The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

With previous chapters having established a demographic understanding of the witch, Chapters 4 and 5 conduct deeper social analyses of Puritan New England and the communal, religious, and gender conditions that produced them. This section of Karlsen’s book situates the figure of the witch within her larger community and sets out to answer such questions as: What was the relationship to the witch to her neighbors? What about the accused set them apart from their surrounding community?

To answer these questions, Chapters 4 and 5 dive deep into historical and anthropological approaches to the topic of 17th-century New England. Karlsen departs from the data analysis that characterized previous chapters and focuses on subjective texts from prominent figures of the time, such as Cotton Mather, to explain the cultural frameworks that gave birth to the witch. In Chapters 4 and 5, Karlsen addresses the difficulties surrounding the history of witchcraft in New England and faces them head on. She thus frames The Devil in the Shape of a Woman as a body of research that was crafted to shed light on areas of this history that have been left dark because of the social, religious, and gendered complexities of Puritan New England.

According to Karlsen, one of the foremost difficulties for historians approaching New England witchcraft is the overwhelming lack of explanation for beliefs in witches, accusations, and forces that drove the trials. Often, reading sources produced in 17th-century New England raise more questions than they answer for researchers. Karlsen defines this dynamic as an issue of the “explicit” versus the “implicit”—that is, what goes said versus unsaid in the sources from 17th-century New England. To explain the phenomenon of the lack of explicit information given in primary sources from 17th-century New England, Karlsen turns to anthropologist Mary Douglas. Douglas states that human societies absorb certain beliefs that are viewed as self-evident facts. Instead of then explicitly stating such obvious facts, these belief systems are expressed implicitly through cultural practices. Karlsen then argues that “in colonial New England, the many connections between ‘women’ and ‘witchcraft’ were implicitly understood” because such beliefs had been carried over from European culture (154). European society had many explicit debates over the sinfulness and Devilish nature of women in the 14th-17th centuries. By the time the Puritans reached American shores, these “once-explicit assumptions about why witches were women were already self-evident” (154).

Karlsen’s anthropological reading of 17th-century New England explains why gender was so often left out of primary sources from this time, and this explains why gender has been left out of modern historians’ accounts of the witchcraft trials. The dynamic between explicit and implicit has been neglected by past witchcraft historians. With her book, Karlsen acknowledges, explains, and responds to this research gap. In quoting Douglas, Karlsen not only supports her own research and proves why it is vital, but also emphasizes to readers precisely how helpful multi-disciplinary methodologies can be. Whereas other historians might have been stumped by aspects of Puritan culture and the primary sources that came out of Puritan New England, Karlsen is able to produce different readings of this history and its sources—as well as offer critiques of previous historical research—because of her method incorporating anthropological sources such as Mary Douglas.

One fruitful example of Karlsen incorporating this anthropological lens onto her historical research is in her analysis of Cotton Mather’s writings. Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman, was a prominent figure of 17th-century New England and one of the major vehicles of advancing Puritan thought and ideology beyond that which the colonists left behind in England. Karlsen analyzes his writings in both Chapters 4 and 5 to interrogate the interrelationship between gender and religion in 17th-century New England. She also incorporates Douglas’ ideas of implicit knowledge in society into her reading of Mather to explain how his writing reflect the unsaid ideologies of Puritan New England that have hitherto gone ignored. For instance, in her closing pages of Chapter 5, Karlsen concludes her analysis of Puritan society’s ideological tensions towards women by reflecting on two of Mather’s texts. While Mather’s 1692 treatise, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, argued “to advocate virtue”(179) among Biblical women, his other publication of that year argued the opposite. His text Wonders of the Invisible World justified the executions of the Salem witch trials because the accused women were in league with the Devil. Karlsen explains this ideological tension present in Mather’s writings through Douglas’ concept of universal, unsaid truths in certain societies. Karlsen argues:

Though Mather’s witchcraft book does not explicitly address the reason why most of his subjects are women, his witches […] stood in direct contrast to the embodiments of female good in Ornaments, all of whom fully accepted the place God had chosen for them and regarded a willing and joyous submission to his will. (179-80)

While those reading Mather’s texts from a contemporary perspective may view his writings as contradictory, Karlsen insists that this is not accidental. Rather, Mather’s views follow a particular ideological trajectory.

Historically, Puritan attitudes towards women grew out of and responded to those formed in England and the rest of Europe. Because links between women and the Devil were widely believed in Europe, those like Mather did not bother to mention them explicitly because they were a given. Karlsen interprets Mather’s work as building off these unsaid truths that existed in Europe and reorienting them to fit the Puritan ideology, which made room for women in ways that old European Protestant ideologies did not.

Women occupied complex, fraught spaces in Puritan society that were more progressive than those in Europe yet still stringent. Women could be Godly but could also be Devilish. For Mather—and the Puritan society that he shaped—those women who were accused were justifiably executed as witches because they were not the submissive women celebrated in Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion. Karlsen’s anthropologically informed reading of primary sources such as Mather’s writing thus enlightens how witchcraft accusations were used to shape and influence not only behaviors of Puritan women, but the larger cultural attitudes towards women. In this way, Chapters 4 and 5 are crucial components in Karlsen’s entire thesis arguing for the necessity of reading 17th-century New England witch trials through a gendered lens and recognizing the epoch’s importance to American women’s history.