Mysterious Examples of Religious Persecution Term Paper

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They focus on what can be documented, such as church membership and taxation.

Critique 2: The Devil in the Shape of a Woman

The social historian Carol Karlsen the Devil in the Shape of a Woman eschews economic data and instead focuses more on the symbolic and social orientation of the young girl's anger. Karlsen is specifically determined to understand why so many of the accused were female, poor or, conversely, females who were unexpectedly well-off. Her answer is that they lived world where "there were two types of dangerous trespass: challenges to the supremacy of God and challenges to prescribed gender arrangements" (Karlsen 119). "Witchcraft was rebellion against God," and religion and culture cannot be separated when discussing issues pertinent to Salem, nor merely seen as a mask for economic interests (Karlsen 120). In rebelling against the religious culture, women in the past had often played a prominent role in dissenting sects such as the Quakers, thus the idea of women as religiously suspect was ingrained in Salem.

Thus, Karlsen's methodology is more cultural and less data-driven than Boyer and Nissenbaum's, and although she does use verifiable general facts she does not substantiate her claims with numerical tables or with many primary source excerpts beyond the trial records. Some of her ideas, such as the fact that female anger was especially problematic, and most of the witches were accused of being angry and muttering, could support her gender-based idea, but do not seem as substantive as the correlation between alliances established in Salem Possessed.

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Karlsen's approach seems more impressionistic, and based upon larger ideas about the symbolism of women in religious cultural struggles, and how women, including girls, voice their discontent within patriarchal constraints. Some of the information she does submit, however, is persuasive in countering Boyer and Nissenbaum's suggestion that family, class, and economic conflicts alone explain the rationale of the witch hunt, such as the fact that many of the accused women were involved in property disputes, divorces, and other problematic legal issues in which women were not supposed to dabble (Karlsen 128).

Conclusion

Salem is so far away from us, historically, economically, and culturally, it is difficult to gain a full human picture of its struggles based upon tables and tax records, but in seeking to paint a picture of the religious psychology of the era, we are more apt to see ourselves and our own gender concerns and assumptions about femininity than those of the time. Did Salem really have the same obsession with constraining gender roles as ourselves? But if economics was the only motivating force, why was it articulated in the discourse of the vocabulary of witchcraft? Neither author provides a satisfactory solution entirely. Perhaps both approaches are taken in consort and necessary to get a better idea of what life was like during this perplexing period of American colonial history.

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