Goodwife

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, began collecting documents related to the history of the Colony of Virginia. Among them was a volume of early seventeenth-century case records from the Williamsburg Courthouse. During the American Civil War, retreating Confederate forces burned the archives in Virginia’s state capital in 1865. This one volume, maintained in Jefferson’s private library, survived, and with it, the record of America’s earliest documented witch trial, some seventy years before the famous trials at Salem. This episode brings you the story of Goodwife Joan Wright and America’s first known witch trial.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

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Music

Antonín Dvořák - Humoresque no. 7 in Gb Op. 101/7 (Violin and Piano arr.), performed by Oliver Colbentson

Purple Planet - Homecoming

Purple Planet - Leave Without Me

Purple Planet - Introspection

Purple Planet - Sense of Loss

Purple Planet - Shadowlands

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Sources

Primary

General Court. “General Court Hears Case on Witchcraft.” Encyclopedia Virginia.

Hotten, John Camden. The original lists of persons of quality; emigrants; religious exiles; political rebels; serving men sold for a term of years; apprentices; children stolen; maidens pressed; and others who went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600-1700: with their ages and the names of the ships in which they embarked, and other interesting particulars; from mss. preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record Office, England. London: Hotten, 1874.

Virginia. Council cn; Virginia. General Court cn; McIlwaine, H. R. (Henry Read); Virginia State Library cn. Minutes of the Council and General Court of colonial Virginia, 1622-1632, 1670-1676, with notes and excerpts from original Council and General court records, into 1683, now lost. The Colonial Press, Everett Waddey Co., 1924.

Secondary

Daily Press. “Witchcraft and gossip: Jamestown Settlement explores English women’s interactions with the law in colonial era.” Virginia Gazette. September 10, 2019.

Games, Alison. “Violence on the Fringes: The Virginia (1622) and Amboyna (1623) Massacres.” History 99, no. 336 (2014): 505-529.

Games, Alison. Witchcraft in Early North America. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2010.

Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. New York: Scribner, 2023.

Gregory, Eve S. “Joan Wright, Surry’s Witch.” Surry County, VA Historical Society. January 22, 2019.

Preyer, Kathryn. “Penal Measures in the American Colonies: An Overview.” The American Journal of Legal History 26, no. 4 (1982): 326–53.

Ring, Nicola A., Nessa M. McHugh, Bethany B. Reed, Rachel Davidson-Welch, and Leslie S. Dodd. “Healers and Midwives Accused of Witchcraft (1563-1736) - What Secondary Analysis of the Scottish Survey of Witchcraft can Contribute to the Teaching of Nursing and Midwifery History.” Nurse Education Today 133 (2024).

Underwood, Amanda. “Witchcraft in the American Colonies Beyond the Limits of Salem.” Fairmount Folio: Journal of History 19 (2019).

Witkowski, Monica. “‘A Witch amongst All Them’: Chesapeake Witchcraft as a Case Study for Colonial North American Witchcraft Beliefs.” In Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake, edited by Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault, 33–50. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.