Diane Purkiss
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 235-253

This essay discusses the 1650 account of Margaret Muschamp, an eleven-year-old girl afflicted with fits, paralysis, speechlessness, and inedia. While we might today regard such a child as simply ill, this article illustrates how Muschamp’s illness polarized her North England community because it suggested alternately divine inspiration or demonic possession. Further, this essay demonstrates that Muschamp herself may have developed the web of meanings identified with her physical state to dramatize her ambivalent relationship with her mother in an extraordinarily public way. She projects her hostile feelings toward her mother onto a miller’s wife, Dorothy Swinow, who as a result of Muschamp’s accusations was hanged as a witch. Contributing yet another level of ambiguity to the relationship between public and private in this story, Muschamp’s mother, Mary Moor, published an account, Wonderfull News from the North, of her daughter’s extravagant and grandiose illness. Just as her daughter harbored ill will toward her, Moor was not altogether enamored of her strangely prescient child. Thus the article wonders, do the events surrounding Muschamp represent a soap opera gone awry, or a tale of visionary innocence? The essay leaves this question unanswered, remaining true to a text that speaks through its silences and ambiguities.