Dangerous expectations: uncovering what triggered the hunt for witches in seventeenth-century New England

Abstract

In voyaging to the New World, European colonists found a world that was unlike anything they believed they would experience, and they struggled to implement their familiar political, social, and religious structures in their new colonies. The gap between colonists' expectations and the New World they actually found sparked the occurrence of witch hunts in colonial New England during the seventeenth century. This thesis works to reinterpret and bridge the gap between two well-developed historiographies of witchcraft. Although historians tend to study witchcraft in the Old World and in New England separately and depict them differently, they are closely related. Witchcraft in the Old World changed and evolved into what we recognize as witchcraft in New England. They provide a continuous narrative.