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. 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. 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. 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. “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. In the Devils Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton 1,289 ratings, 3.
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