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

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England is a nonfiction text written by Dr. Carol F. Karlsen, an American historian specializing in the colonial era, women’s history, and witchcraft. First published in 1987, it was among the first histories of early American witchcraft to focus on the gendered component of this period, studying why most of the witches accused, tried, and executed in 17th-century New England were women. Karlsen uses multi-disciplinary research methods incorporating economics, anthropology, and sociology to argue that witchcraft accusations were a social tool used by Puritan New England to control women’s behaviors and punish women who ventured outside of the bounds of womanhood as dictated by the patriarchal power structure.

Plot Summary

In The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Carol Karlsen argues that the history of New England’s witchcraft trials in the 17th century is specifically gendered. For Karlsen, America’s witchcraft history is intrinsically linked to American women’s history. Insisting that historians have neglected the essential gendered component of New England witch trials, Karlsen frames her research as a response to this gap in historical scholarship.

Chapter 1 gives a comprehensive overview of the figure of the witch, detailing her feared supernatural abilities and hated position in the community. Many in Puritan colonies feared witches’ power of maleficium, which allowed witches to exact harm on others because of greed, jealousy, and other dark emotions. In their alignment with the supernatural and deals with the Devil, witches were believed to upset the natural order. Puritan communities blamed livestock deaths, miscarriages, and general illnesses on the presence of a witch. These systemic, communal fears position the New England witch of the 17th century as a threat to religious and social Puritan order.

In Chapters 2 and 3, Karlsen investigates specific demographic dimensions of the New England witch such as age, marriage status, and class. She determines that those groups who were most vulnerable to being accused of witchcraft were women over 40. Data on accusations is varied when it comes to marriage status, but women who were in line to inherit land from fathers or husbands who had passed away often fell under suspicion from family and neighbors. Women who could no longer bear children because of age, or who were too powerful in the community because of the land they owned, were targeted and stripped of their livelihoods in court.

Chapters 4 and 5 move beyond demographic analysis and seek to identify larger social structures that provided the foundations for witchcraft accusations to take place. Karlsen identifies that Puritans had more progressive views of women than some European clergy, who saw women as innately evil. Puritanism, meanwhile, viewed women as good and Godly—if they stayed in their preordained, strictly-defined roles as determined by the church. Any women who committed religious and social sins such as rebelling against church authority, having sexual relations outside of marriage, or expressing anger and frustration were viewed as ungodly and were thus open to witchcraft accusations.

Karlsen advances her social analyses of 17th-century New England in her final chapters. Here, she shifts her focus to the relationship between the witch and her accusers. Most accusations arose out of economic, familial, and communal disagreements. Karlsen investigates how as the New England colonies grew, land became scarce and economic inequality became more acute. These conditions placed stress on the social relationships of the colonists. In addition to those accusations that stemmed from women’s rebellions against the church, many witchcraft accusations were a result of neighbors or family members seeking to control or punish women who threatened their access to land.

Chapter 7 is a study of possessed accusers, a group within Puritan society that often goes ignored by historians. Possessed accusers were young, working poor women who, according to Karlsen, felt frustrated at their oppressed lifestyles. Fearful of being labeled witches themselves, they expressed their frustrations by adopting wild, uncontrollable mannerisms and claiming to be possessed at the hands of witches. This was the one form of acting out that was acceptable in Puritan society. Karlsen observes that while these possessed accusers were trying to express their agency, they did so at the expense of other women, thus reinforcing the very systems that oppressed them in the first place.

In her epilogue, Karlsen reflects how the same systems that were at work to punish and oppress women in 17th-century New England remain at work today.