The Archaeology of Magic: Gender and Domestic Protection in Seventeenth-Century New England by C. Riley Augé

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Magic: Gender and Domestic Protection in Seventeenth-Century New England by C. Riley Augé Jillian J. Sayre The Archaeology of Magic: Gender and Domestic Protection in Seventeenth-Century New England. By C. Riley Augé. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020. iv + 246 pp. $90.00 hardcover. In the opening of Lydia Maria Child’s historical novel Hobomok (1824), Puritan Mary Conant sneaks away from home to perform a magical ceremony in the woods. Next to a small stream, Mary “opened a vein in her little arm, and dipping a feather in the blood, wrote something on a piece of white cloth” (13). She then draws a circle, walking inside it while muttering an incantation—all to manifest an image of her future husband. Startled by the entrance of the eponymous Pokanoket warrior and relieved by the subsequent appearance of Charles Brown (she will eventually marry both men), Mary returns to her home, the blood-stained cloth, feather, and circle all but forgotten. Several critics have described this ceremony as pagan, identifying such magic as external (or prior) to the strictures of Puritan faith exemplified by Mary’s father and their Salem community writ large. Shirley Samuels, for example, describes the scene as Mary enacting “a moonlit ritual that draws on unspecified pagan beliefs” (64), connecting it to witchcraft in a way that alienates it from Protestant life (70). But what if we were to think about such magical practice as internal to Puritan cultural life? How might a greater understanding of magic within the particular context of women’s experience in Puritan New England help us expand the interpretive possibilities of these and other moments? C. Riley Augé’s new study The Archaeology of Magic: Gender and Domestic Protection in Seventeenth-Century New England takes as its focus precisely this reorientation, placing magical practice and its material culture firmly within the confines of Puritan life (1620–1725). Too often, Augé notes, scholars understand magic as an exotic or vestigial practice when studying British communities in the colonial period; and when magic is considered in studies of this period, they tend to focus overwhelmingly on the witchcraft trials. Instead, she argues, we should understand “uses of magic [as] integral practices [End Page 155] in the daily lives of New England men and women” that were “often associated with religious beliefs (either formal or folk)” (2). In this more expansive view, Augé presents magical practice in colonial New England as all-encompassing, influencing “daily decision-making regarding personal safety, identity, and relationships with others” (4), arguing that a proper understanding of magic is vital to our contemporary understandings of seventeenth-century life. While Augé addresses her critique to her own field of historical archaeology, the same benefit could also hold true for literary studies, as knowledge of this kind of quotidian magical practice would be useful for scholars studying seventeenth-century Puritan writings as well as later texts, like Child’s novel, that saw in the Puritan legacy the seeds of national culture. In its focus on the gendered aspect of magical practice and the attendant exploration of domestic space and magical ritual, Augé’s research might also add nuance and historical depth to studies of more contemporary women’s writing that invokes such associations, as in Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009) or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). (Indeed, Augé’s discussion of lithobolia, a prolonged barrage of stones [93], immediately called this work to mind.) The Archaeology of Magic focuses on magical practices that served the building and protecting of colonial homes and communities. In tracing the evidence of apotropaia (protective magic) and its material culture, Augé is particularly interested in whether women engaged in such practices in different ways and in different spaces than men. The majority of the work builds up the cultural context that supports this framework, first unpacking a general understanding of magic and gender roles within Puritan New England (chapter 2), situating the particular difficulties that might call for protective magic within the larger scholarly conversation surrounding fear and agency (chapter 3), then drawing out evidence of these magical practices in the colonies, often...