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See this thread for information on earlier witch trails.
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Historian Examines Drama of America's Great Witchcraft Scare
By C.K. WOLFSON
Two days before people crowded into the Pease House in Edgartown to hear historian Mary Beth Norton discuss In The Devil's Snare (Alfred A. Knopf, $30), her new, much acclaimed book about the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, the author relaxed with a visitor in her contemporary West Tisbury home.
A distant relative of convicted witch Mistress Mary Bradbury, the Cornell University professor traces her own ancestry to the 1600s in Salisbury. Smiling broadly, she said, "There were many times when I worked on this book that I wanted to summon up the ghosts of my own ancestors to ask them about the events because they lived through it." She laughed and added, "And I really wish that, just for 10 minutes, I could have communed with my genes."
A Vineyard summer resident since the mid-1970s, Ms. Norton did much of the work on In The Devil's Snare at a folding card table on her screened porch. A lively and articulate speaker, she describes Island summers of writing in the morning, afternoons at Lambert's Cove Beach and evenings with a close group of "academic, summer-crowd friends," an informal group she refers to as the "Uppity-Up Academic Women's Group," who regularly meet for dinner.
But her attention lately has been focused on the results of 15 months of writing. "One of the things I wanted to accomplish in the book was to tell the story of Salem as it would have been experienced at the time," she said. It was a topic she had contemplated for about 20 years, "ever since I read a book that showed me how different the Salem episode was from other witchcraft episodes in 17th-century New England," she said, adding, "Because the 17th century was a pre-Enlightenment period and before the scientific revolution, many things were not understood. All kinds of events could not be explained by what people knew, so witchcraft became a kind of default explanation."
Further fueling her interest was the central role women played in the events. "If you think about it," she said, "it's the most important public event in American history before the rise of the women's suffrage movement in the 19th century in which women played the central role."
Ms. Norton, a practiced researcher (her 1996 Pulitzer-nominated book, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, is based on legal records), spent almost five years in this country and abroad investigating the witchcraft trials.
"I am the only person who has ever worked on the Salem Witchcraft crisis who read 8,000 other 17th-century court cases first," she said. "And I think that gave me an insight into the dynamics of what went on in the courtrooms and an understanding of the unspoken subtext behind a lot of the questions and the interrogations. It gave me a different way of reading the records and enabled me to put them together in a different way."
Her research exposed the role of Sir William Phipps, the governor of the colony, who lied about his complicity. "The research I did in London at the public record office was very important for me," she said, "in recognizing the importance of the Indian War because letters that came to the colonial office in London included not just official reports but excerpts from letters written by private individuals in Massachusetts to friends in London, one of the ways to get information about the colonies."
Those who attended the Martha's Vineyard Historical Society lecture Sunday were treated to the professor's rapid-fire delivery and animated voice. Standing at a podium in the crowded room, she wove a factual drama of political deceit and military accountability with gusto. Her enthusiastic delivery, affinity for the subject and obvious mastery of the material lent an accessibility to the information and held the audience in rapt attention.
The audience was instructed to note the multicultural character of the New England area and the impact the fear generated by the Indian wars had in demonizing enemies and making heroines of accusers. It was the military, Ms. Norton explained, who shifted accountability for their defeats to the devil, helping create the Salem crisis. The Rev. George Burroughs, it was decided, bewitched the soldiers so they couldn't fight the Indians.
"A light bulb had been lit in the mind," she said and, using a 17th-century, New Testament phrase, explained the then-popular argument: "God lengthened the chain of the devil so that he could do more to New Englanders than he had previously done." In a delivery that seemed to rise in speed and gesture with the small room's increasing temperature, she explained the emphasis on obtaining confessions from the accused themselves - a contrast to the more typical witchcraft trial depicted in Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, a parable for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, which focused on forcing accusers to name names.
Of the women accusers, she said, "They had suffered deeply from the war, and I have a great deal of sympathy when they accuse the people they think were responsible for their sufferings." While dismissing any presence of the occult, Ms. Norton has shown that the accusers enhanced their testimony as time passed because of the attention they were generating and their new status as heroines.
"I think the Salem witch trials serve as a cautionary tale for us today about what we do when we're confronting a mysterious enemy that seems to appear from nowhere and disappear again into nowhere. I think it tells us something about what can happen when a region or a nation is gripped by fear and searches for explanations and sees demons behind every rock.
"One of the things that historians are very concerned about now with the Bush administration is their desire to keep many things secret such as deportation hearings as so forth. If you talk about cautionary tales - I mean, do we want to wait 310 years until we find out the truth about the Bush administration's decisions about the potential war with Iraq?"
Ms. Norton is happily surprised by the attention her book is generating. "I knew that it was going to be a very different way of looking at Salem, a different interpretation, but I wasn't sure that everybody would recognize it and respond to it the way they have."
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