In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 - Hardcover

Norton, Mary Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037540709X ISBN 13: 9780375407093

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002

Synopsis

In January 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, two young girls began to suffer from inexplicable fits. Seventeen months later, after legal action had been taken against 144 people—20 of them put to death—the ignominious Salem witchcraft trials finally came to an end.

Now, Mary Beth Norton—one of our most ad-mired historians—gives us a unique account of the events at Salem, helping us to understand them as they were understood by those who lived through the frenzy. Describing the situation from a seventeenth-century perspective, Norton examines the crucial turning points, the accusers, the confessors, the judges, and the accused, among whom were thirty-eight men. She shows how the situation spiraled out of control following a cascade of accusations beginning in mid-April. She explores the role of gossip and delves into the question of why women and girls under the age of twenty-five, who were the most active accusers and who would normally be ignored by male magistrates, were suddenly given absolute credence.

Most important of all, Norton moves beyond the immediate vicinity of Salem to demonstrate how the Indian wars on the Maine frontier in the last quarter of that century stunned the collective mindset of northeastern New England and convinced virtually everyone that they were in the devil’s snare. And she makes clear that ultimate responsibility for allowing the crisis to reach the heights it did must fall on the colony’s governor, council, and judges.

A vivid, authoritative historical evocation and exploration that will alter forever the way we think about one of the most perennially fascinating and horrifying events in our history.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University. She is the author of The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (1972); Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980); Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and (with five others) A People and a Nation (6th ed., 2001). She has also edited several works on women’s history and served as the general editor of The AHA Guide to Historical Literature (3rd ed., 1995).

From the Back Cover

"Mary Beth Norton is a brilliant historian with a great gift for clear-eyed, imaginative scholarship, and her new book, In the Devil's Snare, is a fresh and very different unfolding of witchcraft at Salem. The setting is far larger than customary. The cast of characters is more numerous. The gossip network operates at higher speed. But it is the presence of the Indian wars on the Maine frontier that puts everything in a different light. I found the book utterly fascinating. Certainly it is ample proof of the old idea that in recovering the truth of the past, things have to be seen in context."
--David McCullough, Author of John Adams

"Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare accomplishes the almost unbelievable--casting new light on the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, early America's most terrifying event. Never has the Indian presence in Salem's deadly descent to executions loomed so large or seemed so logical, at least from the perspective of frightened Puritans. Salem's bizarre, otherwise inexplicable events unfold in compelling detail through the hands of one of our most elegant, powerful historians. "
--Jon Butler, Author of Becoming America

"This is great history! Mary Beth Norton's broad-ranging research in archives from New York to Maine links the events in Salem to the Indian wars in ways that shed sympathetic new light on accused and accusers alike. In the Devil's Snare is a remarkable study in human nature."
--Gloria Main, Author of Peoples of a Spacious Land

"The best approach to the Salem witchcraft episode in thirty-five years, this fresh work gives remarkable insight into every aspect of the tragic event. Eye witness reports of devastating Indian attacks on Massachusetts' northern frontier are woven together with shocking, day-by-day revelations in Salem's witchcraft trials. Here, we discover a terror struck community, groping its way through a maelstrom of attacks from the visible and invisible worlds. Stories of unspeakable acts -- real and imagined -- all stemming from the Devil's work against God's people. Here, we encounter the words of personal grudges, family disputes, political maneuvering, and youthful vengeance that contributed to a widening social, political, and religious storm that threatened to engulf the whole of the Bay Colony. A masterful piece of historical writing, it lays bare the Puritans' greatest fears about themselves facing God's unyielding judgment -- and slowly becoming aware they were suffering under a great self-inflicted delusion."
-- Benjamin C.In the Devil's Snare provides the most insightful and satisfying explanation of the behavior and motives of all the participants-- judges, magistrates, accusors and the accused. This may well be the final word on an episode that has bewitched and bewildered generations of historians."
--Carol Berkin, Author of First Generations: Women in Colonial America

"Norton, with dazzling insight and astonishing meticulousness and detective work takes us well past the surface explorations of Salem Village quarrels into the deeply complex story of what happened and why. Numerous people in the past have evoked the Indian wars as somehow being implicated in the events of 1692, but before this book nobody has done the research that has uncovered the way the witchcraft trials and the Indian wars were inextricably bound. This is a brilliant book, wonderfully conceived and executed, and it gives reality to the expression, 'a landmark achievement'."
--Bernard Rosenthal, Author of Salem Story

From the Inside Flap

In January 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, two young girls began to suffer from inexplicable fits. Seventeen months later, after legal action had been taken against 144 people―20 of them put to death―the ignominious Salem witchcraft trials finally came to an end. <br><br>Now, Mary Beth Norton―one of our most ad-mired historians―gives us a unique account of the events at Salem, helping us to understand them as they were understood by those who lived through the frenzy. Describing the situation from a seventeenth-century perspective, Norton examines the crucial turning points, the accusers, the confessors, the judges, and the accused, among whom were thirty-eight men. She shows how the situation spiraled out of control following a cascade of accusations beginning in mid-April. She explores the role of gossip and delves into the question of why women and girls under the age of twenty-five, who were the most active accusers and who would normally be ignored by male magistrates, were suddenly given absolute credence. <br><br>Most important of all, Norton moves beyond the immediate vicinity of Salem to demonstrate how the Indian wars on the Maine frontier in the last quarter of that century stunned the collective mindset of northeastern New England and convinced virtually everyone that they were in the devil’s snare. And she makes clear that ultimate responsibility for allowing the crisis to reach the heights it did must fall on the colony’s governor, council, and judges.<br><br>A vivid, authoritative historical evocation and exploration that will alter forever the way we think about one of the most perennially fascinating and horrifying events in our history.

Reviews

In her splendid re-creation of the notorious events of 1692, Cornell historian Norton (her Founding Mothers and Fathers was a Pulitzer finalist) offers fresh and provocative insights into the much-studied Salem witchcraft trials. Using newly available materials from the trial records, letters and diaries, she argues that a complex of political, military and religious factors led to the outbreak of hysterical fits and other behavior that ended in the infamous trials. As Norton ably demonstrates, the settlers saw the First and Second Indian Wars and their resulting loss of prosperity as God's punishment for their sins. In April 1692, as these losses mounted, several teenage girls began having fits that they attributed to the devil, to witches and to Indians. The colonists thus found themselves, says Norton, being punished both by visible spirits (Indians) and invisible ones (the devil). In an unusual turn of events that Norton explores, the magistrates of the village took the testimony of these women who normally were not given any political or judicial authority at face value and began the trials. Moreover, as Norton shows, some judges used this opportunity of blaming witches to assuage their own guilt over their responsibility for political, economic and military mismanagement. Part of the originality of this study lies in Norton's refusal to read events through the lens of contemporary psychology, offering instead a lively account of the ways 17th-century men and women would have thought about them. Very simply, Norton's book is a first-rate narrative history of one of America's more sordid yet ever-fascinating tales.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The Salem witchcraft hysteria that began in 1692 has for 300 years been the subject of much discussion, interpretation, and reinterpretation. Norton (Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American history, Cornell Univ.; Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society) offers a new explanation of this widely discussed episode, assigning central importance to fears caused by the Second Indian War. Norton's "dual narrative of war and witchcraft" examines the progress of threatening frontier disorders to a greater extent than other studies have, links them to the development of the crisis, and considers the thought not only of the panicked accusers but of the judges as well. Based on extensive research and offering a new analysis, this work is destined to become a classic in its crowded field and is recommended for academic and larger public libraries, even those that already own such other important studies as Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed or Carol F. Karlsen's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England.
Theresa R. McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Norton places the Salem witchcraft trials firmly into historical context by "examining the broader crisis that produced the trials." Rather than concentrating solely on the trials themselves, she analyzes the social, political, and cultural fabric of seventeenth-century Salem. In so doing, she concludes that the events surrounding the witchcraft crisis were unique to a certain time and place: namely, Essex County, Massachusetts, in the early 1690s. The residents of Essex County, physically and psychologically threatened and damaged by nearly two decades of continuous frontier warfare during King William's War, were particularly vulnerable to suggestions and suspicions of witchcraft. While also exploring the more obvious political and gender issues and parallels, Norton is the first historian to comprehensively evaluate the specific link between the Indian Wars and the Salem witchcraft phenomenon. This meticulously researched narrative sheds new light on an old and ever-fascinating subject. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037540709X
• ISBN 13: 9780375407093
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 436