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processes that adolescents experienced might be common across cultures, the interpretation of this behavior, of course, varies dramatically, as indeed do the socialization goals that parents and community leaders have for children and young people. New England children in religious families, for example, lived in a world with little privacy, one in which conformity to community norms and obedience to parental and adult authority were prized. Historians are not even sure exactly how parents viewed their children. Debates raged in earlier decades about whether parents loved newborns, given the likelihood of early childhood mortality. Did people view childhood as a separate stage from adulthood? The clothing children wore sends a mixed message, since after the age of six children wore diminutive versions of adult garb and were expected to play an active and helpful role in household economies.192 But the anguished comments by parents who lost their children attest to the deep affection they harbored for their young. It was just that despair that brought parents into court, accusing their neighbors of bewitching and killing their children (see document 8).

Possession was not unique to Salem. Indeed, by the time of the Salem outbreak, the symptoms of possession had become common across Europe, where by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it became a “new plague.”193 People who demonstrated a particular set of behaviors were understood by those around them to be possessed. Possessed people spoke out of turn. They profaned the Sabbath, they mocked religious rituals, they could not hear the commands of their elders, they jerked in spasms, they vomited, they lay as if dead. Some possessed people had uncommon knowledge—

generally understanding and sometimes speaking languages that they had never learned, knowing how to find lost items, or guessing the contents of a wallet or box. They had unnatural strength.

These were exactly the symptoms shown by the afflicted in North America, at Salem and beyond. When Elizabeth Knapp started to show symptoms of possession in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1671–1672, she acted unnaturally (see document 17). She shrieked and laughed. She made inappropriate utterances. She confessed to improper feelings—an impulse to murder a child, the desire for money and luxurious garments. She alternated between trances and convulsions. She was one of several young people who were possessed in New England during the last quarter of the century. She was followed by the four Goodwin children in Boston in 1688 and Margaret Rule, also in Boston, in 1693. The possessed frequently fell into trances and experienced heaviness in their limbs. These were behaviors that were easily recognized by contemporaries as possession. There may well have been clinical conditions that affected some possessed people, but to their contemporaries, their behavior conformed to cultural expectations for possession, especially when the behaviors were exhibited by young people, and even more by young women, and so that is what contemporaries believed to be at stake.

During their affliction, the possessed challenged people in authority. They insulted ministers: Knapp called Willard a “blacke roague,” and in Abiquiu Francisca Barela called Fray Toledo a “kid goat mulatto” (see documents 17 and 18). Devils spoke through the possessed and argued with clergy. Their performance, Karlsen suggests, was a power struggle in which the possessed asserted female independence, striking out from their discontent and anger, and the clergy struggled to reinforce gender and religious roles.194 The possessed shrieked invectives and insulted the learned; their contorted limbs and convulsing bodies occupied spaces that the meek and submissive would not claim. Indeed, the case of Elizabeth Knapp offers ample evidence of this discontent, and her ability to command the attention of a minister and other powerful neighbors, especially when Satan spoke through her, suggests the role reversal possession might afford (see document 17).

The possessed even