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Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft

University of Colorado, USA, isaac.reed{at}colorado.edu

Sociological explanations of the Salem witch trials, and of witch-hunts in the West more generally, have focused on economic transition, political instability, and the functional aspects of witchcraft belief. A more interpretive approach to the explanation of Salem is proposed: an analysis of the intersection of the gendered symbolization of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts and the larger tensions within Puritan culture at the close of the 17th century. A broad theoretical implication of this interpretive shift is also proposed: that a cultural-sociological approach to witch-hunting as symbolic action can bring together feminist theorizations of witch-hunting as an exercise in patriarchal power with the social history of the broad, structural causes of witchhunting in pre-modern Europe and New England.

Key Words: cultural sociology • culture • gender • interpretation • Salem witch trials • witch-hunts

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