Mary Beth Norton

The Ablest Midwife That Wee Knowe in the Land: Mistress Alice Tilly and the Women of Boston and Dorchester, 1649-1650

I N the spring of i649, the Massachusetts Bay Colonys Court of Assistants tried, convicted, and imprisoned Mistress Alice Tilly, a prominent Boston midwife. During the course of the legal proceedings, which lasted for over a year, large groups of women submitted six petitions on her behalf, causing the authorities to modify their initial negative judgment. What offense had Alice Tilly committed? On what evidence was she convicted? Neither of those questions can be definitively answered because the courts records for the years between i644 and i673 are lost. Consequently, the outlines of the story of Mistress Tilly and her many female supporters must be pieced together from fragments. The most important sources are located in the Massachusetts State Archives: a deposition (the only dated manuscript); a brief petition from a small group of men and women asking the authorities two questions about the case; and five longer petitions presented to either the General Court or the Court of Assistants by Mistress Tillys devotees. A total of 217 women, drawn largely from Boston and Dorchester, contributed 294 signatures to the six petitions. Those documents are printed here, followed by a combined, alphabetized list of signers. The episode is worth reconstructing in as much detail as possible because the petitions drafted in i649 and i650 represent American womens first collective political action-by far the largest such group activity undertaken prior to the creation of the Philadelphia Ladies Association in the sum-

Essex County Witchcraft

SALEM witchcraft is, in a word, bewitching. No one knows that better than Bernard Rosenthal, a professor of American literature, who set out in the 1980s to write a book about the events that inspired so many authors of fiction and who, more than two decades later, is still involved with the subject as the general editor of the forth coming Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Or take me, for example. As part of a larger project on the relationship between women and the pub lic realm in early America, I decided in the mid-1990s to tackle the witchcraft crisis, in which women took such a prominent public role. More than five years after publication of In the Devils Snare, I am still writing, teaching, and speaking about the topic. And it is not just schol ars who are intrigued. I have learned to expect self-identified witch descendants in nearly every audience I address, and many people with no familial connections to Salem witchcraft appear just as interested in the subject.1 Historians of Salem witchcraft, whether or not they agree with the interpretation in Salem Possessed, owe a great debt of gratitude to Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. Their 1974 book sets forth what has continued to this day to be the prevailing interpretation of the events in 1692 Salem Village. Only time will tell how historians will react to this