In the Devil’s Snare (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Mary Beth Norton
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: 1675-1693
- Setting: Essex County, Massachusetts, and the Maine frontier
- Principal Characters: Cotton Mather, Samuel Parris, Samuel Willard, Sir William Phips, William Stoughton, John Hathorne, Tituba, George Burroughs, Rebecca Nurse, Ann Putnam
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Colonialism, Religion, New England, Trials, Native Americans or American Indians, Violence, Feminism, War, Seventeenth century, Punishment, Witches or witchcraft, Hallucinations or illusions, Devils or demons, Predestination, Puritans or Puritanism, Frontier or pioneer life, Satan or Satanism, Courts or courtrooms, Demoniac possession, Massachusetts, Maine
- Locales: Massachusetts, Maine
For secular Americans of the twenty-first century, everything about the witchcraft outbreak of 1692 appears extremely bizarre. Within a period of five months, at least 144 persons (38 of them men) were prosecuted as witches, 54 persons confessed to practicing demoniac witchcraft, 14 women and 5 men were hanged, another man was pressed to death by heavy stones, and 3 women and 1 man, along with several infants, died while in jail. Rather than taking place in the Dark Ages, the trials were contemporaneous with the Scientific Revolution, when educated persons of Europe and America were...
[The entire page is 1868 words long]
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