Original manuscripts from the Salem witchcraft trials have been redigitized and are available online as higher-quality images in searchable form, officials from the Peabody Essex Museum announced in a tweet.
The 545 documents (http://bit.ly/WitchTrialDocs), part of the Peabody Essex collection, can be searched and filtered by date and subject and some have transcriptions, officials said.
Dan Lipcan, the director of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, said the museum library launched a digitization initiative about a year ago and their digital collections platform went live in April.
Two museum interns — Alexis Austin and Nina Jones — worked under the supervision and guidance of Amanda Fowler, the museum’s assistant digitization librarian, to redigitize the Salem witchcraft trials papers, he said.
Many — but not all — of the documents had been digitized before, he said.
“Most of these documents had only lower-quality images available online,” Lipcan said in an e-mail to the Globe. “Until now we had never undertaken an effort to systematically photograph the documents in our care.”
Given the interest in the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, “naturally our witch trials papers were at the top of our priority list,” he said.
The Salem witch trials took place from 1692 to 1693. They resulted in the deaths of 25 innocent people, and represent “a defining example of intolerance and injustice in American history,” according to the museum’s website.
Lipcan said one of the highlights of the museum’s newly redigitized collection is the warrant for the 1692 execution of Bridget Bishop, the first of 19 people to be hanged.
Born in 1632, Bishop was a “witty and independent, though quarrelsome” resident of Salem who had been accused — and acquitted — of witchcraft 12 years earlier, according to the museum’s website.
“No witchcraft allegedly perpetrated by Bishop was ever proven by the required testimony of two witnesses,” the museum’s website states. “Instead, the court relied on the spectral evidence claimed by the accusers, the only ones who could ‘see’ the invisible world of demons. Tragically, this injustice against Bishop set the pattern for the remainder of the trials.”
Lipcan noted that the wax seal of William Stoughton, the chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, is affixed to the left margin of the death warrant, and there’s an appended note from Sheriff George Corwin reporting that Bishop had been executed on June 10, 1692.
Lipcan said the newly redigitized collection also contains the latest information about the documents. “We put lots of work into updating and upgrading the associated data according to recent scholarship,” he said.
Emily Sweeney can be reached at emily.sweeney@globe.com. Follow her @emilysweeney and on Instagram @emilysweeney22.