Witchcraft in Early North America (review)

No undergraduate course in American history can avoid the 1692 crisis at Salem, yet the semester demands of periodization often preclude the investigation of legal, linguistic, and social shifts in early modern Europe's haphazard patchwork of witchcraft trials that might shed light on the crisis. Salem's late entry into witch hunts is therefore something of a chore for those teaching American history, requiring a great deal of contextual explanation, which takes time away from investigation of other colonial American developments. In such a situation, American historians usually give short shrift to Salem as an extrusion of the medieval bizarre into an otherwise sensible American story.

Allison Games's Witchcraft in Early North America aims to change this state of affairs: witchcraft can instead serve as an introduction to the complexities of American history, including the history of slaves, Native Americans, and Atlantic empires. Intended as an undergraduate primer on witchcraft, Witchcraft consists of about ninety pages of contextual and explanatory essay, followed by twenty-nine primary-source documents. Games takes witchcraft as a lens through which "to explore the colonial encounters and occupations that transformed much of the continent." In order to do so, she suggests a reperiodization and a new geographic focus for Salem. North America, Games argues, had its own era of "witch hunting," from 1616 to 1806, and extending from Mexico to Quebec. According to Games, this periodization places Salem in the center of a story with several points of North American interest. The result is a text that manages to cover colonial regions and polities (Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean) often included in American history surveys, while avoiding deep investigations of areas (France, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire) often excluded from those surveys.

This intriguing thesis, however, fails to surmount some obvious hurdles. Games assumes, for instance, that "North America" is a useful and relevant geographic category for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the author's insistence that the text will "pay attention to difference," Witchcraft repeatedly skims over the differences of culture and geography in its effort to argue for a North American vision of witchcraft. In the most egregious example, the book invites students to compare differences and similarities in "Indian" beliefs in documents from 1616 and 1812—despite the fact that the former document derives from the Pueblo and the latter from the renegade Shawnee Tenskwatawa. Games also shifts freely between time periods to make her comparisons; in one extreme example, she moves from 1629 to 1733 to 1631 to 1708 in the course of three pages.

Moreover, the book never justifies its novel periodization. It concludes with the Delaware witch hunts of 1806, but the text acknowledges that similar witch trials continued under Native American legal jurisdictions through at least 1821 in the eastern states, and through 1900 in the west. Witchcraft and spell casting remained a going concern in the American slave community for decades after 1806. Denmark Vesey employed a necromancer in his 1822 rebellion, and Nat Turner was accused of soliciting witch doctors in his 1831 attempt. Neither man is mentioned in the text. Indeed, while Witchcraft promises to cover the magical beliefs of Africans in the Americas, that area of investigation occupies a scant ten pages, much of which is devoted to the cases of poisoning, a practice with an unclear relationship to witchcraft in the slave community. The practices of hoodoo and conjure—with potentially stronger relationships to spell casting and witchcraft—receive one paragraph, approximately the same space Games allots to discussing the witchcraft beliefs of Sarah Palin and Pat Robertson. Indeed, Robertson's 2010 comments on the diabolical origins of Haiti's recent earthquake is the only mention of Haiti in the volume. This lacuna is all the more surprising given that Games does pull examples from Barbados and Brazil in her search for African-American magical practices. Looking in the opposite direction, why does Games pass over Moctezuma's slaughter of suspected witches' families in...