story summary:The Last Witchfinder tells of Jennet Stearne, who makes it her life's mission to bring down the 1604 Parlimentary Witchcraft Act. She is aided in this endeavour by some luminaries of her day: Benjamin Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton and Baron de Montesquieu.

We first meet Jennet as a precocious child studying natural philosophy with her Aunt Isobel, a landed Ipswich widow. Even as Isobel, Jennet, and a second pupil, Elinor Mapes, perform their experiments, Jennet’s father – Walter Stearne, the Witchfinder-General – tours the countryside with his son Dunstan, submitting suspected Satanists to his proofs of demonic compact.

Elinor’s father, Reverend Mapes, worries that Isobel’s experiments partake of blasphemy. Walter applies the witch tests, soon determining that his sister-in-law is indeed a Satanist. Isobel is tried, convicted, and condemned to death. Before the sentence is carried out, Isobel makes Jennet promise that she will devote her life to destroying the Witchcraft Act.

Furious at Walter for executing a landholder, King William banishes him to Massachusetts. Jennet is dismayed: how can she pursue her mission in a backwater province? Arriving in Haverhill, Walter finds employment advising the Salem Witch Court on whether the suspects’ blemishes are indeed the notorious marks with which Satan brands his disciples.

Jennet’s family returns to Haverhill, from which Walter and Dunstan launch additional witch hunts. Their enterprise comes to an abrupt halt when Algonquin Nimacooks burn the town and abduct Jennet. A new life lies before our heroine, different from anything she has experienced before.

Several years into her Nimacook captivity, Jennet visits the Bedford Trading Post, where some demonologists are ‘swimming a witch’. If the suspect floats, she has clearly compacted with Satan, for running water cannot abide a heretic. Jennet realises that she must resume her campaign against the Witchcraft Act.

After her escape from the Nimacooks, a marriage of convenience to a colonial postmaster enables Jennet to write her treatise. Complications ensue, designs go awry, and Jennet is once again on her own until she meets the young Benjamin Franklin, whose electricity experiments generate romantic sparks.

Plagued with doubts about her treatise, Jennet accompanies Ben to England, hoping a change of venue will prove inspirational. In London she encounters an old friend, a long-lost child, and the illustrious Isaac Newton. An epiphany at the King’s Theatre makes Jennet more determined than ever to fulfil her quest.

During their return voyage Jennet and Ben are shipwrecked on a Caribbean island, where our heroine at last devises a satisfactory demon disproof. But how will she bring her insights back to civilisation? When a band of gold-hungry pirates appears, the stranded philosophers enact a bold plan for their deliverance.

Back in Philadelphia, Jennet puts herself on trial for witchcraft, thus acquiring a public forum for presenting her demon disproof. Perhaps she will be acquitted, since her lawyer is the brilliant Baron de Montesquieu. But the judge is John Hathorne, who once sent eighteen Salem defendants to the gallows.

Interview with James Morrow

Q: Why did the main character have to be a woman?

A: I’ve always enjoyed creating strong female protagonists. My fourth novel, Only Begotten Daughter, recounts the adventures of Jesus Christ’s divine half-sister in contemporary Atlantic City. By placing a woman at the centre of The Last Witchfinder, I believe I made the Renaissance-to-Reason rotation more engaging than if I’d used a male protagonist. Obviously a woman would face an uphill battle convincing the world that she has discovered a scientific refutation of the ‘demon hypothesis’. And I thought there would be a certain poetic justice in having a heroine, as opposed to a hero, put the witchfinders out of business, since women endured a disproportionate amount of persecution during ‘the burning times’. Indeed, the main reason Jennet goes on her quest is that, early in the novel, her beloved Aunt Isobel is publicly executed as a Satanist.

Q: Jennet Stearne is a formidable heroine: brilliant, sharp-tongued, courageous. But why would even the cleverest 17th-century woman imagine she had the intellectual and political resources to destroy the ‘witch universe’?

A: Throughout her quest, Jennet takes heart from a kind of talisman bestowed on her by Aunt Isobel: a letter from Isaac Newton in which he implies that a ‘demon disproof’ lies hidden between the lines of his scientific masterwork, the Principia Mathematica. Jennet comes to believe that, by studying the Principia, she’ll uncover an argument that will persuade the English legislature to overturn the Witchcraft Statute. After several false starts, she manages to write a persuasive treatise, but then she faces an even bigger problem: convincing Parliament to read it. And so, in a daring move, Jennet puts herself on trial for witchcraft in colonial Philadelphia, using the attendant ‘media circus’ to publicise her argument.

Q: Is Jennet based on a real person?

A: No, though many women of this era, through their salons and soirées, were passionately involved with the new mechanical science – or, as it was called then, ‘natural philosophy’ – of Descartes and Newton. The recent epochal exhibit at the New York Public Library called The Newtonian Moment featured a gallery of ‘Newtonian Women’, among them Laura Bassi, Diamante Medaglia Faini, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, and Voltaire’s celebrated collaborator, Madame du Châtelet. In the 1750s Oliver Goldsmith, noting the phenomenon of women wedding themselves to natural philosophy, remarked that a man ‘who would court a lady must be capable of discussing Newton and Locke’.

Q: So Jennet is your own creation, but many actual historical figures parade through the novel: Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Cotton Mather, the Baron de Montesquieu.

A: The real catalyst for The Last Witchfinder – the event that got me moving beyond Edward Harrison’s inspiring sentence – was my discovery of an obscure historical fact: in 1725 the young Benjamin Franklin, age eighteen, travelled to London on a mission for the Pennsylvania Royal Governor, and eventually penetrated Newton’s inner circle, hoping to meet the genius behind the theory of universal gravitation. But Newton saw no reason to waste an afternoon talking to some cheeky kid from Philadelphia.

Q: But in The Last Witchfinder Newton and Franklin really do meet.

A: I realised that I could use these fascinating characters as symbols of the two universes: Newton the avatar of the Renaissance, as pious a man who ever lived, versus Franklin the quintessential Enlightenment sceptic, eternally playful and irreverent. When they finally cross paths in my novel, they have nothing to say to each other. Newton wants to talk about the great preoccupation of his dotage, Biblical prophecy, and Franklin wants to talk about electricity. The problem isn’t just that they’re from two different continents and two different generations. They’re also from two different universes.

Q: This large theme of yours, the clash between Renaissance theology and Enlightenment science – for some prospective readers, it may sound a trifle dry.

A: Or even dull?

Q: Or even dull. And yet The Last Witchfinder is a rollicking, satiric, picaresque, and sometimes bawdy adventure. As the plot progresses, Jennet runs afoul of Indians, pirates, whores, scoundrels, charlatans, hurricanes, and a smallpox epidemic.

A: My models included those juicy, spirited, comic novels of the 17th and 18th centuries – Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and, of course, Voltaire’s Candide – that people still read today with pleasure. I especially enjoyed juxtaposing the scientific and the erotic, as when Jennet and Ben Franklin seduce each other while performing an experiment with a rotating sulphur ball. They’re diligently determining the degree to which a human body can conduct static electricity, and soon they’re sparkling and crackling with mutual desire, and before long they’re swiving on the mattress in Ben’s garret.

Q: Swiving?

A: It rhymes with driving.

Q: You mentioned that the encounter between Newton and Franklin never really happened – but many of the events in the novel are historically accurate, yes?

A: I was continually delighted by how much real history I could incorporate into The Last Witchfinder. It seemed as if these glittering shards of the past were lying around in a field, and all I had to do was glue them together into an urn of my own design.

Q: Almost as if the book was asking to be written?

A: Exactly. At one point the storyline required Jennet to be abducted by Algonquin Indians from her home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Well, it turned out that the Abenaki tribe really did attack Colonial Haverhill in 1696. When Jennet puts herself on trial for witchcraft, I thought it would be interesting if the Baron de Montesquieu – another personification of the Enlightenment – came forward to defend her. So naturally I was pleased to discover that not only had Montesquieu denounced the conjuring statutes, he was a world traveller and could easily have landed in colonial Philadelphia at this time. Even the climactic courtroom battle has a rough historical counterpart. In a 1730 issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin reported on a witch trial that had supposedly occurred across the Delaware River – in Mount Holly, New Jersey. The article is clearly a hoax, but I decided to take Ben at his word.

Q: Evidently you did a lot of research.

A:More that I care to think about. I began with weighty tomes like Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons and Bernard Cohen’s Franklin and Newton. At one point I even waded into Andrew Motte’s famous English translation of the Principia Mathematica. Thanks to a rigorous high-school calculus class, I more or less understood what was going on. The real fun was the legwork I did on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually I spent a week in England, following in Jennet’s footsteps as she encounters Robert Hooke at Cambridge University, witnesses Aunt Isobel’s execution behind Colchester Castle, and tracks down Newton in London.

Q: We began by talking about The Last Witchfinder as your foray into straight historical fiction. But the novel has one frankly fantastical dimension. The narrator technically is not James Morrow but rather Newton’s Principia Mathematica. From the first sentence onward, you give us a world in which books have minds, souls, and a passion to write other books.

A: I’d always envisioned The Last Witchfinder as a qualified defence of the 18th-century Enlightenment. And yet these days, I’ve noticed, the Age of Reason has few friends. The religious right detests the Enlightenment because it leads to secularism; postmodern academics reject the Enlightenment as the presumed progenitor of an oppressive scientism; and the New Age fringe invites us to regard Reason as Spirituality’s feeble and overrated shadow. So from the instant I started composing chapter one, I wanted to incorporate a contemporary perspective – not only to give the anti-Enlightenment argument its due, but as a way to avoid the bane of historical fiction: characters who are implausibly aware of what their lives will mean to their descendants. At first I tried to achieve this distance by having Aunt Isobel compose a long, prophetic poem in which she foresees the French Revolution and other disasters accruing to the apotheosis of Reason. But it didn’t ring true, and so I tried an even stranger ploy: turning the narration over to Newton’s Principia, a sentient book living outside the bounds of time and space.

Q: Your Principia narrator invites us to regard the witch-persecution era as a mirror of our present age. Do you see The Last Witchfinder as an allegory on the contemporary problem of faith versus rationality?

A: If satire is what closes on Saturday night, allegory doesn’t even get into the theatre – nor should it. The last thing I had in mind was inflicting an uplifting lesson on the reader. That said, we’re obviously living in an age when theology is again leading people down some very dark paths indeed. Whether we’re talking about the rise of jihadism or recent attempts to cast ‘intelligent design’ as commensurate with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the shadow side of religious faith is haunting the West. So if I had to tease a message out of The Last Witchfinder, I would paraphrase Churchill and hold forth as follows: Reason is the worst possible mode in which to negotiate the world – except for all the others.

For discussion

• In order to include a ‘contemporary perspective’, the narrator is ‘a sentient book living outside the bounds of time and space’. Do you feel that using the Principia Mathematica in this way adds to, or detracts from, the novel? Is the fantasy element out of place in a historical novel?
• ‘Why me?’ Alan Macfarlane helps explain the persecution of witches as a means of the unsophisticated masses finding something to blame for unexplained misfortune. ‘My pig’s died, it must be someone’s doing!’ What modern parallels can you see of witch persecution?
• During her life Jennet acquires five lovers: Okommaka, Tobias Crompton, Benjamin Franklin, Pussough, and – unbeknownst to herself – the Principia narrator. Which of these characters understands our heroine best? Could Jennet have found long-term happiness in any of these relationships?
• Upon her deliverance from the Nimacooks by Tobias Crompton, Jennet happily plights her troth to him, knowing that this union will enable her to continue the quest. How do you feel about Jennet's ‘marriage of convenience’? Did she have any alternatives?
• The author believes that ‘by placing a woman at the centre of The Last Witchfinder, I believe I made Renaissance-to-Reason rotation more engaging than if I’d used a male protagonist.’ Do you agree? What differences would a male protagonist have made?
• The Last Witchfinder’s main theme is the struggle between established Renaissance theology and the new Enlightenment science. But must faith and reason necessarily conflict? Has the action/adventure illuminated or obscured the theme?
• To what extent do you believe that the use of real historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton lend historical veracity to The Last Witchfinder? Did you finish reading the novel believing that Newton and Franklin had met in reality?
• Perhaps you've attended a revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, or maybe you've seen the 1997 film adaptation starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. Whereas Miller sees the Salem Witch Trials as foreshadowing the McCarthy era, with ruthless people exploiting a transient hysteria to advance their own interests, Morrow evidently interprets the Salem tragedy as one more battle in a protracted war between Renaissance theology and scientific rationality. Which understanding of the 1692 trials do you find more compelling?
• The Malleus Maleficarum states that the belief in the existence of witches was an essential part of Catholic faith, and to maintain the opposite opinion ‘savours of heresy’. What does modern society require us to believe, lest we become heretics?
• ‘Methinks I’ve deciphered her final words.’ (p.121) How has the author conveyed the mindset of centuries ago? Is it enough to change the speech patterns and word selection? How else has the author shown us that his characters are from their time, and not just twenty-first-century characters in a historical setting?
• Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of the Principia narrator is his romantic feelings toward Jennet. Do you sometimes feel that books have lives of their own? Do you love your favourite books as friends?

Timeline

Real people

Benjamin Franklin
Born 1706 in Boston
Died 1790
US statesman, writer and scientist

Made his name as a journalist, his research into electricity proves lightning is electricity, and suggests lightning rods on buildings. In 1776 was involved in framing the Declaration of Independence. US minister in Paris until 1785. Three times president of the State of Pennsylvania.

Sir Isaac Newton
Born 1642 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire
Died 1727
Physicist and mathematician

In 1665-6 the fall of an apple was said to prompt his forming of the Laws of Gravitation. He devised the first reflecting telescope. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica appears 1687. Became Master of the Mint 1699. Sat in Parliament on two occasions.

Robert Hooke
Born 1635 in Freshwater, Isle of Wight
Died 1703
Chemist and physicist

Devised Hooke’s Law governing elasticity. Coined the biological term ‘cell’. Invented the balance spring in watches, and helped develop the telescope and microscope.

Cotton Mather
Born 1663 in Boston
Died 1728
Colonial minister and prolific author

Set the moral tone with prolific pamphleteering. Early New England historian who reported on American botany.

Baron de Montesquieu
Born 1689 near Bordeaux
Died 1755
Political thinker

Articulated the theory of ‘separation of power’