Early New Englanders used magical techniques to divine the future, to heal the sick, to protect against harm, and to inflict harm. Protestant ministers of the time claimed that religious faith and magical practice were incompatible, and yet, as Richard Godbeer shows in this book, there were significant affinities between the two that enabled layfolk to switch from one to the other without any immediate sense of wrongdoing. The Devil's Dominion examines the use of folk magic by ordinary men and women in early New England. The book describes in vivid detail the magical techniques used by settlers and the assumptions that underlay them. Godbeer argues that layfolk were generally far less consistent in their beliefs and actions than their ministers would have liked; even church members sometimes turned to magic. The Devil's Dominion reveals that the relationship between magical and religious belief was complex and ambivalent; some members of the community rejected magic altogether, but others did not. Godbeer also argues that the controversy surrounding astrological prediction in early New England paralleled clerical condemnation of magical practice and that the different perspectives on witchcraft engendered by magical tradition and Puritan doctrine often caused confusion and disagreement when New Englanders sought legal punishment of witches.

1. Magical Experiments: Divining, Healing, and Destroying in Seventeenth-Century New England
2. The Serpent that Lies in the Grass Unseen: Clerical and Lay Opposition to Magic
3. Entertaining Satan: Sin, Suffering, and Countermagic
4. Sinful Curiosity: Astrological Discourse in Early New England
5. Insufficient Grounds of Conviction: Witchcraft, the Courts, and Countermagic
6. Rape of a Whole Colony: The 1692 Witch Hunt
Epilogue
Appendix A: Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century New England (Excluding Persons Accused During the Salem Witch Hunt)
Appendix B: Persons Accused During the Salem Witch Hunt
Name Index
Subject Index