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Conjointly, the quality of scholarly interpretation brought the subject of witchcraft and social
history in colonial North America out of the confessional and ideological orbits into which the
work of Upham and others had firmly put it. Beginning with the work of Perry Miller, Edmund
Morgan, and others in the 1940s, scholarly studies of early New England culture, society, and
thought and its relation to witchcraft became a major component of American Colonial history. 
The now classic works of Boyer and Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of
Witchcraft, John Demos, Entertaining Satan, and a number of later studies, including
Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New
England, are good examples of this trend.35 These
studies incorporated a new and vibrant social and cultural history along with the history of
religion as a cultural component. Some of them noted the continuing beliefs in witchcraft into the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States.36 In addition, the new scholarship has also incorporated a
critical, self-reflective dimension, exemplified in the recent work of Bernard Rosenthal and
especially that of David Harley.37 All of these studies
have brought the study of religion, society, and witchcraft in early New England up to the level
achieved in Great Britain by the work of Keith Thomas, Alan
Macfarlane, and Christina Larner and their successors since the early 1970s.38
 
-notes-

35Boyer-Nissenbaum, Cambridge, Mass., 1974; Demos,
Oxford, 1982; Karlsen, New York, 1987.

36For example, Richard Weisman, Witchcraft,
Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Amherst, 1984),  Kenneth
Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1984), David D. Hall,
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(New York, 1989), Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American
People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990) and Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic
and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge, 1992).  On the continuity of beliefs after
the 1690s see Godbeer, 223-232, Demos, 387-400, and Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of
the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America
(New York, 1976).  For a similar phenomenon on the Continent, see Willem de Blécourt, "On
the Continuation of Witchcraft," in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 335-351.  A
classic modern study is Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage
(Cambridge, 1980).
 
37Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the
Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge, 1993); David Harley, "Explaining Salem: Calvinist
Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession," American Historical Review 101 (1996),
307-330.  For an excellent example of working the research cited here and in the preceding note
into broad European studies, see Robin Briggs, Witches and
Neighbors, 310-316.

38For a recent review of Thomas' work, see Jonathan
Barry, "Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft," in Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe,  1-45.  Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional
and Comparative Study (London, 1970).  On Larner, see the memoir by Alan Macfarlane in
Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion (Oxford, 1984), vii-ix.