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In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton Knopf, 2002 432 pp.; $30 |
Over the past couple of decades, scholars have been reinterpreting colonial American history in the light of the intimate encounter between the colonists and the Native Americans they married and buried, learned from and taught, fought with and against, killed and were killed by. Now a distinguished historian, Cornell University's Mary Beth Norton, provocatively proposes that this interpretive turn allows us, for the first time, to understand properly one of the most exhaustively studied episodes in American history: the Salem witch trials.
Sevententh-century New Englanders believed that people sometimes covenanted with Satan to acquire the powers of witchcraft. That this assumption was nearly universal in Massachusetts made it no different from other European societies, where witches had been prosecuted, tortured, and executed with some regularity since at least the 11th century. But there is no doubt that something strange occurred in Salem in 1692—by far the largest outbreak of witchcraft accusations, prosecutions, and executions in colonial North American history, with 19 people dying and hundreds more accused before the trials were stopped.
So what happened in Salem? The question won't go away. From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" to Elizabeth George Speare's oft-assigned tale, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, the witch trials have inspired some of America's most popular writing. The Internet, predictably, features all manner of sites devoted to the Salem crisis, from National Geographic's "Salem Online Witchhunt Game" (which allows players to imagine what it would be like to be accused) to a "Salem Tarot" page that offers a "Tarot reading with a Salem Witch" for $45 per half-hour. The town of Salem itself has not hesitated to capitalize on its tourism potential, featuring no less than five museums devoted to witchcraft.
The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Marilynne K. Roach Cooper Square Press, 2002 688 pp.; $35 |
Most Americans who know anything about the Salem witchcraft crisis probably have had their impressions shaped by Arthur Miller's 1953 play (and 1996 movie) The Crucible, which saw parallels to 1950s McCarthyism in Salem's trials. For their part, historians have offered many competing accounts, most of them focused on the accusers' motivations. Probably the most influential recent approach is Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed (1974), which interprets the crisis as a boiling over of long-simmering animosities between the "haves" and "have-nots" within Salem Village, the newer, more agrarian neighbor of old Salem Town. Books and articles on the trials continue to appear at a remarkable pace. Marilynne K. Roach's The Salem Witch Trials is representative of this ongoing interest: her "day-by-day chronicle" will find a place on the shelves of researchers and history buffs for whom the fascination of Salem never palls.
Mary Beth Norton, however, is not satisfied with this vast literature, and her ambitious and complex In the Devil's Snare argues that most of the work on Salem witchcraft has failed to connect the accusation patterns to the one factor that may finally help us understand why the outbreak became such a torrent: the external wartime setting that provided the trials' context. We have heard these sorts of claims before, as many writers have claimed that they will reveal the one compelling piece of evidence that others have overlooked. But Norton's analysis of the witchcraft crisis in the context of the ongoing wars does make a significant new contribution, probably the most important since Boyer and Nissenbaum.
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