Altercation, Alliteration, and Adumbration: How Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores Could Say More

Intercourse with the devil, bestiality, and testimony from beyond the grave are just some of the intriguing events with which Elaine Forman Crane tantalizes her readers. Given such topics, Crane could very well be writing about Ira Levin's onesie-outfitted spawn of Satan in Rosemary's Baby, 1980s Italian adult films, or the murdered husband's return to his pottery-making wife in director Jerry Zucker's film Ghost. Despite—or perhaps in acknowledgement of—the baffling number of current pop culture references to such sexy (or perhaps 'deviant') subjects, there seems in Crane's book an effort to cast early America— for scholarly inquiry—as equally titillating ground. But early America doesn't really need any help being sexy. Those early days of which Crane writes were when America was quite possibly at its absolute sexiest—whether the sex was supernatural, depraved, or simply commercial. Crane's (and I suspect her editors') emphasis on early American sex and sensationalism relies somewhat on the conservatism of our current time. Add to that academic publishers' understandable obsession with alliterative and sensationalistic titles as tools of professional survival, and you have a book that wants to label the ways in which sexuality, abuse, and the supernatural (to name a few) shaped law and vice versa—but one that ultimately holds back.

The book's title and selection of early legal cases or microhistories, which range from the seductive to the truly bizarre, set up an expectation that early America was extraordinary. Yet the analysis reveals that the period's relationship between society and law is strikingly similar to that of our own time; indeed it laid the foundation for it. The book's strength is that it demonstrates the fact that early American common law shared with the Netherlands and England more ideals—and indeed extended them into the emergence and development of the United States—than one might have thought, sexiness and scandal aside. Its shortcoming is that it works hard to make a point that doesn't need making, and it misses some opportunities to explain in more detail what exactly these little-known stories tell us about the relation between early American daily life and common law more broadly. Crane mentions that the relation between the two constitutes a "uniquely American national identity," but what is particularly unique about it is at times left for the reader to guess (p. 16).

After a compelling introduction to narratives and legal cases featuring— among other things—witchcraft, slander, murder, and ghosts, Crane takes us to New Amsterdam to reveal that gendered slanderous terms speak less to sex and sexual behavior than to economics. The author's overview of Dutch colonial law is thorough and engaging. Tracing Dutch and English magistrates' concern with community corruption at the hands of corrupt individuals, Crane demonstrates that these anxieties contraposed both the Bible's and the Enlightenment's interest in the individual over the group, as well as the magistrates' worry over the possible wrongful punishment of these individuals. Accounting for the period's economic context, she reveals the connection between reputation and remuneration and fears of women's entry into the marketplace. In this first chapter, slander, though gender-inflected, functioned more as an attack on one's commercial activities than on one's sexuality. In a sexually permissible New Amsterdam, what exactly made the slur "whore" pack such a punch? Crane contends that it was an insult to the woman's lack of morals rather than an accusation that she was actually a prostitute. The microhistory of Marretie Joris, who sued Gabriel de Haes for calling her such a thing, reveals how slurs become "less useful as a tool for distinguishing gender roles" (p. 39). Men and women defended themselves more against accusations of malfeasance than whoredom or cuckoldry, for example.

The chapter's thesis is convincing and well...