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students to the historiography of witchcraft—that is, the different ways in which historians have interpreted the subject over time. Scholars who examine witchcraft analyze it through the history of law, medicine, disease, religion, family, community, sexuality, economy, race, psychology, gender, politics, and popular culture. It is a subject characterized by methodological diversity, and thus witchcraft offers an ideal entry into how historians work to understand the past. The primary documents in Section II will encourage students to weigh historians’ interpretations and to develop their own.

Readers are likely to understand the primary sources more easily if they read the introduction first, and indeed the two sections of this volume have been designed to be interdependent. The documents represent an array of source material, including missionary reports, trial transcripts, laws, newspapers, letters, church records, and travel accounts. The documents focus on six core topics: First Impressions, Resistance and the Devil, English Witch Beliefs Cross the Atlantic, New Worlds, Possession, and Outbreaks. The documents delineate a wide variety of perspectives and experiences, although rarely are Indians and Africans and enslaved people able to speak for themselves. Students will have to read closely to get beyond European perceptions and viewpoints, and they will also have to wrestle with some archaic language, especially in some legal documents. While I have made some silent editorial changes, for the most part I have left English spelling unchanged from its original seventeenth-century form. Readers might find it helpful to read documents out loud if the spelling confuses them, and if they do so, they might enjoy imagining how the language sounded to those who heard it centuries ago.

I made extensive use of all facets of the Georgetown University libraries in the course of this project. I am especially grateful to the efficient sleuths in the interlibrary loan office, the invisible people who circulate books so expeditiously around the Washington Research Library Consortium, the solicitous staff at the circulation desk who knew when a book arrived from remote storage or another library on the subject of witchcraft that it was for me, and John Buchtel in Special Collections. David Hagen photographed material from Georgetown’s Special Collections and worked some digital magic on an image from the Library of Congress. I also thank Steven Tabor at the Huntington Library, Anne-Marie Walsh at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Susan Danforth at the John Carter Brown Library, and Mary Haegert and John Overholt at Harvard University for their help with images. Robert D. Martínez gave me permission to use his translation of Fray Toledo’s letter about the possessions at Abiquiu, and I thank him for his generosity. I was fortunate that this project found a home in Rowman and Littlefield’s American Controversies series, and I am grateful to Niels Aaboe, Karen Ackermann, Michelle Cassidy, and especially Elisa Weeks for their assistance. Bill Nelson made the map.

I have picked the brains of many friends and colleagues in the past two years as I worked on this book. I thank Rose Beiler, Judy Bieber, Elaine Crane, Steve Hackel, Cindy Nickerson, Carla Pestana, and Jim Williams for their assistance. In the History Department at Georgetown, one never lacks for patient, helpful, and generous readers. I sometimes wonder how historians in less collegial departments manage to write books. I am grateful to the many colleagues who read the introduction for me. I thank Tommaso Astarita, Katie Benton-Cohen, David Collins, Chandra Manning, Adam Rothman, and John Tutino. I have learned more about witchcraft (and all sorts of other interesting and important things) from Amy Leonard than she can imagine. Special thanks to Karin Wulf (who has been reading my work for twenty years) for her extensive editorial advice. My animal familiars have provided constant companionship. Doug Egerton read drafts of this book with care and enthusiasm and offered many helpful