Innocence and guilt, victims and prosecutors: domestic and social dramas in Mary Moore’s Wonderfull news from the north (1650)

In Wonderfull News from the North (1650), Mary Moore recounts the story of the bewitchment of her eleven-year-old daughter Margaret Duchamp to en-courage the legal pursuit of the cunning-man John Hutton and Mrs Dorothy Swinow whom the woman believes to be the culprits of the tragedy afflicting her family. The complexity of the story that Wonderfull News from the North tells is reflected in its intricate internal structure, which stitches together vari-ous types of text: the chronicle of facts, transcriptions of Margaret’s “visions”, sequences of dialogue, lists of eyewitnesses, legal proceedings, perorations to the “Corteous Reader”. Writing both documentary and parenetic colours this elaborate text, with autobiography, chronicle and an insistent search for justice interwoven in a manipulative and exaggerated tone. This is a “minor” work of literature, undoubtedly, but one that is of great historical-cultural interest and that has only occasionally received critical attention. The present work will attempt to unravel the polyphony of voices and inten-tions that give life to Wonderfull News from the North, first by presenting its structural strategies, and then by investigating – at a deeper textual level – the different dramaturgical planes and, in particular, the ways in which, in this ep-isode of microhistory, Margaret’s body became the crossroads of various dra-mas/conflicts. Read attentively, the pamphlet reveals a multiplicity of conflicts, closely related to each other, which involve the socio-political, the domestic and the personal dimension. The trial for witchcraft does not therefore exhaust the narrative richness of the text, although it is undoubtedly the most evident dramatic element, and is what justifies the writing and the very existence of the pamphlet.