Black Dogs and Burnt Bodies: Spectres, Night Visions, and Gender in the Reported Dreams of Colonial New England

There is a long-established historiography regarding the uses of spectral testimony in witchcraft and other criminal prosecutions in seventeenth-century New England. This paper explores the uses of dreams and dream-like materials (visions, apparitions) in criminal prosecutions, including cases of murder and witchcraft, both from Salem in 1693 and from elsewhere in seventeenth-century New England. I discuss the beliefs and suppositions behind these potent visions, and connect them to the contemporary British proscriptive literature on dreams. If dreams were to be regarded with considerable suspicion in the post-reformation world, and especially so by Puritans, how then did these visions carry such power in colonial society? Who was likely to report such visions, and what are the gendered and racialized aspects of these night-time apparitions in the context of a colonial (read: colonizing) society. I argue that the resort to specters signals the revitalistic aspects of the witchcraft controversies, in which visitations by the devil could be used to spark religious revival. In addition, debates over spectral testimony reveal much about contemporary thinking on the nature of the soul, and the mechanisms by which the soul could be thought to leave the body.