I spent the better part of today hunting through volumes of preserved court records from New Hampshire in the 1680s, looking for the original documents of the witchcraft prosecution of Rachel Fuller of Hampton. I started with the items listed in David D. Hall’s book, Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth century New England: A Documentary History 1658-1693 (2nd ed., Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1999). It took some doing to find the original documents, since Hall had only copied transcriptions published in the 19th century, but persistence paid off: there were three more documents about the case with the main cache of them, but one of the documents Hall included wasn’t there. So I looked in the next two volumes, and found it — along with two other documents about the case. I am trying to figure out exactly what I’ll do with them. I’d like to write up something about the case and transcribe them fresh, since my skills at reading and transcribing documents from this period are still strong!
