Maureen Burgess

The Cup of Ruin and Desolation: Seventeenth-century Witchcraft in the Chesapeake Maureen Burgess

The focus of this research is on seventeenth-century witchcraft in the Chesapeake. To date, there has not been an in depth study witchcraft in the early Southern colonies. Most studies of American colonial witchcraft tend to be either on the 1692 witchcraft hysteria of Salem. While both regions were comprised of English colonies, there were profound differences between the Northern and Southern colonists. These disparities resulted in dramatically different ways each group perceived the nature of witchcraft, and the way they dealt with it. To aid in the understanding of the place of witchcraft in the Southern worldview, the use of the traditional Puritan model of witchcraft as a heresy has been abandoned in favor of an English seventeenth-century model that holds witchcraft as a practice. Because this study covers criminal and civil trials over eighty years, it allows for a tracing of the evolution of the beliefs in the Chesapeake. As the social, political, and economic conditions on the frontier gave way to an emerging gentrified society, witches and their place in the Chesapeake were pushed to the background of a very colorful, eccentric society.