Salem Witchcraft Crisis Of 1692 Summary

With In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, Mary Beth Norton becomes another participant in the search for the rationale behind what remains perhaps the most irrational collective failure of discretion that America has ever seen.

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings held in Massachusetts. As Norton writes, the unrest began in February 1692, when two young girls in Salem Village had sudden, severe fits of hysteria which doctors could not explain with any earthly diagnosis. As more young girls in the village began to experience similar quasi-epileptic fits, the girls and their relatives began to accuse others in the village of bringing about the fits through "witchcraft." The ensuing sequence of events was

Norton discusses the many witch-hunts that took place before 1692 and writes that "with very few exceptions, [early New Englanders] believed unhesitatingly in the existence of witchcraft." Norton attempts to explain this tendency by pointing out that "In the world of 1692, many events lacked obvious explanations: Children suddenly sickened and died, farm animals suffered mysterious ailments, strange noises were heard and ghostly visions seen." After indicating the psychological vulnerability of 1692 Salem by proclaiming that "during the early 1690s, residents of [Massachusetts] were experiencing many setbacks that needed explanation," Norton highlights some of the unique aspects of the Trials. The staggering number of accusers and accused, exponentially greater than in any previous witchcraft case, "cry out for explanation." The geographic reach of the case, she argues, is significant as well-—whereas prior cases were based on accusations coming from one or two different towns, the Salem Trials involved victims and "witches" from over 22 different locations. While leading accusers in prior cases tended to be older men, the Salem Trials were predicated largely on accusations from young women--- and this often-marginalized demographic held a great amount of influence and directive sway in these Salem proceedings. The rate at which defendants were convicted and executed exceeded any precedent, as did the visible resoluteness with which "justice" was handed down. Norton, faced with these aberrations, devotes Devil's Snare to the pursuit of "a deceptively simple but rarely asked question: why was Salem so different from all previous witchcraft episodes in New