| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. By Mary Beth Norton. (New York: Knopf, 2002. 436 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-40709-X.)

Mary Beth Norton, a leading historian of women and gender in early America, began her project on Salem witchcraft, she writes, expecting to produce "a feminist reinterpretation" (p. 4). But, while gender remained a critical concern and the basis for some useful insights, the thrust of In the Devil's Snare is to explain how the experiences of settlers in Maine during King Philip's and King William's wars (1675–1676 and 1689–1697, respectively) shaped the Salem crisis. During the wars, Norton observes, Wabanaki Indians destroyed homes and other property, carried off captives to New France, and inflicted massive violence. Traumatic memories of these events haunted the homeless and occasionally orphaned survivors who fled to Salem and elsewhere in Essex County, Massachusetts. There, Norton argues, Indians afflicted some refugees and their neighbors, often appearing as specters trying to lure them to Satan's cause. The wars challenged New England colonists' notion "that they were a chosen people, charged with bringing God's message to a heathen land previously ruled by the devil" (p. 295). Witchcraft provided an explanation for this unsettling challenge and a rationale for searching out and suppressing its insidious manifestations. The histories of the two wars "and the Salem witchcraft crisis are intricately intertwined," Norton argues. Her book "explicates those links through . . . a dual narrative of war and witchcraft" (p. 5). This interrelationship, Norton claims, made Salem in 1692 exceptional among New England witchcraft outbreaks.

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