Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Joyce E. Chaplin, Harvard University

When I received this new book on witchcraft, I found tucked in it the William and Mary Quarterly's guidelines for book reviewers and noted that the book review editor had assigned me a deadline of October 31: very apt—eerily so. No other incident in American history is as appropriate to Hallowe'en as is the outbreak of witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions in and around Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The "Salem witches" are, along with Pocahontas, turkey-eating Pilgrims, thee-and-thou Quakers, tea-phobic Bostonians, and George Washington and his Founding Brothers, among the few instantly recognizable characters of early American history. Viewers of stage and screen versions of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and tourists in plaque- and monument-studded present-day Salem (complete with New Age wicca shops) are continually reminded of the peculiar drama around Salem. Nor have the witches and their accusers wanted for scholarly attention. Do we need another book on the subject? Mary Beth Norton proves that we do. Norton elaborates such a new and important set of issues about the controversy that it is even less likely than before that we will have heard the last of Salem's witches.	1
Norton begins by summarizing the basic events of the crisis. By the time ended, 144 people had been subject to legal action, fifty-four confessed to witchcraft, and twenty-three adults (along with some infants) died in custody or were executed. Norton also assesses current interpretations of "witchcraft" at Salem (that is, explanations for the accusations, for the character of the prosecutions, and for the confessions), which have ranged from socioeconomic stress in Salem Village, to ergotism or epidemic encephalitis, political uncertainty in the charterless province of Massachusetts, hysteria among female adolescents, and the real presence of malefic magic. Norton does not so much dismiss these interpretations (though I hope she is skeptical about the "real witchcraft" explanation) as she adds another cause to the list: the "concurrent political and military affairs in northern New England" (p. 5). Norton thus follows a trend in current scholarship that sees frontier affairs, especially warfare with Indians, as central to the development (with all its bloody setbacks) of colonial societies.	2
Richard Slotkin's germinal Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973), along with his edition of key documents from King Philip's War of the 1670s, was perhaps the immediate impetus for this recent direction in the field. The subsequent, post-1688 conflict in northern New England—variously named the Second Indian War or King William's War—has been somewhat less studied than the phases of King Philip's War, which took place in southern New England. But Richard Godbeer, in The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (1992), indicated a telling connection between this later frontier conflict and the brewing witchcraft crisis around Salem. Norton is the first to elaborate and analyze this connection. Additionally, she points out that the witchcraft incidents themselves have been misunderstood and mislabeled. Salem proper was not the only affected location in Essex County; the prevailing scholarly attention to trial records from Salem has focused too closely on only part of the story. Norton emphasizes, "the term Salem witchcraft crisis is a misnomer; Essex County witchcraft crisis would be more accurate" (p. 8). Still, it is notable that Norton uses the former, not the latter, as the subtitle to her book; "Salem" has the greater power to attract readers.	. . .