E. J. Kent has written a fine-grained reconsideration of four well-known and exceptionally well-documented prosecutions of male witches, two in early modern England and two in New England. Kent demonstrates that the accusations made against these men resulted from their conflictive masculinity, from their power and ability either to impose their will on others or to maintain conflict over long periods. Kent's most important conceptual contribution is the insight that gender theory was originally framed to work for studying (oppressed) women and requires revision to be useful in the study of (powerful) men.

These four men shared many characteristics, including litigiousness and a willingness to resort to legal remedies, even expensive ones, to their personal, economic, legal, or social conflicts. Nicholas Stockdale of Norfolk (in the period 1593–1619), Edwin Haddesley of Essex (1597–1607), and the Massachusetts settlers John Godfrey (Springfield, 1600–45) and George Burroughs (Salem, 1692) all were accused, Kent argues, for reasons primarily to do with their masculine identity and power. Some of the author's arguments are speculative (Kent uses “could” or “could be” five times on pages 40–42, and ends the argument on page 44 with “may well”) or are based largely on circumstantial evidence.

Nonetheless, Kent makes good arguments why it was plausible to accuse these men of witchcraft, either primarily or in addition to other crimes. Haddesley, for example, seems to have been a notorious practitioner of learned magic. The common thread was that men perceived as holding and wielding power illegitimately might be liable to witchcraft accusations. Yet many (almost all) other men were, by definition, powerful, and many dabbled in learned magic and were not accused of witchcraft.

In a theoretically sophisticated introduction that will be of particular interest to historians of gender and in each subsequent chapter, Kent takes as a particular target a hypothesis that Lara (not Laura) Apps and I proposed in 2003: that male witches seem to have been implicitly feminized. Kent devotes a good deal of space to showing that in her four cases, the opposite was true. Kent does an excellent job proving this point—for her four cases. However, all we proposed, as a weak hypothesis, was that in demonological theory, there seems to have been some sort of implicit feminization of male witches. We made no arguments regarding specific instances.

If we look at the rough statistics, we see that around 1,000 people were executed for witchcraft in early modern England and New England. Most of those cases took place in what one might call “normal times”: not during mass witch panics. As Kent notes, the largest witch panic in English history was that of 1644–47 in East Anglia, instigated by the witch-finder Matthew Hopkins, in which around 100 witches were executed. These numbers pale by contrast to any number of municipal witch panics in Europe, such as that in the episcopal town of Bamberg (Franconia, now part of Bavaria), where between 1626 and 1631, over 900 people, a large proportion of them men, were accused of witchcraft. They were tortured to obtain confessions and the names of other witches. Between 300 and 600 of them were executed. Of the perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 people executed for witchcraft in the western European world between the later Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, around 2 percent were English. There are two radical differences: between England and the Continent, and between what has sometimes been called “endemic” and “epidemic” witch hunting. In fact, we might speak of witch accusations in “normal times” and “epidemic” witch hunting as quite different phenomena, even if both relied ultimately on belief in witches. English scholarship on witch hunting has not always paid enough attention to these differences.

In England, torture by professional torturers (“pricking” for witches notwithstanding) was not used in witchcraft cases. Hence it was hard to create the domino or avalanche effect that characterized the most destructive (and common) witch trials in European history: a suspect was tortured until she named names of fellow witches; those named were then tortured until they also named names, and so on. A larger proportion of men tended to be caught up in such panics than in “normal times,” probably because the reasons for accusations differed so strongly. One of the very earliest mass, state-sponsored, torture-driven witch trials in Europe took place in the town of Arras (then Burgundy, now France) in 1459–61. This set the pattern for subsequent continental trials during witch panics.

Both on the Continent and in England, accusations in “normal times” followed a more clearly social logic—especially in torture-free England. But the male agency and power Kent demonstrates to have been at the root of these four cases were precisely irrelevant in most accusations of powerful and ordinary men alike on the Continent—namely, during witch panics, which is when a very large number, perhaps even the majority of witches executed on the Continent were tried. The evidence from Arras shows that the trials reached an end when too many notables who could appeal to higher powers (such as a nobleman with the right of appeal to French royal justice) were caught up and accused. At Arras, and at Bamberg, masculine power and privilege ended witch trials.

Kent is probably right that in most cases of “endemic” witch hunting, social and interpersonal conflicts were key to accusations and that the masculinity of male witches played a role in such circumstances. Social conflict also figured in mass trials during panics, as the evidence from Arras and Bamberg clearly shows—but not in clear-cut ways that would allow us to make conclusions about witch hunting as a whole.

To expand on that point: scholars examining trials in a few cases, a town, or a region should avoid suggesting that their findings elucidate the motives for witch hunting in general. This is especially true for England, where witch hunting had a very different complexion than on the Continent. Britain might (still) be in the European Union, but that does not mean that England was always a part of Europe.