[HPforGrownups] Re: JKR...HP and world events

[MadameSSnape at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 165927

 
In a message dated 3/8/2007 9:37:59 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
bartl at sprynet.com writes:

I  doubt anybody bragged about being a witch.


-------------------------
Sherrie here:
 
Actually, there were at least two who did that we have record of.  One  was 
Dorcas Good, daughter of Sarah Good, one of the first accused;  though Dorcas' 
bragging didn't come til she confessed and testified  against her mother in 
court.  (She was five at the time, and her  father later sued because she was 
never right in the head after her release from  prison.)
 
The other was Abigail Hobbes, a teenage girl who boasted to friends that  she 
had "sold herself body and soul to the Old Boy" and that she had "seen the  
Devil and made a covenant with him."  (Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem,  pp. 
63-64.)  (Arthur Miller took a bit of Hobbes when he created his  character for 
Abigail Williams in The Crucible, IMHO.  It's  certainly NOT the historical 
Williams!)
 
Tituba, the Carib Indian slave whose entertainment of the girls with  
fortune-telling triggered the troubles, also speaks freely of the  "Black Man" (a 
Puritan euphemism for the Devil) in her confessions and  testimony.  
 
No, it wasn't The Thing To Do Around Salem in 1692 - but it did  happen.
 
Sherrie
(who started reading about Salem in 6th grade, & just happened to be  going 
back over all this in preparing a director's proposal for The  Crucible...)
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