ABSTRACT
The confessions made by the Suffolk women charged with witchcraft in 1645 indicate that, in many cases, accused women were contextualising their own experiences within a wider demonological framework. Often they were judging themselves in their roles as wives and mothers – the witch, after all, was the behavioural opposite of the stereotypical role model of the ‘good wife’. There are noticeable references to infanticide, suicide and possible abuse. It could well be that women who possessed no other language to describe certain traumatic experiences took on the conceptual framework of demonology as a way of explaining events. Witch-hunting was a method of behavioural control in which women as victims (in many senses of the word) were themselves participating because they had no other framework of reference.
