Describing the situation from a seventeenth-century perspective, Norton examines the crucial turning points, the accusers, the confessors, the judges, and the accused, among whom were thirty-eight men. Mary Beth Norton gives us a unique account of the events at Salem, helping us to understand them as they were understood by those who lived through the frenzy.
Seventeen months later, after legal action had been taken against 144 people, 20 of them put to death, the ignominious Salem witchcraft trials finally came to an end. In January 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, two young girls began to suffer from inexplicable fits. Introduction - Under an evil hand - Gospel women - Pannick at the Eastward - Dreadfull apparition of a minister - Many offenders in custody - Endeavors of the judges - Burroughs their ringleader - All sorts of objections - New witch-land
Such concerns induced them to ask the leading questions of many confessors that elicited concurring responses, although Ann Sr.’s vision of the “little Red book” appears to have been her own.Includes bibliographical references and index Because all sorts of occult practices were linked to the devil, clergymen and magistrates could readily envision the dangers potentially lurking in the pages of those volumes. After decades in which the sole Bay Colony press published nothing but sermons and official documents, not only were several printers in Massachusetts and the middle colonies now producing almanacs and primers, but increasing numbers of booksellers were also importing books on such topics as astrology and fortune-telling. The historian Jane Kamensky has cogently argued that the obsession with books (especially small, easily concealed ones) evident in the Salem records resulted from an explosion in the availability of such volumes after the mid-1680s. “Samuel Willard’s account of her afflictions, widely available in published form after 1684 in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences, almost certainly influenced the statements offered eight years later during the witchcraft outbreak.
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