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

Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare, The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2002, is a scholarly history that reads the Salem witchcraft accusations against the ongoing frontier war between English settlers and Wabanaki forces allied with the French in Maine and New Hampshire, arguing that displaced refugees from that war and their trauma shaped who accused whom and why in ways earlier Salem scholarship, focused mainly on the town's internal social tensions, had underweighted. Norton is a historian of colonial America working from the trial records and contemporary documents themselves. Its strength is that new explanatory frame, connecting Salem to a documented regional conflict rather than treating it as an isolated local event. Its limit is that it is one interpretive framework among several competing scholarly explanations for Salem, economic, religious, psychological, so a claim about the crisis's cause should be attributed to Norton's specific argument rather than presented as the single settled explanation.