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.
Karlsen's approach seems more impressionistic, and based upon larger ideas about the symbolism...
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