In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton

The afflictions that beset Deliverance Hobbs and other accusers also suggest a tie to Native American warfare: in their testimony the afflicted claimed to have seen devilish and “tawny” apparitions serving or acting as the Devil, and to have suffered wracking physical pains similar to those imposed on torture victims by Indian captors (a symptom that had not appeared at earlier New England witch trials). Many of the accusers in 1692, Norton observes, came from towns other than Salem – over forty of the accused “witches” were from Andover, for instance – and many of the early accusers and alleged witches, like Abigail Hobbs and George Burroughs, were emigrants or refugees from communities that French-allied Abenaki warriors had recently attacked.

Unlike those earlier authors, who characterized the witchcraft crisis as the outgrowth of intra-community conflict, Mary Beth Norton observes that the crisis was a regional event occurring in the context of a disastrous frontier war and a breakdown in provincial political authority. Norton's award-winning IN THE DEVIL'S SNARE offers the most important revision to date of Boyer and Nissenbaum's influential interpretation of the 1692 witch trials, SALEM POSSESSED (1972). By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages.

Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees-including the main accusers of witches-had fled to communities like Salem. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study.

In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton