Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America by Elaine Forman Crane (review)

Crane encourages her readers to think of her book's six chapters as a collection of short stories, except that none of the tales are fictional; they all depict events that took place in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Remarkably, enough historical material has survived for Crane to recount these dramas in vivid detail. She has culled and interpreted legal cases concerning domestic violence, slander, witchcraft, attempted rape, eviction, and inheritance like a skillful and patient translator. The thread that connects all of the cases is early Americans' use of the law to resolve their differences, whether they resided in New Amsterdam, Rhode Island, or Bermuda. Indeed, the law developed from, and was confirmed by, ordinary people's adherence to customs and compliance with authority. Modern readers should have no trouble comprehending the significance of the cases for the actual participants, particularly in regard to their gendered expectations of daily life, but the subtleties of interpretation are another matter altogether—hence this reviewer's choice of the word "translation" to describe what Crane has accomplished. Her fluency with early American language, including its slang and idiomatic expressions, and her ability to piece together the strange fragments found in the court records, is nothing short of extraordinary.

What was the weight and scope of the law? Was fornication worse than adultery? Was bestiality worse than witchcraft? Could attempted rape be prosecuted successfully? Crane is masterful at explaining the implications of the charges against the accused. We come to understand how defendants tried to divert public scrutiny of their conduct to that of others to protect their reputations, or how they managed to escape punishment by appealing to sympathetic juries. Crane is also a gifted narrator. She weaves fascinating sagas out of what is sometimes elliptical documentary evidence. She is able to hint at the emotions that must have been at play without presuming to assert a fabricated knowledge of her subjects' innermost thoughts and feelings.

Many of Crane's central characters were familiar with the law. Unlike today, when only trained attorneys can be expected to know legal details, the laymen and women in Crane's book were often apprised of the fine points of prosecution and defense strategies. Even in the relatively rare cases of witchcraft, many of them seemed to recognize what would draw perilous attention and what might end with an apology and an admission of slander. Even though Crane knows the outcomes of the cases that she chronicles, she does not tip her hand, giving them the air of gripping mystery stories. In each episode, she argues that popular understanding was largely consistent with the law, even when trials turned on events, like ghost sightings, that now seem remote and bizarre to us. Early Americans had a shared sense of reality, and the law gave it substance.

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores immerses readers in lives that we might have assumed to be inaccessible. But despite this enhanced familiarity, much about the colonial period remains cryptic. Crane writes, "Even a historian who specializes in speculation is unable to subdue the surviving documents and force them to confess" (141). Happily for us, Crane comes as close as one can.