In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton

Such concerns induced them to ask the leading questions of many confessors that elicited concurring responses, although Ann Sr.’s vision of the “little Red book” appears to have been her own. Because all sorts of occult practices were linked to the devil, clergymen and magistrates could readily envision the dangers potentially lurking in the pages of those volumes. After decades in which the sole Bay Colony press published nothing but sermons and official documents, not only were several printers in Massachusetts and the middle colonies now producing almanacs and primers, but increasing numbers of booksellers were also importing books on such topics as astrology and fortune-telling. The historian Jane Kamensky has cogently argued that the obsession with books (especially small, easily concealed ones) evident in the Salem records resulted from an explosion in the availability of such volumes after the mid-1680s.

And EmersonWBakers brilliant Storm of Witchcraft makes a solitary mention on p.

Knopf.“Samuel Willard’s account of her afflictions, widely available in published form after 1684 in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences, almost certainly influenced the statements offered eight years later during the witchcraft outbreak. Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devils Snare, includes a dismissive footnote on p. Norton talked about her book, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, published by Alfred A. Norton answered questions after her presentation. The Puritans believed that the defeats were God’s way of punishing the colonists for their sins. Norton argues that the situation had less to do with sorcery than with the atmosphere of paranoia and fear in the colonies caused by the losses from the first and second Indian wars.

Using newly available materials from trial records, letters, and diaries, Ms. The trials, she concludes, were driven more by politics than by superstition. The book is a re-examination of the 17th-century events that resulted in 144 people, including 38 men, being accused of witchcraft. In this lecture, historian Mary Beth Norton examines the original court documents from the Salem witchcraft trials she places these well-known events in the context of the Indian wars and other witch trials in New England.

In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton