The Devil In The Shape Of A Woman Analysis

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Often times when the ordinary person recalls the events of the Salem Witch Trials, one would tend to think of the execution of people by means of religious superstition. However, author Carol F. Karlsen in her book titled “The Devil in the Shape of a Woman” deconstructs the underlying motives behind the trials, in particular focusing heavily on how females were the prime targets throughout this phenomenon. The methodology Karlsen crafts throughout her literary piece is seamlessly divided into chapters. She creates discussions involving a variety of aspects of everyday life of the Puritan woman, such as religious, economic and sexual traits the accused woman shared or possessed distinctly. Perhaps the most significant and noteworthy motive outlined throughout the monograph involves the process of land grabbing. This motive included accusing woman of witchcraft simply based on the foreknowledge that the…show more content…
She recurrently uses primary sources such as court documents and records to supply her argument with enriched facts and complexity. Throughout chapter 1 she uses “Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England” to formulate and construct information about certain court cases involving witchcraft (Karlsen 275). She makes adequate use of the “New England Historical and Genealogical Register” to showcase the Hibbens witchcraft trial (Karlsen 275). She even goes as far as dissecting the amount of inheritance that was left for her family, as well as certain percentages and cuts that were provided on her will. The utilization of Increase Mather’s novel “Cases of Conscience” expresses the ignorance of the Puritan society. As revealed, Mather himself failed to admit that innocent people had been executed, and that there was a flawed belief in the ministers and their accusations of witchcraft (Karlsen

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