult crime" in a transatlantic context and focuses exclusively on the period before 1670. Stopping twenty-two years prior to the infamously exceptional witchcraft crisis in Essex county, Detestable and Wicked Arts looks across to England, and occasionally Bermuda, rather than forward to Salem for comparison and context. As a result, the book offers a detailed accounting of the first half century of reported incidents of witchcraft across colonial New England, proceeding methodically to present an overview of who the witches and their accusers were, of what precisely they were accused, and how the law handled these reports. The book's frequent deployment of statistics—often putting demographic details about the accused in New England next to their contemporaries in England—is particularly helpful in making the book a resource for anyone interested in witchcraft in this distinctive time and place. Most of the time, as the book freely admits, the charts show that New England was not, in fact, all that distinctive but expressed many of the same fears and beliefs in many of the same ways as metropolitan communities. Occasionally, this transatlantic framework yields insights about, for example, the sources on which the New England Puritans were relying to understand and prosecute witchcraft. The book explains "the paucity of testimony concerning witch flight," for example, by the "more conservative stance" of the Protestant sources on the subject that New Englanders "imbibed" relative to continental sources. Similarly noteworthy, Moyer shows that husband and wife pairs were far more likely to be accused together in New England than anywhere else around the Atlantic and that, curiously, the "relative lack of children" of these married pairs of accused "[stands] out." Also, in this pre-Salem period, when compared with England and other colonies "New Englanders did not generally suspect the young as witches . . . or imagine the existence of witch families."

Throughout, the book's discussions are accompanied by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century woodcut illustrations taken from English and continental sources on witchcraft, vivifying the ways that these figures and their malefic acts may have manifested in popular conceptions at the time. By compiling a comprehensive array of sources, data, and images from across these five decades, Detestable and Wicked Arts offers, like Moyer's previous books, a broad and multilayered portrait of the beliefs and practices of everyday settler colonists, shifting focus almost entirely away from colonial leaders, judges, printers, ministers, or other policymakers. Readers of a wide array of backgrounds who want to know who a New England witch was likely to be in the eyes of their peers or what they might be accused of—infesting their neighbor's cheese with maggots more often than flying by night to a large Satanic meeting, for example—will be provoked, intrigued, and entertained thanks to the book's uncomplicated prose and hospitable structure.

The final two chapters are the strongest, and likely the most useful to those interested in witch-hunting across a wide array of time periods and locations. The book's sixth chapter, "Very Awful and Amazing," focuses in depth on how the Hartford witch hunt of 1662–1663, the largest in New England prior to Salem, spun out from the sudden sickening and death of a child from a humble family to ensnare many victims across the community, ultimately resulting in fourteen accusations and four executions. The transatlantic focus is particularly helpful here in placing this hunt in the context of others in East Anglia and Bermuda and pointing out the...