Judyth’s Reviews > The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England > Status Update

This book is, understandably, making me angry. It’s actually so easy, in this day and age still, to see people falling into such “hysterics”. Even in the 1600’s, people were suing each other for petty reasons and they’ve never stopped fighting to keep rights from women on every side.

“Acknowledging herself to be ‘a female, a weaker vessel, subject to passion.’” -Katherine Harrison, forced to say these things in court, while fighting for her own property and against witch accusations.

“He [Cotton Mather] and other writers sometimes referred to accused witches in terms such as ‘an ignorant and a scandalous old woman’ or ‘a lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman.’”

“History offers few subjects as endlessly fascinating or as intellectually frustrating as witchcraft. The word itself evokes images so diverse, ultimately so contradictory, as to defy definition. It is associated with old age, frightful ugliness, and female wickedness on the one hand, with youth, beauty, and female sexual power on the other.”