Chelsea Berry
March 3, 2017
Theodore E. D. Braun Travel Fellowship
For two months, with the assistance of the Theodore E. D. Braun Travel Fellowship, I lived in Aix-en-Provence and conducted research on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century poison cases in Martinique at the Archives Nationalesd’Outre-Mer (ANOM). As a piece of my larger project, comparing poison cases in Martinique, Virginia, Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas, this research was essential for exploring the particular topography in this colony of ideas about poison, medicine, and magic. My time at ANOMallowed me to not only build off of my early analysis of qualitative and quantitative information on poison cases, but also to gain new insights on multiple contemporary perspectives on poison by making links across different kinds of sources.
One of my main goals of my time at ANOM was to expand upon the work I had done in my preliminary scouting trip examining surviving poison trials. I picked up where I had left off with criminal case summaries in eighteenth-century reports from the ConseilSuperieur to the Ministere de la Marine. I also spent time analyzing poison trials in the Courd’assises records from 1830 to 1848. Between the two collections, I gathered valuable information on eighty-five poison cases, including both qualitative details on the circumstances of each case and quantitative demographic data. For example, I confirmed my earlier observation that poison cases were strongly gendered male, with an average of 75% of the accused being men, and built upon it with data showing an increasing ratio over time of women being accused. By comparing information on these cases with laws and colonial ordinances on poison, I have also been able to track shifts in the language that indicate a development of colonial understandings of poison that differed from those in contemporary Europe.
An advantage of on-site research at the archive has been the ability to make connections across the different kinds of sources held there. In addition to the trials and laws, I spent time working with collections of official correspondence between Martinique and the Ministere de la Marine. One particularly interesting attachment I found is a 1775 treatise on superstition and critique of poison trials in Martinique. The author gave detailed descriptions of practices planters used to identify sorcerer-poisoners, some of which matched information in the trial summaries themselves. Some boxes in the correspondence collectionscontained a variety of different kinds of evidence particularly inviting for comparison. For example, a file on a nineteenth-century case of a planter tried for abusing his slaves—his successful defense built upon his claim that they were poisoners—included copies of newspapers with transcripts of the trial marked up by the prosecutor. The reporting in the newspaper, which included information on the reactions of the crowd to different pieces of testimony, combined with the content of the transcript, the prosecutor’s notation, and official reports to the colonial office together gave me multiple angles of analysis and rich detail on this case.
Finally, sharing my two months at the archive with other scholars in my field was invaluable for the development of my project. Between lunches, coffee breaks, and working side-by-side in the reading room, our conversations opened up opportunities for us to share new discoveries and bounce ideas off of each other. The analyses and insights I developed from this working environment, as well as the practical gathering of sources itself, would not have been possible without travel to France. I would like to thank ASECS for helping make this opportunitya reality through your generous support.