DAMNED WOMEN: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
Elizabeth Reis
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.
ELIZABETH REIS teaches history and women's studies at the University of Oregon and is the editor of Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America.
Women's Studies|Gender Studies|Religion|History - American More about this Title
Paper 1999 240pp 6 x 9
13 black-and-white illustrations
ISBN: 0-8014-8611-4 $16.95 | £12.50 Quantity
Cloth 1997 248pp 6 x 9
13 black-and-white illus.
ISBN: 0-8014-2834-3 $42.50 | £31.50
NOT ALL WIVES
Women of Colonial Philadelphia
Karin Wulf
Marital
status was a fundamental legal and cultural feature of women's
identity in the eighteenth century. Free women who were not
married could own property and make wills, contracts, and court
appearances, rights that the law of coverture prevented their
married sisters from enjoying. Karin Wulf explores the
significance of marital status in this account of unmarried women
in Philadelphia, the largest city in the British colonies.
In a major act of historical reconstruction, Wulf draws upon
sources ranging from tax lists, censuses, poor relief records,
and wills, to almanacs, newspapers, correspondence, and poetry to
recreate the daily experiences of women who were never-married,
widowed, divorced, or separated. With its substantial population
of unmarried women, eighteenth-century Philadelphia was much like
other early modern cities, but it became a distinctive proving
ground for cultural debate and social experimentation involving
those women. Arguing that unmarried women
shaped the city as much as it shaped them, Wulf examines popular
literary representations of marriage, the economic hardships
faced by women, and the decisive impact of a newly masculine
public culture in the late colonial period.
Karin Wulf is Assistant Professor of History at American
University. She is coeditor of both Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A
Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America and the forthcoming
Diary of Hannah Callendar, 1758?1788.
American History|Women's Studies|Regional-Northeast
Cloth Available in JANUARY 1999 240pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 maps, 5 black-and-white photographs, 7 tables
ISBN: 0-8014-3702-4 $39.95s | £29.50
INDIANS AND COLONISTS AT THE
CROSSROADS OF EMPIRE
The Albany Congress of 1754
Timothy J. Shannon
On the eve
of the Seven Years' War in North America, the British crown
convened the Albany Congress, an Anglo-Iroquois treaty
conference, in response to a crisis that threatened imperial
expansion. British authorities hoped to address the impending
collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in the northern colonies,
a problem exacerbated by uncooperative, resistant colonial
governments.
In the first book on the subject in more than forty-five years,
Timothy J. Shannon definitively rewrites the historical record on
the Albany Congress. Challenging the received wisdom that has
equated the Congress and the plan of colonial union it produced
with the origins of American independence, Shannon demonstrates
conclusively the Congress's importance in the wider context of
Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic empire. In the process, the
author poses a formidable challenge to the Iroquois Influence
Thesis. The Six Nations, he writes, had nothing to do with the
drafting of the Albany Plan, which borrowed its model of
constitutional union not from the Iroquois but from the colonial
delegates' British
cousins.
Far from serving as a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional
Convention, the Albany Congress marked, for colonists and
Iroquois alike, a passage from an independent, commercial pattern
of intercultural relations to a hierarchical, bureaucratic
imperialism wielded by a distant authority.
Timothy J. Shannon is Assistant Professor of History at
Gettysburg College.
Copublished with the New York State Historical Association
American History|Regional-Northeast
Cloth Available in JANUARY 1999 320pp 6 x 9
3 maps, 12 black-and-white photographs, 2 tables
ISBN: 0-8014-3657-5 $39.95s | £29.50
September 29, 2000