From Suspicion to Verdict: Evidence Governance in Colonial Witchcraft Prosecutions

Abstract

Margaret Jacobs’s letter of 3 January 1693 (preserved in Robert Calef’s later compilation) captures the uncertainty and coercive pressures confronting the accused during New England’s witchcraft crisis. This article reframes colonial witchcraft prosecution as an inquiry into the philosophy of evidence and institutional rationality: how communities under threat interpret misfortune as actionable claims, and how legal procedures stabilize suspicion into verdicts. Moving beyond Salem-centered scholarship that treats 1692 as paradigmatic, the article examines a wider colonial landscape and argues that witchcraft functioned as a gendered explanatory idiom through which illness, adversity, conflict, and misfortune were moralized and attributed to supernatural agency. While accusations disproportionately targeted women and proceedings often relied on spectral claims and other unstable proof-forms, prosecutions unfolded within distinct provincial legal frameworks. Evidentiary standards, procedural pathways, institutional filtering, and outcomes diverged across colonies and decades, as local institutions mediated wider Atlantic legal and theological currents in determining credibility and admissibility. Bringing less-studied catalysts—fortune-telling and “cunning” practices—into the same analytic frame as war, political instability, clerical influence, and Puritan discipline, the article shows that what mattered was not belief in the abstract but the governance of credibility: whose testimony counted, which inferences were permitted, and how uncertainty was managed (or exploited) as juridical fact.