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were an important part of Native American revitalization efforts in the early nineteenth century, when the number of witches killed certainly surpassed the numbers for Salem, although an exact count is impossible to come by. So from a North American perspective, the chronology of Salem does not look too peculiar. Nor, indeed, does the size of the outbreak. It was outnumbered by the outbreak at Abiquiu, in which 176 people were accused.173 Unlike Salem, where the majority of those accused were colonists of English descent and mostly women, the composition of the accused at Abiquiu was varied, and reflects the different nature of witch beliefs and their expression in colonial New Mexico. Of those 176, 67 were of European descent (and of these 31 were women and 36 were men); of the 109 accused Indians, 40 were women and 69 were men.174

Confession

So if Salem’s chronology is in fact not distinctive, and its size is in line with other major outbreaks, what else might turn out to be a shared feature? One of the characteristics that has seemed, at first glance, to be unique to Salem was the propensity of the accused to confess. Certainly, in the context of witchcraft trials within New England, confession was a remarkable feature of the Salem outbreak, before which only four confessions had taken place. At Salem, some fifty people confessed, and most were women (see documents 19, 21, 23, 24).175

Why did women confess? After all, if the confession were not true, then a woman committed the grave sin of lying—and the crime of doing so in court. And yet, especially at Salem, women did confess. The historian Elizabeth Reis argues that women in the strict Puritan religious culture of seventeenth-century New England were likely to think about even the most ordinary sins—envious thoughts, greed, or discontent—as renunciations of God, and thus as an unspoken, implicit, pact with the Devil. Women spoke and thought about their sins—and their sinful nature, which any devout Puritan accepted as an inherent feature—differently from men. In conversion narratives, for example, in which men and women explained why they deserved church membership, women recalled their despicable and sinful nature, while men explored specific peccadilloes—whether gambling or drinking. Reis proposes that these different ways in which men and women thought about their conduct suggests that men believed their sins could be cast aside, while women thought of their sins as internal to their nature. These beliefs played themselves out in confessions to witchcraft. If, that is, women believed that they were almost by nature sinful, then they could be persuaded by the accumulated testimony of their neighbors that they had, perhaps, made a pact with the Devil. Perhaps their sinful thoughts, their envy, their anger, had turned them into Satan’s allies. Perhaps they were witches.176

It was not enough, however, to confess; judges had to be prepared to accept confessions, and here gender roles and Puritan theology played a role. Justices in New England believed these confessions, in part because the exemplary Puritan woman was one who made a confession, who showed a contrite nature and accepted responsibilities for her deviant and sinful ways. By confessing, she modeled redemption for the whole community. Moreover, who was not tainted by sin? This certainty snared Rebecca Nurse at Salem. She denied being a witch and denied having signed a pact with the Devil. But like everyone else, she believed in witches, and she knew that something was terribly wrong with the possessed victims who writhed in court, fighting off pinches and pricks and stabbing pains and struggling to control their speech. And when Nurse, a church member and prominent resident of Salem Village for decades, wondered how she ended up in the terrible plight of being accused of being a witch, she queried “what sine hath god found out in me unrepented of” that she should be so singled out?177 Indeed, what sin? The magistrates agreed—even if they doubted her satanic pact. She was hanged on July 19 with four other