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

This is really two books. One is a detailed chronology of what happened in Salem in 1692/3. The other contends that the outbreak of "witchcraft" in Salem was a manifestation of the societal trauma caused by the Indian Wars on the Maine frontier over the previous decades. And the former effort strangles the latter. The book is scholarly, without doubt. Its erudiction, however, becomes numbing....more

This is really two books. One is a detailed chronology of what happened in Salem in 1692/3. The other contends that the outbreak of "witchcraft" in Salem was a manifestation of the societal trauma caused by the Indian Wars on the Maine frontier over the previous decades. And the former effort strangles the latter. The book is scholarly, without doubt. Its erudiction, however, becomes numbing. Examinations and trials of the witches are recorded in copious detail, often with extended citation from the extant original sources. But the author loses the forest for the trees, and the result is drudgery. The book's smugness ("historians have not fully recognized how... examining the chain of events within a chronological framework can reveal the key patterns", p.295) does it no favors. No one in the last 300 years has adequately examined the "chronological framework" of the most famous episode of early American history? Please. The book's thesis is promising but ultimately underdone, lost in the undigestible minutiae. There is something to the idea that "the judges had too much personally at stake in the outcome. They quickly became invested in believing in the witches' guilt, in large part because they needed to believe that they themselves were not guilty of causing New England's current woes" (p.300). But for me that thesis remains unproven, filled with holes that the author never addresses. (Why did the outbreaks start with small children who had no personal exposure to the Maine frontier? Why was Cotton Mather so personally invested in the trials but his own father, Increase Mather, so sceptical? One could go on and on.) For a far livelier and more convincing explanation of the Salem Witch Trials, I recommend Boyer and Nissenbaum's "Salem Possessed".    hide