American History

Brief Profile of the Authoress
Carol F. Karlsen is a professor of History and Womens Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr Karlsen is the author of three books The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman Witchcraft in Colonial New England, and The Salem Witchcraft Trials A History in Documents. She is a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Award and has won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. She is presently continuing with her research on the representation of witches in the U. S. after the turbulent Salem-Witchcraft trials that had occurred in 1692.

The Setting of the Book
The setting of Karlsens book is colonial New England. The time period that is focused on is 1620 to 1725, give or take a few years. The author devotes particular attention to towns where witch trials had predominated. Such towns seemed to accord a marked importance to wealth and social status. The courts in the towns were wont to rely on religion as much as on the law in the conduct of their trials. Colonial New England in the 17th century was in a state of confusion and disarray. The land derived its beliefs about witchcraft and other matters from England, its mother country. The Puritans had initially been unsure about how to convert their sexual beliefs into public laws. Massachusetts passed its first adultery law as early as in 1651. In the years to come, more laws were passed on a variety of topics.

The laws aimed at fairness to all, but their application by the magistrates and clergy was determined in part by the identity of the accused. This sort of bias was common in those days and was to become manifest in the subsequent witchcraft trials as well. The ambiguous approach of the magistrates towards the alleged witches is manifested in the following endorsement made on August 1, 1692 by Increase Mather and seven others The Devil may sometimes have a permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolical molestations. But  such things are rare and extraordinary, especially when matters come before civil judicatures. (Boyle  Nissenbaum, 1974, p. 10).

Subject and Theme of Book
The author studies the plight of the women who were accused of being witches in colonial New England, graduating into a discussion of larger themes pertaining to the role and position of women in Puritan society. Karlsen introduces her subject thus History offers few subjects as endlessly fascinating or as intellectually frustrating as witchcraft. The word itself evokes images so diverse, ultimately so contradictory, as to defy definition. Especially in its Western incarnation, witchcraft confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves. It confronts us too with systematic violence against women. (p. xi). Karlsen devotes attention to the women who had been accused of being witches, and perceives them to be mostly placed in precarious socioeconomic positions. Such women often had vulnerable positions with regard to inheritance in property, variously owing to their having arrived into an inheritance, being about to receive an inheritance, or having lost an inheritance. Hence, Karlsen repudiates the notion of the women accused of witchcraft as being animated beggars, and instead, views them to have been inheriting women who were apparently persecuted in a patriarchal setup.
 
Karlsen refers to the events that had led to the witch trials of Salem all through the book. The trials had occurred in modern-day town of Danvers, which was then a parish in Salem Town, and known as Salem Village. The mass hysteria had its origin in the bizarre and apparently inexplicable behavior of two little girls -- daughter, Betty, and niece, Abigail Williams -- of the Salem Village minister, Reverend Samuel Parris. The girls had been experimenting with magic, trying to read the future through a makeshift crystal ball. After a few days, the girls started having fits and displaying other symptoms of possession. Soon, the malaise affected other females in the village. The first three women to be arrested were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba. At the Village meetinghouse, Good and Osborne denied that they were witches, but Osborne confessed, and even volunteered a description of the Devil as a thing all over hairy, all the face hairy, and a long nose. (Boyer  Nissenbaum, 1974, p. 10). The witchcraft hysteria took its unfortunate toll of human lives, with 19 being hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem Town, and five dying in prison. This is a negligible fraction of the total number of women who are believed to have been done to death in America and Europe during the witch-hunting years, whose estimates range from tens of thousands into the millions. (p. xii)

Karlsens work has significance beyond the limited context of the Salem outbreak of 1692. Karlsen studies the witchcraft trials from a feminist perspective, despite the fact that in 1692 one-third of the accused witches had been male, as compared with one-fifth having been males in other years. The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women, and this I suspect accounts for much of the fascination and the elusiveness attending the subject. (p. xii). Hence, Karlsen attempts to investigate how far the patriarchal society, growing property inheritances among women, and a veiled gender war may have played a role in the witch-hunting. The book attempts to answer the following questions.

Why were certain women accused of being witches, while others were spared this charge Were women accused of witchcraft on rational grounds, or were there other covert factors behind such accusations To what extent were a womans marital status, social standing, affluence and relationships factors in her being accused of being a witch

Karlsens Organization of Her Book
The book appears to be fairly well organized in its sequence and flow of contents. The first chapter of Karlsens book discusses witchcraft in New England, which comes forth as a set of dynamic religious beliefs (xiii). The following three chapters analyze witchcraft more minutely, and focus on the traits of those who had been accused of witchcraft. Karlsen tries assiduously to identify patterns and causes that might explain why certain individuals were more likely to be accused of witchcraft, and convicted and executed over it, than others. She believes that this was instigated by several unspoken assumptions about women and witchcraft (xiii). The final three chapters attempt to interpret the features of witches in the background of the gender system prevalent then in New England. Karlsen notes the similarities between Puritan ideas of women and New Englands notions of witches. Karlsen studies the role that witchcraft played in framing and maintaining the social structure of New England.  
The contents of the book under review are delineated into various sections, on the basis of time and place. The book contains several charts that attempt to illustrate the relationship that the accused have to various factors like gender, age, affluence and location. The charts amply highlight that women tended to be targeted to a greater degree. Moreover, it is generally agreed that those accused of being witches were mostly from the poorer segments of society. Though some men were executed as witches during the period of massive witch hunting, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witches were generally thought of as women and most of those who died in the name of witchcraft were women. (p. xii). The case that Karlsen builds is that it was usually a woman who was somehow vulnerable that was accused of witchcraft. This category included even women who had arrived into wealth on the untimely demise of their husbands. A promiscuous woman was prone to invite accusation of and trial for being a witch. Marital disharmony occasionally led to the disgruntled husband shrieking witch. Women who could not conceive invited charges of witchcraft no less.

Karlsen employs voluminous references for her work. There are several documents still in existence that show transfers of property by the accused witches to the villages. Karlsen also draws from entries kept in journals and diaries by people living in those times. The Peabody Museum lent Karlsen substantial relevant references, since it preserves 522 original court documents relating to the witchcraft trials. Moreover, Karlsen studies the general profile of the accusers, and realizes that several of them appear to have been engaged in a fierce negotiation  about the legitimacy of female discontent, resentment, and anger. When such negotiation developed into violence, men chose to accuse their female neighbors of witchcraft, in a bid to retain their suzerainty over the established  if   threatened  social order. The key thesis permeating much of the book is that accusations of witchcraft were frequently leveled against women who threatened a smooth transfer of property from the father to the son. The inheritance of land represented the transfer of scarce and valuable properties from one family to another involving an intermediary woman in the patriarchal system. Any threat to property transfer or male dominance evoked unpredictable and extreme reactions to maintain the status quo, particularly in view of the prevailing misogyny of the period. (xiii).

By Way of a Conclusion
At the end of the day, does Karlsen succeed in proving her thesis There probably cannot be a definitive answer in the affirmative to this. Karlsen does prove that it is women who got to be more accused of witchcraft than men. Gender does seem to have played a key role in the subsequent hysteria that had welled up in the community. Karlsen certainly succeeds in stressing the various other factors that seem to have worked in determining who came to be accused of witchcraft and who was spared it. The reader is enabled an insight into the working of a conglomeration of complex socioeconomic factors that came to the fore at the witch trials. One might not share the authors conviction on all that she writes, but one can nevertheless appreciate the logic and trend of her arguments. It would perhaps be difficult to conclusively depict such a complex and passionate affair as the witchcraft trials had definitely been in a neat explanation that may be accepted as the last word on the subject. What Karlsens book succeeds at is pointing to the existence and relevance of various factors that may have influenced the witch trials. Karlsen effectively integrates the trials into the backdrop of the prevailing social norms and ethos. Hence, the reader is helped to view the witch trials not in utter isolation, but as events that the compulsions of the patriarchal society perhaps precipitated.

The lay reader may not be expected to enjoy reading the book, since it pertains to gory and grim events. The books title might have one suppose the book to inform the readers about the practice of witchcraft, but the book will disappoint one in this regard. The authors explicit purpose was to attempt to explain who, where and why had been accused of witchcraft. As Karlsen asserts, Only by understanding that the history of witchcraft is primarily a history of women, however, can we confront the deeply embedded feelings about women -- and the intricate patterns of interest underlying those feelings -- among our witch-ridden ancestors. (p. xiii). Finally, Karlsen maintains that  we still live with witches in our culture, however much their shape may have changed over time. (p. xiii). Hence, the author employs an investigation of the role that gender issues had led to injustice against women during the witchcraft trials over three centuries ago only as a means to awaken the readers into the same factors probably perpetrating similar injustices against the fairer sex in sundry ways in the modern world. Karlsen seeks an end to refined witch-hunting that the modern times must be a witness to, by pointing to the the continuing power of woman-as-witch in our collective imagination. (xiii). The book can be deemed successful insofar as it does leave the reader wiser on such aspects of the witch trials, and more sensitive to feminine concerns.

Book has Invited Positive Reviews
Karlsen may not have convinced the reader about the validity of her assumptions, findings and conclusions, but her book has won accolades for significantly contributing to studies on the subject of witchcraft, and for widening the canvas of the study. The book proves that there is ample scope for further original research into various facets of witchcraft, gender and property issues in colonial New England.  According to one commentator, Karlsens study is provocative, wide-ranging, accessible, and frank. (Lindholt, 1988). The book has won laurels, and it has been observed that its descriptions and analyses stand on their own as valuable contributions to our knowledge of witch lore and the ambiguous status of women in early New England. (Gildrie, 1989). The authors of the pioneering book on the Salem witchcraft issues  Salem Possessed -- Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have reviewed Karlsens book very positively. Boyer lauds Karlsens book for its formidable intellectual power (Boyer, 1988) and Nissenbaum regards it as constituting a major contribution to the study of New England witchcraft (Nissenbaum, 1989).  The book subjects the role of women as witches to a microscopic scrutiny over three centuries after the events had transpired. Furthermore, Karlsen employs an investigation of witch-hunting in New England to draw attention to the disguised witch-hunting that the modern times allow. Karlsens book will prove of keen interest to the scholar, student and the lay person, who wish to acquire an insightful understanding of witchcraft, its underlying causes and provocations, and the role of women in the society of colonial New England.