In Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America, Crane writes of American legal culture before 1800 with much candor, and astutely posits that law deserves historical analysis because it both reflects and shapes conceptions of commerce, property, community, family, gender, and race. With particular sensitivity to issues of gender, Crane explores cases involving slander, witchcraft, spousal abuse, attempted rape, property rights, and the paranormal to highlight the interaction between law and everyday life in early America. Insistent on the value of microhistory, Crane presents each chapter as an independent story. Together, the chapters demonstrate how everyday Americans, including those on the fringe of society, sought legal redress for injuries to their property, bodies, and personal honor. Interestingly, Crane demonstrates that issues of gender, economics, and honor were often intertwined in the law. Sexual slander in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, for example, targeted and harmed women's economic reputations as businesspersons.

The work relies on a rich array of sources, including court documents, jury lists, census data, statutes, newspapers, and personal writings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Amsterdam, Bermuda, New England, and Maryland. Crane uses these diverse sources to discover the rationales behind perceived legal injuries. Out-migration, gender disparity, and Quaker proselytizing may have spawned witchcraft accusations in Bermuda, or the fragility of widows' economic security may have made them insistent on favorable property bequests or capable of false rape accusations. Some readers may find this kind of speculation unnerving, but it is thoughtfully presented and creates a captivating narrative.

The text suggests that many “common folk” (albeit largely white common folk) could employ and shape the law. It also elucidates commoners' legal savvy. For example, Comfort Taylor, a white widow in her late 30s, used her knowledge of ambiguities within the law to initiate rape charges against a slave in mid-eighteenth-century Rhode Island. She successfully argued the slave's personhood, which made him capable of the assault, but then transformed him into the property of his master to ensure her access to a monetary judgment. Similarly in Maryland in the 1790s, one man created conversations with his deceased friend in order to persuade a court of the intent of his friend's will, while carefully and cleverly avoiding personal charges of deliberate deception. However, Crane also understands that commoners' legal power, agency, and machinations were limited. For example, entrenched patriarchy prevented abused women's informal familial and communal networks of aid from seeking legal assistance until it was too late. Although abused women reached out to family, friends, and neighbors, patriarchal gender roles prevented state intervention except in cases of homicide.

Beyond discussing individual cases, Crane argues that the common law, employed by common folk, created a common culture. The legal culture was unusually inclusive, as community members from New England to Bermuda, slandered, accused, and protected one another. Their collective and individual conceptions of the law reified the significance of law as a binding social force. Although this argument may not be novel, its presentation through microhistories is original. This, however, may leave readers searching for more nuanced connections between the disparate case studies. The reader is left with other questions as well. For example, how does Crane's work speak to uses of the law to contest gender constructions? Why were matters of property and honor central to the claims of common folk? Notwithstanding the author's italicized transitions between chapters, readers may find themselves underwhelmed by the connections between specific legal examples. The final two chapters of the book, although sensitive to commoners' real and presumed legal savvy, are the least connected to larger themes. The inherent tendency of microhistory to avoid sweeping analysis should not, however, cloud Crane's achievements. Her use of very dramatic cases reveals the more mundane and commonplace functions of the law in the lives of many early Americans, as well as the influences of the law on other social constructs.