Thirty years ago Christina Larner demonstrated that witchcraft was a gender-related rather than gender-specific crime. Clearly, the number of men accused – perhaps one in five – was no aberration. What it meant for a man to be a witch, however, is debatable. Was ‘witch’ an essentially feminine category? The idea that causing harm using diabolic power was a weapon of the weak, publicly constituted through words and centred on the domestic sphere, suggests it may have been. Of course, here ‘essentially’ is intended to mean ‘implicitly’ not ‘exclusively’. Could the concept of witchcraft ever have been exclusively associated with women, and, if so, how could we know? Demonologists did not exclude men, and for everyone else the notion was more inwardly felt than outwardly expressed – hence implicitly. Perhaps male witches were seen as instruments of demonic masculine power in their own right.
Elizabeth Kent's book comprises six case studies: three from England (1593–1648) and three from New England (1648–1692). None is deeply researched, and so lacks some of the context necessary to explain fully the witchcraft accusation at its heart. Kent admits this is ‘a work of interpretation, not archival revelation’ (p. 22). At the same time, she also considers it to be qualitative rather than quantitative, yet the ‘thick description’ to which she refers might have been thicker. The English examples are all informed by cases from the Court of Star Chamber, a rich source but not an uncontentious one, demanding that its stories be told from another angle. Kent shrugs off received wisdom on this point, apparently because it suits her purpose to do so. Nor do the files themselves feel thoroughly explored, and are footnoted sparingly without reference to specific membranes. There is little that is new. The Star Chamber stories can be found in C. L. Ewen's Witchcraft in the Star Chamber (1938). For New England, John Godfrey's case has been examined by John Demos, and the Hugh Parsons story has also been told by David Hall, Marion Gibson and others.
On the positive side, the episodes are related well, and their implications explored rigorously and imaginatively. In the chapter on Parsons, links made between different anxieties about patriarchy in the mid-seventeenth-century Atlantic world are especially impressive. Kent's secondary source reading is extensive and used to good effect – for instance, Alex Shepard's ‘multi-relational’ model of gender – even if sometimes the argument seems overly dependent on such research. She also makes revealing comparisons with continental European cases. Most importantly, the conceptual core of the monograph is clearly articulated, ensuring its status as a thought-provoking addition to the field. Furthermore, the writing is elegant and sophisticated, which illuminates the concealed complexity of a long-lost culture.
Kent's analysis is guided by theories about gender, in contrast to the work of some historians (this reviewer included) who have written about male and female witches without deploying gender theory. The danger, Kent suggests, is that we read past meanings off the surface rather than probing more deeply. She argues that ‘the analytical category of gender is necessary for understanding the maleness of some English witches, just as it has been for understanding the femaleness of most English witches’ (p. 2). She proposes that we shift our focus from a binary matrix to a complex one, and ‘from the gender of female witches to the gendering of early modern witchcraft’ (p. 3). She also plays down the idea that men were both progenitors of masculinity and its victims. But, then, she pays relatively little attention to class. Poor men had little in common with prosperous men: their masculinities were, in practice, profoundly different. Paupers could not even be kings in their own households because so often they didn't have households.
The point Kent asserts strongly throughout is that male witches were not ‘secondary’ to female witches, but ‘primary’ witches with identically malevolent attributes to what is sometimes uncritically seen as a female norm. Male witches were not cast within a borrowed ideological framework that was feminine, but were comprehensible, sui generis, as male witches. The Suffolk clergyman John Lowes can be understood as a witch ‘with reference to a language of maternity whilst remaining within the masculine cultural domain’ (p. 84). Similarly, Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, was ‘an unruly masculine agent whose negative authority might derive from his masculine context’ (p. 105). The alignment makes even more sense when one considers the male identity of Satan. The New England witch John Godfrey was an ‘incarnate devil’ (p. 134), and George Burroughs ‘functioned as a cipher for the Devil within the witchcraft narrative of the Salem trials’ (p. 146). Kent's chapter on Burroughs and popular demonological ideas is superb.
Furthermore, argues Kent, the male witch terrified his neighbours not because he was marginal, but because he was integrated. This is an interesting observation. But it might be more accurate to say that it was the witch's ambiguity that bothered people rather than her – or his – marginality per se. To be socially ambiguous was to be marginal, but in a particular way that stirred unease and divided opinion, as opposed to generating consensual hatred against a scapegoat. All the men in this study were ambiguous figures without being indigent or disenfranchised.
There were, however, many other men tried for witchcraft who were poor and truly marginal. Their confessions spoke of hardship, oppression and dependency, and suspicions against these unfortunates were sustained by the fact that they were ineffectual in the community, unable to support themselves, and care for (or even begin) families. They may not have been feminised by witchcraft (the argument of historians such as Lara Apps, Andrew Gow and Rolf Schulte), but they were feminised by the poverty that lay behind their accusations. It was poverty, many believed, which had forced them to accept diabolic help. To their neighbours, they had both the motive (impotence, acquisitiveness, vengefulness) and the lack of moral fibre that made surrender to temptation plausible and even, in some cases, probable.
