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Our results suggest that children do not generally have enough knowledge of satanic ritual abuse to make up false allegations on their own. However, many children have knowledge of Satanism as well as nonreligious facts of violence, death, and illegal activities. It is likely that such facts could prompt an investigation of satanic ritual abuse or possibly serve as a starting point from which an allegation is erected.

Thirty-seven adult dissociative confusion patients who reported ceremony abuse in childhood by satanic cults are described. Patients came from a variety of split scientific settings and geographical locations and reported a number of similar abuses. The most often reported types of ritual abuse are outlined, and a clinical syndrome is offered which includes dissociative states with satanic overtones, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor guilt, bizarre self abuse, unusual fears, of sadistic impulses, indoctrinated beliefs, and substance abuse.

These suspicions were confirmed as she moved through the archival record and began to notice repeated, increasingly' frequent references to "black men," Indians, Indian rituals transmuted into Satanic rites, Indian atrocities remade by accusers into acts supposedly committed by witches, and other evidence of cross-fertilization between Indian-white warfare and Puritanical- Satanic warfare.

Norton thus came to argue that the timing and content of Salem 's crisis can be explained largely in two ways--first, as an expression of the Puritans' abiding belief that Satan operated with God's permission and as a by-product between settlers and Indians. Here Norton's nose for the archive bore fruit: having decided to widen her reading to include non-trial evidence and communities beyond Salem , she unearthed masses of evidence linking warfare on two fronts. She learned of the presence in Salem of numerous migrants from Maine , and the movements of traders who carried information about Indian atrocities from around New England into the Bay Colony. These migrants and traders, significantly, proliferated just as the Salem crisis reached fever pitch, as "unusual suspects" came to be implicated in witchcraft, and as sober Stalemates began to worry about prosecutorial excesses.

Does this mean that In the Devil's Snare has nothing to do with gender? No. Norton seeks to build a bridge between mainstream history writing and feminist scholarship. In this complex and politically delicate undertaking, she very nearly succeeds. She confronted a decades-old problem: historians interested mainly in the social or political roots of the Salem trials tend to be insensitive to gender differences; historians of women, in contrast, sometimes have given short shrift to causation and context--the overarching "why" and "when" questions of history. For the most part, women's historians aim to show, in one way or another, how and why Puritan patriarchs abused or misused women. Karlsen, for example, ferreted out the social and demographic characteristics of the magistracy's victims in order to explain why a particular group of women was singled out for persecution; Reis explored the ways in which Puritan theology itself predisposed its adherents to think of women as likely vessels for Satanic corruption.

Without ignoring these efforts, Norton takes gender analysis in a different direction, moving beyond the familiar misogynist litany and an equally familiar throng of female accusers and victims, toward a vision of history in which women step forward en masse as agents and framers of the community's destiny. For one blazing moment, women in Salem found themselves on top: as Norton points out, they functioned essentially as part of the magistracy. They called leading members of the community to account for their behavior, framed a historical epoch and predominated among accusers and accused.

Beyond this conceptual coup Norton also makes a number of specific contributions to witchcraft studies. In the Devil's Snare captures historical process--the day-to-dryness of events as they unfolded--far better than any other account of the trials. Norton's painstaking reconstruction of events and players leads her to see patterns that other historians have missed. She is able to differentiate the early stage of the crisis, in which locals demonized largely female neighbors, from later, more ambitious' and tangled stages. As the crisis advanced, for example, the list of accused expanded to include not only displaced women, but also well-placed men and women, some of them seemingly allied as traders or conspirators with Indians or with the French. The shift from one stage to another evidently coincided with the appearance of Maine settlers and traders on the scene and the renewal of hostilities between whites and Indians, both in Maine and elsewhere. It was a small leap from warfare against a visible Satanic force of Indians and their French allies to battles against invisible forces the Satanic "black man" or "Indian," witches and familiar spirits. As the juggernaut gained momentum, many of the accused came to be charged not only with diabolical arts but also with other capital crimes among them homicide, wife-beating and the malicious spread of smallpox.

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