Mary Beth Norton sheds new light on Salem witches and war

Professor Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, poses with manuscripts from Cornell Library's Witchcraft Collection. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Linda Grace-Kobas

In a crowded meetinghouse in Salem Village in 1692, Magistrate John Hathorne asked 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs to confess whether she was guilty of witchcraft. "I have seen sights & been scared," the girl replied. She had even seen the Devil once, "at the Eastward, at Casko-bay." The judge and observers of Abigail's testimony knew that the place where Abigail said she met Satan was a frontier town on the front line of the bloody Second Indian War (1688-99).

Abigail's testimony helped tie together "the visible and invisible assaults against New England," asserts historian Mary Beth Norton in her groundbreaking book, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell and author of the acclaimed Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), which was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.

In the Devil's Snare has gotten media attention and rave reviews that academic histories rarely receive. The New York Times Book Review called it "stunning" and "a rabble-rouser of a book." A reviewer on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" called Norton a "master historian-detective" whose narrative is "dazzling." She "builds her case with the precision of a criminal prosecutor," said a Boston Globe reviewer. Her lecture at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she did research on the book, was broadcast on C-SPAN's "Book TV" program. The book recently went into its fourth printing by Alfred A. Knopf.

"I think people are endlessly fascinated by Salem," Norton said in an interview in her McGraw Hall office. The Salem trials had been "in the back of my mind for 20 years," she said, ever since she read the then-unpublished dissertation by Yale student Carol Karlsen which compiled data about all the 17th century witchcraft prosecutions in New England. "Salem was so different from everything else," Norton said.

She put Salem on hold while she finished Founding Mothers & Fathers. Later, after teaching several undergraduate seminars on witchcraft, she began her research for the book.

Cornell Library maintains a Witchcraft Collection that has over 3,000 titles. It was begun in the 1880s by Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr.

"The Witchcraft Collection is rather wonderful; it's one of the reasons I decided to do the book," Norton said. "Burr was a very important early witchcraft researcher." Though she did not have a spectral vision of him while scrutinizing old manuscripts, Norton said she felt Burr was watching her the entire time she was in the collection.

In the Devil's Snare turns the conventional story of the Salem witchcraft trials on its head. Most people have gotten their understanding of Salem from Arthur Miller's The Crucible, in which the aura of repressed sexuality permeates the play. Most books about Salem contain "many, many errors," Norton found.

"The way the story is told is usually very misogynist," she said. "My story doesn't say that crazy girls are responsible. It's much more complicated than that."

Norton dismisses theories that hallucinogens or ergot poisoning caused the crisis. "It's very hard if you read any kind of medical description from [the 17th century] to know what's going on," she said. "The problem of dealing with people in the pre-modern world is, can we apply our psychology to them. I think historians come down on both sides. We have to be really careful. I tried to tell the story as people in the 17th century would tell it.

"Today people reach for medical conclusions about behavior," she added. "Every period has its explanation for some behavior. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was witchcraft. In the 18th, religious conversion. In the 19th, hysteria. In the 20th, it's a disease. Now we look for medical and biological explanations."

Norton had several "eureka" moments while researching her book. One was in England, where she was reading letters sent home by colonists. "I found comments about the trials but not what I thought. There was [much more written] about the Indian wars. And much criticism about how the colony was being run. I thought, these people are trying to tell me something."

Another eureka moment was when she discovered that the two magistrates conducting the witch trials had been responsible for a bloody defeat in the Indian wars by recommending the withdrawal of a militia troop from one of the frontier towns. She writes that they, and other colonial officials, "... attempted to shift the responsibility for their own inadequate defense of the frontier to the demons of the invisible world, and as a result they presided over the deaths of many innocent people."

Norton published an op-ed in The New York Times Oct. 31 that addressed the question of whether the Salem trials were a response to the trauma of war. Her commentary raises many provocative questions about the current "war on terror" in America, and "what happens when a society becomes increasingly fearful and ends up doing a lot of irrational things," she explained.

Norton said, smiling, that her current activities include "recuperating" from the exhausting 15 months during which she wrote In the Devil's Snare, and the hectic book promotion schedule she's had this semester, while still teaching.

In her acknowledgments, Norton cites financial support she received from Cornell through the Dean's Humanities Research Fund, the Col. Return Jonathan Meigs III Fund and the Mary Donlon Alger endowment. She dedicates the book to her "female and Americanist colleagues" in the history department. She was its first female member when she joined it in 1971 and was its only woman for her first five years. It is now one-third female.

Ultimately, she will complete her historical trilogy that begins with Founding Mothers & Fathers (which goes until 1670) and ends with Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. Salem was "a diversion," she said, though it's part of the middle of the trilogy she must now complete. "I'm getting at the flashiest story -- the relationship between women and the state."

Norton confessed to having had trouble sleeping while researching and writing about the Salem trials. She noted that she is a descendent of Mary Bradbury, who was convicted as a witch but not hanged because her husband broke her out of jail. Susannah North Martin, a ninth step-grandmother, was hanged. Since her family roots in New England go back to 1630, other ancestors were involved in the dramatic, and often bloody, events that marked the founding of the New World.

She said she's sleeping better now that she's shed new light on their history.