The Vagaries of Manuscripts from the Salem Witch Trials: An Edition of Four (Re-)Discovered Documents from the Case Against Margaret Scott of Rowley

Abstract

Rich documentary evidence survives from the witch trials in Salem, MA, in 1692–1693. We have at our disposal about 1,000 documents, including witness depositions, indictments, warrants, letters of restitution, and records of pretrial hearings (see RSWH). At the same time, it is clear from the extant body of texts that a substantial number of additional documents must have existed that no longer survive or whose locations are yet to be determined.1 There are also records that are not extant or have been assumed not to be extant but for which we have evidence in the form of later transcriptions or editions (see e.g. RSWH, nos. 414 and 417). This is the case of four witness depositions pertaining to the case of Margaret Scott of Rowley (for Scott’s case, see Rosenthal 1993: 171; Norton 2002: 254, 276–277, 317; Rice 2005: np). These depositions were transcribed and included in Thomas Gage’s History of Rowley published in 1840. As the original documents had been presumed lost, the new edition of the Salem documents, RSWH, reproduced Gage’s transcriptions (RSWH, nos. 643, 645, 646, 647).2 In the course of our work on the recorders of the documents from the Salem witch trials (about which more below), we rediscovered the original manuscripts of these four depositions in the Boston Public Library (BPL): MS 445. In this article, we provide transcriptions of the depositions together with a commentary on the physical appearance of the documents, their textual characteristics, and their content. We also contextualize the transcriptions by comparing them with those found in Gage (1840). We show that having access to the original documents gives us information that is not retrievable from the edition in Gage (1840), most significantly concerning issues of transmission (including changes in the documents at various stages) and concerning the recorders of the documents.