9 Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World, 79; George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Whitchcraftes (London, 1593).
1“Certain Proposals Made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke and Other Persons of Quality …” (1636), reprinted in Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (3 vols, with addenda, Cambridge, 1936), I, 415.
2 Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Inquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974), 13-23. Lockridge, among the first to control for age and wealth, raised the history of literacy to a new level of sophistication. But his raw data are at odds with three other studies by George H. Martin, William Kilpatrick and Clifford Shipton. Kilpatrick found in a study of Suffolk County deeds (1653-56) that 89% of men and 42% of women could sign their names. Clifford Shipton, in another inquiry based on 2,729 names on petitions, addresses and other legal documents, obtained the following result:
Shipton found remarkably little variance throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut. Signature-mark ratios ranged from a high of 99% in older eastern towns to a low of 90% in new settlements. Significantly lower were signature-mark rates in Plymouth Colony (81% signing). The difference between these estimates and those of Lockridge cannot be accounted for by age, biases of wealth, or name repetition. Lockridge’s sample also yields lower raw numbers than another New England sample in W. H. Kilpatrick, The Dutch Schools of New Netherland (New York, 1912), 229; see also Samuel E. Morison, The Puritan Pronaos (Ithaca, 1936), 83-84.