The Infernal Conspiracy of Indians and Grandmothers

Mary Beth Norton. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 436 pp. Appendices and index. $30.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

Salem Village is probably the most intensively studied community of the early modern Atlantic world, and the Salem witch trials are certainly one of the most exhaustively analyzed events. After several decades of relative inactivity, modern scholarship resumed in 1969. Through the 1980s the rate of publication remained roughly one important contribution every three years. In the 1990s that pace quickened to more than one per year; although it has since slackened, the cycle has not yet run its course.

Chadwick Hansen opened the current cycle with a 1969 book that argued that at least some of the accused at Salem, such as Bridget Bishop, were actually trying to harm their neighbors through malefic witchcraft. Three years later Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum edited an imaginative documentary collection on the crisis, one that is still a marvelous teaching tool and that emphasizes Salem Village itself, its church records, and its social tensions. In 1974 they published their own analysis of this evidence in a study that has had an enormous impact despite one central flaw. They paid almost no attention to gender yet were able to show that the fault line in the witch crisis placed on one side the supporters of the Reverend Samuel Parris, who provided most of the accusations and grimly encouraged the trials, and on the other side the opponents of Parris, many of whom became the victims. In 1977 Boyer and Nissenbaum published a three-volume collection of the legal documents of the trials, but they used the Works Progress Administration's 1938 transcripts of the manuscripts without checking them against the originals. Recent studies have shown that the New Deal compilers did make errors, some of them serious. In 1982 John Demos used the witchcraft records of the seventeenth century mostly to learn what they could tell us about the psychology and sociology of early New England. His book was less an effort to explain Salem than to use Salem and other trial records to understand the culture in which they arose. Two years later Richard Weisman, in a study confined to Massachusetts, distinguished sharply between witchcraft accusations based on maleficium (a specific evil inflicted upon a victim, such as the death of a cow or a child) and those resting on some kind of compact between Satan and the witch, a pattern that became conspicuous in Massachusetts only at Salem. In 1987, Carol Karlsen put gender at the center of witchcraft accusations and argued that those people most likely to be convicted and executed were women without male heirs. They became suspects because they had interfered with the orderly transfer of property, especially landed property, from one generation of men to the next. Whatever Karlsen's explanation may tell us about Connecticut executions, it has little or no relevance to events at Salem. ¹

In 1990 Larry Gragg published the first full-scale biography of Samuel Parris, and a year later Enders Robinson, a descendant of a Salem victim, released a thesis-driven analysis that traced the crisis to a conspiracy that began before anyone was even accused and in which some families deliberately destroyed others. That argument has not won wide acceptance, but Robinson's biographical appendix that gives extensive family data on the first seventy-five people to be accused is an excellent research aid. David Hall collected the documentary record of pre-Salem trials (he also includes some Salem materials), which had remained scattered in various places and difficult to access. In 1992 Gregg published the first narrative history of the Salem crisis since Marion Starkey's 1949 popular history. Richard Trask compiled a documentary record of the outbreak of the Salem crisis through March 1692, a collection that differs from its predecessors in that it is...