In the Devil's Snare Quotes

“The accused and the magistrate next engaged in a dialogue about what constituted witchcraft. If she had not signed the book, had she dealt with “familiar Spirits”? If not, how could her apparition hurt the afflicted? Hathorne observed that “you seem to act witchcraft before us, by the motion of your body.” When Bishop responded, “I know not what a Witch is,” Hathorne pounced. “How do you know then that you are not a witch?”
― Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

“The autumn hit-and-run raids and the colonists’ attempts to retaliate ended with the early onset of especially heavy snowfalls that year. Over the next few months, the Massachusetts government dispatched to Maine companies of “country soldiers” to augment the inadequate regional militia forces. The troops, however, proved a mixed blessing to local residents and stimulated great controversy, especially in Black Point. There taxpayers later complained bitterly that they had not asked for the soldiers and had derived little benefit from their presence, yet they had nevertheless been required to pay the soldiers’ expenses. Even more galling, they explained, was the fact that the local commander, Joshua Scottow, who had moved to Maine from Boston a few years earlier, had used the men for his own personal gain, employing them to pave his yard, move his barn, and build a palisade for his property.”
― Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

“Cruell mordrous Rogs in the first Indian war”; it was, he emphasized, “very straing that a govnor shoold bee soe Carless of his majestys subjects & Intrest.”
― Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

“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. 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. 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. 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. 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.”
― Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

“Goody Putnam thereby became the first to follow Tituba in describing the devil’s book—an object that, in many guises, was eventually to appear in numerous statements by both accusers and confessors. The afflicted later referred repeatedly to being tempted to write their names in Satan’s book, while confessors typically described actually having done so. More than two decades earlier Elizabeth Knapp had been the first New Englander to indicate that the diabolic covenant was embodied in a book rather than merely a piece of paper.”
― Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692