In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, examines the Salem witchcraft crisis from a seventeenth-century perspective, drawing not only on court records, but also on correspondence and journals from the late 1680s to the early 1690s. She offers a new interpretation of the witchcraft trials, placing them in the context of the terrifying reports of armed frontier conflicts and massacres that profoundly colored the collective mentality of the inhabitants of Salem and surrounding Essex County, Massachusetts.