Between punishment and divine gift, atonement and enchantment: visions and distresses of a Northumberland child in Oliver Cromwell’s England

In July 1644, Margaret Muschamp – an eleven-year-old Northumberland child – suddenly fell into a ‘Heavenly Rapture’, to the amazement of her family and all her fellow villagers. Shortly afterwards she was ‘stricken with a great deale of torment: the use of her tounge gone, with all her limbs, pressing to vomit’ (Moore 1650). The malaise was interpreted as an unequivocal sign of witchcraft, and she herself indicates the culprits: the cunning-man John Hutton and Mrs Dorothy Swinow. The events were reported in Wonderfull News from the North, published in 1650 and attributed to Mary Moore, the child’s mother. The pamphlet brings to light a dense tangle of conflicts: the clash between parliamentarian Puritans and royalist Anglicans in a small border community, the weapon or the use of witchcraft to stigmatise political enemies, but also the difficulties of family relationships and the tensions between a mother and her daughter. In the text, Margaret appears as much the dramatist of her own contrasting visions and of the torments afflicting her body as the spectator of their exploitation by the other actors involved in the story: on the one hand she responds with her physical and mental discomfort to a divided family in which she cannot fit, on the other her mother uses her fragility to strike, with the accusation of witchcraft, a woman against whom she cultivates feelings of hatred. Between chastisement and celestial gift, expiation and astonishment, Wonderfull News from the North shows the intricate polyphony of views on psychological instability in early modern England.