Between Hell and Plum Island: Samuel Sewall and the Legacy of the Witches, 1692-97

Abstract

SAMUEL SEWALL'S tribute to the natural beauty and religious significance of Plum Island and Newbury, Massachusetts, comes as a surprise in an otherwise pedantic tract devoted to New England's potential role in the millennium. A lone paragraph on the penultimate page of Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, a prophetic exercise published in Boston in 1697, the passage appears out of place, a bit of bravado or, perhaps, selfindulgent nostalgia for the writer's childhood stamping ground.' Appreciators of Sewall's brief prose-poem are usually silent about the balance of the lengthy tract it so strikingly brings to a close. But, of course, as with all great writing, the part loses much of its power when divorced from the whole. Sewall's treatise had a serious purpose. It was a strong reaction to English theologian Joseph Mede's depressing forecast about the New World's role in the prophetic drama of the millennium, about which English theologians were increasingly excited as the Civil War approached. Mede (1586-1638), of Cambridge University, died sixteen years before Samuel Sewall was born. But no matter, his writings outlived him by many years and were still being discussed in America far into the eighteenth century.2