In the Devils Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Editorial Reviews. leondumoulin.nl Review. The story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known, from both historical accounts and dramatic retellings, such as.
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Norton builds her case with the precision of a criminal prosecutor. Her conclusion is forceful. It may well herald a new golden age in American history. Among these were the facts that the accused women were of all ages whereas in other instances they clustered in middle age ; that more men were accused than at other times; that the accusers tended to be unmarried women in their teens and twenties rather than the previously dominant married men in their thirties; and that many more of those tried by the special court at least were convicted and executed than was commonly the case.

Nothing Karlsen or anyone else had written at that time explained any of these anomalies. But once I had completed that project, and having in the interim taught several undergraduate research seminars on witchcraft, I started to think about writing a book on Salem, because even though more books on the subject had been published by then—stimulated by the th anniversary of the trials in —no one had yet focused on the questions that interested me.

Although individual interpretations of the episode differed dramatically, all the existing books told the story in essentially the same way: What would happen, I asked myself, if I tried to tell the story in a very different way? What if I produced a genuinely chronological narrative that pulled apart the evidence presented in the courtrooms to describe what happened when it happened rather than when it was later described in court, which was how other authors had organized their tales?


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What if instead of focusing on the accused, as others had, I paid more attention to young female accusers? What if I looked carefully at those anomalous accused men, including some whose cases had not received much attention because they had never actually been tried? The major surviving legal documents have been collected into a three-volume work edited by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, The Salem Witchcraft Papers, published in but based on transcripts made by WPA workers in the s. These volumes are arranged alphabetically by the name of the accused.

Yet I worked my way through the records in a different order, by date of accusation, all the while compiling first a master list of events and then actual monthly, weekly, and daily calendars laid out schematically so that I could understand more clearly what had happened, and when.

Witch Trials Weekly Video 33: The Devil's Snare of False Confession

As the dates began to fill in I started to get a sense of how the crisis had developed over time. Some nights I actually had difficulty sleeping because I found myself overwhelmed by the flood of accusations the magistrates had considered simultaneously on certain days. Thus I asked myself: And I vowed to try to capture the feeling that would have been created in by the cascades of accusations.

Every day, people would have awakened to a myriad of new horrors. Soon I realized that the accusation of the Reverend George Burroughs, one-time pastor of Salem Village, had been crucial—that immediately after he was first named but about three weeks before he was questioned and long before he was tried, convicted, and hanged came the initial dramatic jump in the number of accusations filed with the magistrates.

And I also concluded that the fact he had served congregations on the Maine frontier for most of his career he had been in Salem Village for only about two years was much more important in leading to his accusation than anyone had realized. Based on the evidence offered against him, I decided that his life as a frontier clergyman provided the key to understanding his crucial role in the Salem episode.

Then I turned to the young accusers. At various historical archives I also pursued another line of inquiry, searching for letters from the period to find out what people wrote about the trials. At first I was disappointed, because the comments I found were not very useful for example, merely reporting convictions or executions , but then another aspect of the letters hit home: People who lived in Massachusetts were clearly obsessed with the subject. Jul 11, Kevin Oliver rated it really liked it. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.

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To view it, click here. This is an excellent detailed account of the Salem witch trials. It is well researched and presents a lot of primary source materials to the reader. While a great book, the argument is not entirely convincing. Norton argues that the frequent battles, clashes, massacres, and loses to Native Americans across northern and central New England triggered Salem's hysteria. Although this undoubtedly played a part in triggering hysteria initially, it is not entirely convincing for the majority of the "e This is an excellent detailed account of the Salem witch trials.

Although this undoubtedly played a part in triggering hysteria initially, it is not entirely convincing for the majority of the "experience. Secondly, very few Native Americans were singled-out for accusation. In fact, Tituba may have been the only one if I remember correctly. Moreover, most of the Puritans who were singled out did not have any connections to indigenous peoples, and those who did were largely refugees from the wars in what is now Maine. Finally, the accusers admitted they were faking it. While the accusers may have been faking it, the community's fear of the indigenous peoples may have made some people more willing to believe.

In the end, some of the evidence that Norton presents actually works against her argument. Despite these factors, Norton's book is intensely interesting and she does a good job revealing the martial and political history of New England. Her book is intricate and detailed. It is definitely worth the read. In fact, it could easily be used as a starting point for an excellent HBO historical fiction series. This is NOT to say that her work is fictitious, quite the contrary.

Rather, the events, motives, intrigue, and people are so vivid and complex, they would make for great entertainment, on par with Deadwood, The Tudors, and Game of Thrones, because she covers all of the different cultures and strata of society and weaves them into a flowing, interconnected narrative. That being said, I would definitely recommend this book. However, I would recommend reading the shorter "Salem Possessed" first, as the argument made by its authors that commerce and materialistic cultural changes triggered an anxiety in Salem Village over the disappearance of traditional values, which was then aimed at those in, and closer to, Salem proper, who represented this shift and the changing paradigm is much more convincing.

However, despite that, when THIS book is subsequently read, it makes it easier to see that Norton's thesis could fit into, and help explain, what happened in Salem, albeit as a small part, not as THE overriding factor. But as one of America's most often produced plays, it casts a spell over our cultural imagination that complicates the historian's task. The factual inaccuracies - composite characters, age changes, the adulterous affair at the center of the play - are, in a sense, the least of it.

Embroiled in the cold-war paranoia of the s, Miller needed a sufficiently distant setting to critique what he called a "perverse manifestation "The Crucible," by Arthur Miller, is an illuminating piece of theater. Embroiled in the cold-war paranoia of the s, Miller needed a sufficiently distant setting to critique what he called a "perverse manifestation of the panic which sets in among all classes when the balance begins to turn toward greater individual freedom.

Cornell history professor Mary Beth Norton doesn't finger him by name, but it's clear that with "In the Devil's Snare" she wants to wrest the witchcraft episode away from Arthur Miller. What happened in Salem, she argues, was not a timeless expression of the battle between conformity and individuality. Instead, her "new interpretation Her perfectly reasonable thesis, which she characterizes as radical, is that Indian attacks on the northern frontier created a climate of panic at a time when Massachusetts had lost its charter and was being ruled by a shaky interim government.

That tense atmosphere led usually skeptical men to accept the hysterical claims of young girls, which they ordinarily would have dismissed. What's more, she continues, the leaders of Massachusetts, having failed to protect their citizens from Indians - the devil's minions - "quickly became invested in believing in the reputed witches' guilt, in large part because they needed to believe that they themselves were not guilty of causing New England's current woes. The air over Salem is already crowded with explanations for what happened during those paranoid months. Historians have suggested that revenge or a deadly lust for others' land motivated neighbors to hang 19 people and press one to death.

Puritans didn't burn their witches - that was considered a "Popish cruelty. Feminists have illuminated the signs of misogyny in the accusations. Psychologists have analyzed psychosomatic illnesses caused by the anxieties of young people trapped in repressive Salem households. Pathologists have noticed that smallpox often inspired panic about malevolent forces.

Biologists have even speculated that moldy grain may have induced hallucinations in the bewitched girls. Many critics before Norton have noted that the Puritans were terrified of the Indians, whom they regarded as working in concert with Satan to destroy their "city on the hill. What's more, she's dismantled the proscenium arch over Salem and demonstrated that what happened there must be seen in the broader context of northern New England fighting for its survival. That effort involves tracing - sometimes with a degree of speculation - the history and family connections of many Salem residents back to the Maine frontier, the site of the First and Second Indian Wars King Philip's War and King William's War.

In the Devil’s Snare

From there, Norton shows that victims of witchcraft often described their afflictions in specific phrases that echoed the grisly Indian attacks they'd seen or heard about. Norton is also particularly attentive to the flow of gossip, which enables her to reconstruct the drift of certain accusations from town to town until they took deadly root in Salem. Salem investigators made a crucial error when they departed from custom and began questioning suspects in public, thereby creating a forum in which aggrieved parties could interrupt with hysterical outbursts, fits, and curses.

The Puritans lived on the cusp of the Enlightenment. They knew enough already to be skeptical, but they also believed that malevolent forces were at work in the physical world. Despite their attempts to establish scientific and medical tests for witchcraft, the judges clung to the controversial notion that testimony given by spirits and ghosts - "spectral evidence" - was admissible.

To make matters worse, the magistrates began preserving the lives of confessed witches who were willing to expose other witches, a practice that quickly led to the imprisonment of hundreds of "Satan's servants. As an academic historian, Norton tolerates none of the lurid aura that floats around the witchcraft crisis, but in the process she throws out Rosemary's baby with the bath water.

There's no flesh on these characters. She names the names, but they remain just names - who went here, said that, did this. In her sober recitation of legal and historical detail, even the hysterical fits, ghastly visions, and physical manifestations of supernatural attack eventually begin to sound monotonous. Yes, this is valuable scholarship, but nonacademic readers accustomed to spellbinding characters in the work of David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin may find this approach as dry as a witch's broom.

This book presented a fresh viewpoint on the Salem Witch Trials that I'd never seen put forth as possible cruxes to the extreme volitility of the accusations put forth during this infamous period. However, I found little to connect the events throughout the narrative other than an occasional alluding to the parallels drawn between the descriptions given of the "devil" and their resemblance to the Indians that were so present on the northeastern frontier and the sporadic mention of certain accuse This book presented a fresh viewpoint on the Salem Witch Trials that I'd never seen put forth as possible cruxes to the extreme volitility of the accusations put forth during this infamous period.

The connections weren't, I felt, fully brought together until the conclusion and I would've like a bit more interconnectivity throughout the narrative. That being said, I now have a new view of the Trials that I hadn't been led to consider previously and I'm glad that this book exists to help bring about a fresh take on a much discussed and debated time period of American history. A detailed analysis of the events surrounding , The focus upon the influence of the Indian Wars distracts Norton at times and other elements are glossed over, or missed, from the account provided here in order to allow a focus upon the psychological impact of the continual conflict.

Well written, well researched, and worth a read. Jul 05, Grace rated it it was amazing Shelves: The entire subject to me is very frustrating because historians like answers and we are usually pretty good at finding them. But this whole subject is hard to diagnose because primary sources are scare and they all require a lot of interpretation. In the end nobody will know for sure why Salem played out the way it did but Norton's take on it with the Indian Wars theory 4. In the end nobody will know for sure why Salem played out the way it did but Norton's take on it with the Indian Wars theory makes the most sense to me.

However, it still feels incomplete and like there is more going on there we aren't able to interpret Nov 28, SDKalos rated it liked it. I wanted more analysis here. There's a lot of summary of events that felt like covering ground that we've already been over a hundred times. The might be better for people less familiar with the events and timeline of the Salem Witch Trials.

Jul 07, Eric rated it it was amazing. Top-notch historical account of the Salem Witchcraft crisis, which Norton reads in the contexts of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance though she doesn't call it that, quite. She points out that many of the white accusers were refugees from "Indian wars" just north of the Salem area. Aug 09, Nicole Parren rated it it was amazing.

In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton | leondumoulin.nl

This was my lunch book. Sep 24, adriana rated it liked it. I read this many years ago for a school project. It was probably around I don't remember much about it, but I felt it necessary to add it to my collection of read books. Mar 06, Mary Meiklejohn rated it did not like it. Norton's premise is that the witchcraft panic was actually about fear of Indian attacks, and that the Salem authorities were willing to entertain absurd accusations because, if the devil was at work locally, then it wasn't the authorities' fault that Indians were attacking.

However, she only lays out this premise clearly in the afterword, and before that writes tedious alternating chapters about the trials and the Indian Wars, without drawing the parallels. Good idea, very poor execution. Nov 29, Rick Maloney rated it it was amazing. Over a period of eighteen months and through the use of primary sources, Norton explores the idea that early New England settlers had a very real reason to fear the devil.

Pre-Enlightened New Englanders believed they were chosen by God to spread his word to the heathen land of the New World. English settlers had long thought the Native American Indians were devil worshipers and combined with the Puritan belief in God facilitated the English acceptance that the devil was real and appeared to women as a spectral.

Placing the Salem witchcraft trials in the context of the Indian Wars, Norton concludes the trials were driven by the failed politics of those protecting English settlements and driven by superstition, not the legitimate belief in witchcraft. In the opening chapter, Norton directly connects the witchcraft hysteria to the First and Second Indian Wars. Norton vividly describes how a group of a hundred and fifty Wabanakis Indians raided and burned the settlement of York, Maine in Ignoring a yearly Tribute of Corn, disrespecting the Wabanakis fishing rights, and settlement on unpurchased land by the colonists caused friction with the local Indians prompting raids on English villages The previous experiences of the participants of the witchcraft trials on the Maine frontier, specifically their connection to the Indian Wars, was the first contributing factor to the witchcraft hysteria.

Women were also more likely escape the Indians and return to the village retelling the horrors witnessed on the frontier. Norton argues the men presiding over the trials were to blame for the hysteria getting out of hand. The political and judicial leaders used public fear to divert attention from their failure to protect settlement expansion of the frontier into Indian Territory.

In other words, the witchcraft trials were a political conspiracy to cover up the inadequacies of Puritan leaders. Accusations of witchcraft shifted the focus of the battle from the frontier and into the courtrooms. In the courtrooms, the founding members of New England settlements leveraged a deeply religious community blaming the devil for the attacks and the spectral visions seen by the accused. Apr 20, Andrea rated it really liked it Shelves: I picked this up back in October, thinking that by the time Halloween rolled around, I could relate some witty and interesting tidbits about why witches wear pointy hats, with fond memories of the witch trial in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

In fact, Norton takes us on a rigorously academic journey, analyzing the social, spiritual, and legal atmosphere that charged Salem and northern New England in the late s. The facts are relatively undisputed: Young girls began have strange "fits" where they I picked this up back in October, thinking that by the time Halloween rolled around, I could relate some witty and interesting tidbits about why witches wear pointy hats, with fond memories of the witch trial in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

Young girls began have strange "fits" where they were tortured by visions of other colonists. The fits spread, as did the specific naming of torturers. Trials were held, interrogation and evidence methods reflected strong bias, and a striking number of women and men were hanged for witchcraft -- many of whom were believed to be innocent only months after the fact. What is disputed, according to Norton, is WHY the events unfolded.

Contagious fits, even witchcraft trials, were not uncommon occurrences, but Salem seems to have taken all of it too far. Norton argues that the colonists behavior is directly linked to the ongoing, devastating war with the Wabanaki tribe of Maine. For the better part of twenty years, Maine colonists were attacked, captured, tortured, and killed by the mysterious Indian tribe, who were long believed to be sorcerers of Satan and fought in a fittingly elusive and shadowy way. When Norton digs a little deeper into the accusations at Salem, a high number seem to come from those with traumatic childhood memories of Indian raids, in which homes were burned and parents murdered.

The accused were often those with rumored ties to the Wabanakis or their French allies. Norton provides two striking illustrations of the atmosphere in northern New England. The first of Gloucester resident Ebenezer Babson, who for many consecutive nights heard voices outside his house at night, and saw shadowy figures moving around. Others saw them too, and believing them to be Indians or French, called in a man militia unit from nearby Ipswich.

The men kept guard, but when shot at the figures would disappear into the thick woods without a sound. After two weeks, it was decided that the figures were apparitions of Satan, and totally imagined. This was July In August , Norton includes a short and eerily simple plea from the residents of New Hampshire, addressed to the King and Queen of England.

It says plainly that the Indian raids are killing them, and without significant assistance from the crown or other colonies, they "shall be Exposed to ruine, or necessitated to quit the Province to the enemy to save our own lives. A ghostly sighting here, a few livestock go missing there As does the need to make somebody pay. Recommend if you are big on history. Jan 02, Katherine Addison rated it it was amazing Shelves: Norton's conclusion should have been put at the start, for in it she explains her thesis clearly and concisely--that the witchcraft crisis of was in large part a reaction to King Philip's War and King William's War--and makes explicit the logic by which her argument works.

Both these things would have benefited me greatly if I'd had them up front. She also, in the conclusion, addresses the question of the afflicted girls--sensibly and with attention to nuance. In the Devil's Snare is a treme Norton's conclusion should have been put at the start, for in it she explains her thesis clearly and concisely--that the witchcraft crisis of was in large part a reaction to King Philip's War and King William's War--and makes explicit the logic by which her argument works.

In the Devil's Snare is a tremendously ambitious book, as Norton is trying to lay out connections between the experiences of settlers in Maine, the accusations of the afflicted in Salem, and the actions and decisions of the colony leaders in Boston also in Maine and in Salem. This is a horrifically tangled web; I spent most of the book wishing desperately for a score card.

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

And she has some of the same problem that Boyer and Nissenbaum do. Where they treat the witchcraft accusations as transparent vehicles for socioeconomic disputes, Norton treats them as transparent vehicles for anxieties about the Wabanakis particularly in regards to John Alden, where--going by Norton's explanation--he was accused of witchcraft because he was known to trade, without any supernatural overtones, with the French and the Indians.

And I don't think it's quite that simple. On the other hand, the parallel Norton argues that the people of Massachusetts saw between the Wabanaki attacks and the Devil's attacks, between the colony's military failures and the afflicted girls suffering, does make very cogent sense of a troubling question: If the devil was operating in their world with impunity--if God for his own inscrutable reasons had "lengthened the chain" that usually limited Satan's active malevolence against mankind, to adopt Lawson's memorable phrase--then the Massachusetts leaders' lack of success in combating the Indians could be explained without reference to their own failings.

If God had providentially caused the wartime disasters and he had also unleashed the devil on Massachusetts, then they bore no responsibility for the current state of affairs.


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    • Norton And as she makes very clear, without the hand of Providence to hide behind, their responsibility was very heavy, comprised of both greed and incompetence. It's not exactly comforting to be given proof that human governments have pretty much always been greedy and incompetent, but on the other hand, it does put the current political sturm und drang in helpful perspective. I was never quite convinced of the transparent one-to-one correspondence Norton wants me to believe the New Englanders saw between the Wabanakis and Indians in general and the Devil, but that may be my own subject-position getting in the way, rather than a fault in her argument.

    I don't want to believe they could have believed that, but that doesn't mean they didn't. I enjoyed this book despite its assigned nature. The idea that the wars against the Native Americans played a significant role in the Salem Witch Trials was a novel one for me, and I hadn't thought of it that way. The concept that the first few girls at least were not faking their issues was intriguing, as well.

    Overall, the writing style was a bit dry, but it wasn't that difficult a read. Jun 08, Helen rated it it was amazing. Norton's thesis is that the Salem witch trials which she aptly calls the "witchcraft crisis" were directly related to the two Indian wars, one occuring concurrently, and the other about ten years before. A significant portion of the accusers were in fact refugees from the Maine coast, people who had watched their families killed by Indians, who the Puritans already equated very closely with the devil and devil worship.

    The forest was the realm of the usually hidden, suddenly striking Indians, Norton's thesis is that the Salem witch trials which she aptly calls the "witchcraft crisis" were directly related to the two Indian wars, one occuring concurrently, and the other about ten years before. The forest was the realm of the usually hidden, suddenly striking Indians, and also the providence of witches. Young Goodman Brown, anyone?? I've heard the feminist take on the trials, and have to agree it, but any treatment of this subject that skipped over the fact that the players were in the middle of a war would be missing the point entirely- makes me wonder how much of "history" is similarly flawed.

    From my reading of this book, it seems that the Indians, from a tactical perspective, were, in , definitely winning the war- as small groups of militiamen were pulled out in various key spots, the Indians were systematically eliminating settlements going down the coast of Maine. Had things gone differently, perhaps the Indians really could have pushed the European presence out of this country- remember, the West was not yet "won" and while European presence was heavy in spots Boston, New York it was all concentrated on the East Coast- and this is as late as !

    My one caveat so far is that Norton uses the term "Wabanaki" liberally, and makes it sound like a tribe name, where it was actually more of a political umbrella- "Wabanaki" means "Dawnland People" and the Wabanaki Confederacy was made up of the Pasamaquoddy, the Penobscot, the Mikmaq, the Maliseet, and the Abenaki. I'm sure that Norton herself understands the difference, but she doesn't make it clear to the reader, and the average reader is not going to immediately grasp the distinction.