Premise of witchcraft being a reaction to subdue powerful women in colonial New England. ( )

Although now nearly 20 years old, Carol Karlsen's 1987 book, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, is still a compelling and useful work. As Appleby says, it demonstrates the “connections of status, deviance, and power” (p. 253) in a way not seen before its publication. She even goes so far as to list it as one of the seminal works in the realm of serious writing on women's history.
Karlsen examines the topic of witchcraft in a scholarly and methodical manner, without the gruesome accounts or titillating details to which some earlier works resorted. In order to do this, she relies on the “rich description and statistical precision” (p. 71) that Steele says is characteristic of much recent scholarship. Through a careful analysis of the demographic factors of women who were accused, tried, and or convicted of witchcraft, she is able to explore the way the society reacted to women who threatened the church or the traditional patterns of inheritance. Karlsen's increased focus on the economic (as opposed to religious or social) motivations behind witchcraft allegations offers new insight into the relationship between gender, power, and accepted societal roles in colonial New England.
Although her analysis is not complete or perfect, it does offer a marked change to the way the topic was treated in the past. It even goes so far as to anticipate Steele's “hope for new family studies that appreciate gender and its conveyance to children” (p. 73) when it touches on the tendency of witchcraft accusations to run in families. While somewhat flawed by strong feminist overtones (it does not seem to go into nearly enough detail about the men who were accused of witchcraft, especially since, when brought to trial, they were more likely than women to be executed) this is not surprising given the time of its writing. It has stood the test of time and remained an important work.

Carol Karlsen's 1987 book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England provides a sort of demographic, sociological, and anthropological examination of the witchcraft trends in early New England. By examining the records, Karlsen has created what she suggests was the archetypal 'witch' based on income, age, marital status, &c.

She argues in part that women who had inherited or stood to inherit fairly large amounts of property or land were at particular risk, as they "stood in the way of the orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to the next" (p. 116). These women (and others), Karlsen suggests, were targeted largely because they refused to accept "their place" in colonial society. How their actions translated into being accused of witchcraft by - usually - other females is left unexamined for the most part, unfortunately.

This is a fairly useful study into some of the various elements of the witchcraft cases. I don't find Karlsen's arguments as compelling as those made more recently by Mary Beth Norton, for example, but this is hardly a bad book just for that reason. Recommended for those interested in the witchcraft phenonmenon.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/... ( )

Karlsen investigates the demographic background of the women caught up in the witchcraft trials in Colonial New England. Her findings on the relative economic and other power indicators provide insight into possible motives for the hysteria, other than religious zeal. ( )