Primary sources include court depositions as well as excerpts from the diaries and letters of contemporaries. They cover trials for witchcraft, reports of diabolical possessions, suits of defamation, and reports of preternatural events. Each section is preceded by headnotes that describe the case and its background and refer the reader to important secondary interpretations. In his incisive introduction, David D. Hall addresses a wide range of important issues: witchcraft lore, antagonistic social relationships, the vulnerability of women, religious ideologies, popular and learned understandings of witchcraft and the devil, and the role of the legal system. This volume is an extraordinarily significant resource for the study of gender, village politics, religion, and popular culture in seventeenth-century New England.

David D. Hall is Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at the Harvard Divinity School. His books include Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology; Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England; and Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, published by Duke University Press.