The Devil In The Shape Of A Woman Witchcraft In Colonial New England

Author : Carol F. Karlsen
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1998-04-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393347197

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The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F. Karlsen Pdf

"A pioneer work in…the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft." —Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University Confessing to "familiarity with the devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events at Salem. More than three hundred years later, the question "Why?" still haunts us. Why were these and other women likely witches—vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession? Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.

Author : Carol F. Karlsen
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1998-04-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393317596

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The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F. Karlsen Pdf

In this work, Carol Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in 17th century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society. "A pioneering work in . . . the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft".--Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University.

Author : Carol F. Karlsen
Publisher : Peter Smith Publisher
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Witchcraft
ISBN : 0844670200

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The Devil in the Shape of a Woman by Carol F. Karlsen Pdf

In this work, Carol Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in 17th century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society. "A pioneering work in . . . the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft".--Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University.

Author : Marilynne K. Roach
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2013-09-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780306822346

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Six Women of Salem by Marilynne K. Roach Pdf

The story of the Salem Witch Trials told through the lives of six women Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been "afflicted," 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn't include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders. All this adds up to what the Rev. Cotton Mather called "a desolation of names." The individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation. And although the flood of names and detail in the history of an extraordinary event like the Salem witch trials can swamp the individual lives involved, individuals still deserve to be remembered and, in remembering specific lives, modern readers can benefit from such historical intimacy. By examining the lives of six specific women, Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live through it unchanged.

Author : Alison Games
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2010-10-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442203594

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Witchcraft in Early North America by Alison Games Pdf

Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games's engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The documents begin with first encounters between European missionaries and Native Americans in New France and New Mexico, and they conclude with witch hunts among Native Americans in the years of the early American republic. The documents—some of which have never been published previously—include excerpts from trials in Virginia, New Mexico, and Massachusetts; accounts of outbreaks in Salem, Abiquiu (New Mexico), and among the Delaware Indians; descriptions of possession; legal codes; and allegations of poisoning by slaves. The documents raise issues central to legal, cultural, social, religious, and gender history. This fascinating topic and the book’s broad geographic and chronological coverage make this book ideally suited for readers interested in new approaches to colonial history and the history of witchcraft.

Author : George Lincoln Burr
Publisher : Library of Alexandria
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Witchcraft
ISBN : 9781465546609

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Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 by George Lincoln Burr Pdf

Author : Mary Beth Norton
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307426369

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In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton Pdf

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

Author : Laurie Winn Carlson
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1999-07-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781566633390

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A Fever in Salem by Laurie Winn Carlson Pdf

This new interpretation of the New England Witch Trials offers an innovative, well-grounded explanation of witchcraft's link to organic illness. While most historians have concentrated on the accused, Laurie Winn Carlson focuses on the afflicted. Systematically comparing the symptoms recorded in colonial diaries and court records to those of the encephalitis epidemic in the early twentieth century, she argues convincingly that the victims suffered from the same disease. A unique blend of historical epidemiology and sociology. —Katrina L. Kelner, Science. Meticulously researched...the author marshalls her arguments with clarity and persuasive force. —New Yorker

Author : Patricia U. Bonomi
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2003-07-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780195303797

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Under the Cope of Heaven by Patricia U. Bonomi Pdf

In this pathbreaking study, Patricia Bonomi argues that religion was as instrumental as either politics or the economy in shaping early American life and values. Looking at the middle and southern colonies as well as at Puritan New England, Bonomi finds an abundance of religious vitality through the colonial years among clergy and churchgoers of diverse religious background. The book also explores the tightening relationship between religion and politics and illuminates the vital role religion played in the American Revolution. A perennial backlist title first published in 1986, this updated edition includes a new preface on research in the field on African Americans, Indians, women, the Great Awakening, and Atlantic history and how these impact her interpretations.

Author : Paul Boyer,Stephen Nissenbaum
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 1976-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674282667

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Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer,Stephen Nissenbaum Pdf

Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, nineteen bodies swinging on Gallows Hill. The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it. From rich and varied sources—many previously neglected or unknown—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. “Salem Possessed,” wrote Robin Briggs in The Times Literary Supplement, “reinterprets a world-famous episode so completely and convincingly that virtually all the previous treatments can be consigned to the historical lumber-room.” Not simply a dramatic and isolated event, the Salem outbreak has wider implications for our understanding of developments central to the American experience: the breakup of Puritanism, the pressures of land and population in New England towns, the problems besetting farmer and householder, the shifting role of the church, and the powerful impact of commercial capitalism.

Author : David D. Hall
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2005-02-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822382201

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Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England by David D. Hall Pdf

This superb documentary collection illuminates the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting in seventeenth-century New England. The cases examined begin in 1638, extend to the Salem outbreak in 1692, and document for the first time the extensive Stamford-Fairfield, Connecticut, witch-hunt of 1692–1693. Here one encounters witch-hunts through the eyes of those who participated in them: the accusers, the victims, the judges. The original texts tell in vivid detail a multi-dimensional story that conveys not only the process of witch-hunting but also the complexity of culture and society in early America. The documents capture deep-rooted attitudes and expectations and reveal the tensions, anger, envy, and misfortune that underlay communal life and family relationships within New England’s small towns and villages. Primary sources include court depositions as well as excerpts from the diaries and letters of contemporaries. They cover trials for witchcraft, reports of diabolical possessions, suits of defamation, and reports of preternatural events. Each section is preceded by headnotes that describe the case and its background and refer the reader to important secondary interpretations. In his incisive introduction, David D. Hall addresses a wide range of important issues: witchcraft lore, antagonistic social relationships, the vulnerability of women, religious ideologies, popular and learned understandings of witchcraft and the devil, and the role of the legal system. This volume is an extraordinarily significant resource for the study of gender, village politics, religion, and popular culture in seventeenth-century New England.

Author : Elaine G. Breslaw
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1997-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780814713075

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Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem by Elaine G. Breslaw Pdf

Tituba, a young house servant from the West Indies, allegedly influenced and encouraged occult activities among teenage girls in 17th century Massachusetts, which led to the infamous witch hunts of Salem. This book offers "an imaginative reconstruction of what might have been Tituba's past".--TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. "A valuable probe of how myths can feed hysteria".--THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD. 15 photos.

Author : Elizabeth Reis
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 1999-01-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501713330

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Damned Women by Elizabeth Reis Pdf

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity.Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed.Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.

Author : Thomas A Foster,Carol Berkin,Jennifer L Morgan
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2015-03-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781479812196

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Women in Early America by Thomas A Foster,Carol Berkin,Jennifer L Morgan Pdf

Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

Author : Elaine G. Breslaw
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 534 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2000-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780814798508

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Witches of the Atlantic World by Elaine G. Breslaw Pdf

Breslaw (history, U. of Tennessee) has created a fascinating reader--for undergraduate classes in history, anthropology, religious studies, or women's studies--surveying the subject of witches, witch hunts, and the larger political context of both. The sections, which cover Christian perspectives, non-Christian beliefs, diabolical possession, issues of gender, and a lengthy section on the Salem witch trials, each include an introduction by Breslaw, primary sources, then secondary commentaries on the sources. The latter are excerpts from books and articles. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR