Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. By Elizabeth Reis. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. xxii, 212 pp. $32.50, isbn 0-8014-2834-3.)

Elizabeth Reis addresses a question posed by Carol Karlsen in her highly influential 1987 book, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Why was witchcraft associated with women? Unlike Karlsen, who concentrates on the economic position of the accused, Reis advances a cultural interpretation focusing upon the Puritans' belief in the devil and the ways that men and women experienced their inclinations toward evil differently. It is this gendered difference, she suggests, that helps to account for the disproportionate numbers of women who were charged with witchcraft. Without displacing Karlsen, Reis pushes the feminist interpretation of Puritan witchcraft into a more symbolic and psychological realm. . . .

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