KatherineHowe

In general, I think that the film took the time frame very seriously. The farm would have been much, much larger, the garden much bigger, and the family most certainly would have had a pig or two before they had goats (though the goats certainly have a narrative role to play). The material culture is pretty close, though. The early modern period was a time of great scarcity, before the consumer revolution of the 1700s made middle class people much more comfortable. The idea that there might be one particular special cup of great value - that's very period accurate. For most families living in colonial New England their most valuable possessions would have been their linens and bedclothes. The layout of the way the family sleeps was accurate. I would think the barns would have been bigger and better built - building crafts and furniture making was not the primitive stuff you might expect, and if you're curious to see examples of American furniture from the 1600s, there are many fine examples at the Met museum in NYC, at the MFAB in Boston, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. But overall yes, the film took the material culture of that period very seriously.

The short answers is - fiction. Baby killing for the purposes of witchcraft did not (as far as we know) ever occur. The long answer is - what happens in the film is a pretty compelling representation of what early modern Europeans thought witches might do. If you look at early modern witch trials, very often there's weirdness around the relationship between accused witches and children. Accused witches were typically women at middle age, and so they would be at the peak of their social power, and the role of mother was a vital one in a culture dependent on family labor in the home for survival. In fact, the family in THE WITCH would, on average, have had many more than five children, or would have lost several in infancy. But sometimes women who were accused as witches were suspicious because of their unnatural interest in other people's children, or because they were childless themselves. One really heartbreaking example from the years between the setting of THE WITCH and the Salem trials 60 years later is the case of Eunice Cole, an isolated woman who tries to "entice" an orphan named Ann into coming to live with her. When Ann refuses, Eunice hits her over the head with a rock in the middle of a cabbage field. So you see - weirdness with children is a common theme.

Well, the devil does go about like a roaring lion, seeking what he may devour. But in this instance, given that we are fortunate enough to live in a post-consumer revolution age of abundance, I propose smiling beatifically and buying more milk.

Actually, when the devil offers Thomasin butter, that is one temptation named by several confessed witches. It gives you a sense of how much we have and take for granted today that was a rich luxury only a few hundred years ago. Also "fine cloaths," "freedom from work," and in her (likely forced) confession, Tituba Indian, the first accused witch at Salem, who was a slave from Barbados, was offered that she could go home. Some of the temptations named by confessed witches are surprisingly poignant for how small, and yet impossible, they are.

Living in the past, guys. It was a hard row to hoe.

Oh, so many weird ways, it's hard to know where to start. Sometimes they might do a "touch test," i.e. have the bewitched person close her eyes, and then bring in a few suspects and see if their touch proved malignant on the sufferer - a case of confirmation bias if ever there was one. Another infamous test was that oftentimes a woman on trial would have her body searched for a "witches teat." They believed that witches were attended by spirit familiars - like the hare in THE WITCH - and those familiars had to be cared for and suckled like babies. The teat could be anywhere - between the fingers, on the ribs. Most notoriously, the description of Rebecca Nurse's examination at Salem indicates they find what can only be her clitoris. Damning evidence for a woman indeed. Less common, though more famous courtesy of Monty Python, was the ducking stool. Though I know of at least two instances in which a ducking stool was used - one in Connecticut and one in Virginia. In Virginia, though, they got the idea out of a book and then had no idea how to interpret the results.