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Excerpt from the Reclaiming Quarterly Spring 1997 Reviewed by M. Macha NightMare
All during my childhood in the Delaware Valley in the 1940s and '50s, I heard stories of the "Jersey Devil." So when I heard of a novel based on the legend(s), naturally I was immediately intrigued.... Brigid's Charge is a worth contribution to reconstruction novels about our Old Religion past and how it survived, and did not survive, in the Americas, especially in the British colonies. Jersey Devil The author is a direct descendent of Deborah Leeds, the mother of the entity/phenomenon which has since 1939 been referred to as the "Jersey Devil," but which was formerly known as the "Leeds Devil." The story we are told was that an old woman gave birth to a creature which immediately grew to a great size, flew up the chimney, and began to terrorize the surrounding farms, eating chickens and other livestock. We children, and adults, were always cautioned about roaming the surrounding pine barrens for fear we might encounter the Jersey Devil. The Jersey (or Leeds) Devil first appeared in the early 1700s in the vast sandy-soiled pine barrens of Southern New Jersey.... In the early years of the 18th century, much of the populace of the area was native Lenni Lenape, while most European settlers were Quakers (Society of Friends). The strong Quaker influence in community affairs is still prevalent in the Philadelphia and South Jersey region today. Many prominent familes were Quaker.	Old Religion and New Anyway, Mother Leeds--Deborah--the main character in Cynthia's fine book, is a young woman raised in the Old Religion by her healer grandmother in England. She comes to the New World to be wife to a young Quaker man from an Anglican family. (Yes, Virginia, inter-religious quarreling was just as prevalent hundreds of years ago as it is today in Northern Ireland or in the American world of Neo-Paganism.) As you no doubt know, Quakers are as tolerant a religious group as you are going to find anywhere, so Deborah's pre-Christian spiritual life is easy for her to blend into the free-thinking, independent and women-respecting ways of the Friends. As a healer, she is welcomed among the small European settlements, where she mends bones, cures fevers, assists in childbirth--with great dependence upon the healing properties of her herbs, both those she learned in England and the newer ones she learns from her husband's aunt and other healers in New Jersey. (...the efficacy of many of those plants were learned by the settlers from the native Lenape.) As a historical novel, Brigid's Charge is colored with descriptions of clothing, everyday tools, and processes of a simpler time. These matter-of-fact references enrich and deepen the reader's sense of time and place. Descriptions of weather, landscape, flora--and especially mosquitoes in the marshlands in Summer--bring the physicality of the setting alive. The Quaker way of speech, however, was somewhat disconcerting for this reviewer to become accustomed to, but probably rings true to their speech patterns.	Radiant Presence But it is Brigid as matron of healing, Brigid as inspirer, Brigid as keeper of the faith in the old ways, the divine Brigid Who is the most radiant presence of this book. She guides the lives not only of Deborah Leeds, but also of her friend Erin, an indentured servant from Ireland who also becomes Deborah's dearest friend, confidante, and colleague; later, she guides Deborah's daughter and heiress to her gifts, Deborah Fae, and Erin's daughter Ana, a midwife. To students of colonial American ways, to people who practice the healing arts, to Pagans and Witches, to feminists--to all of you, I recommend this worthy novel. It is a fitting continuation of the work of Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich (Witches, Healers, Midwives, Nurses) in revisiting the history of the healing arts and women's role in them, as well as to the great historical novelists of our day, such as Diana L. Paxson, who re-invoke Her memory and presence. May Brigid's inspiritation guide the hands of those who heal! So mote it be.
For information about Macha's books, visit her website at http://www.MachaNightMare.com
Excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle Reviewed by Caroline Keller
The word "witch" conjures up the image of an evil woman in a pointed black hat sitting astride a broomstick. But in her absorbing first novel, Cynthia Lamb dusts away the cliche with a fascinating exporation of the origin and nature of what we have come to tihink of as witchcraft. Brigid's Charge is a fictionalized account of her English ancestor Deborah Smith Leeds and her struggle to keep the pre-Christian pagan religion of her culture alive in the America of the early 18th century. According to Lamb's family history and colonial folklore, Deborah possessed supernatural healing powers and spawned the legend of the Leeds--or Jersey--Devil, a creature with a serpent's head and dragon's tail.	The story begins when Deborah's mother and grandmother send her from England to marry an American man she has never met. Deborah's mother just wants her to settle down with a wealthy husband, but her Granna wants Deborah to go because "our line hath survived thousands of years on this soil...and though they ne'er hanged me on the gibbet, no longer are we welcome here. The men of schooling and the clergy do as once did we. They sit counsel, tend the ill, pass the soul on at death." On the long sea voyage to New Jersey, Deborah heals a crew member's paralyzed arm. She also receives her first hostile accusation from the drunken captain. "What spell shall save you now?" he asks. For the rest of her journey, and the rest of her life, Deborah is blessed and plagued with visions of her turbulent future....	When she meets her betrothed, Japhet Leeds, Deborah realizes she can never share with him her treasured book of "receipts and stories of our line," a gift from Granna, or tell him about her pledge to Brigid, Mother of her ancient people of northern England. Deborah's acceptance into Quaker society only encourages her to keep her own counsel. Her secrets all but destroy the marriage, leaving Deborah "divided--with him and not with him...feeling horrid--knowing she was betraying them both.... Combining history and folklore, Lamb has created a believable story that sheds new light on an old tale. As Deborah says, "'Tis the height of arrogance and folly to deny the existence of a thing only because you cannot explain its origin."
Excerpt from The Press of Atlantic City Reviewed by G. Patrick Pawling
The Jersey Devil's gone, escaped, over the fence. For more than two centuries it belonged here and mostly stayed here, hidden in the darkness of superstition and folklore, occasionally peering out from the Pine Barrens, sometimes emerging at Halloween, its wings and horse-head silhouetted by the full moon. Now a California woman is writing about the Jersey Devil, and she does it so well that soon the entire country may know. The legend is loose.... Who is this woman, and what right does she have to our legend? She is Cynthia Lamb, and she is direct descendant of Deborah Leeds, the woman who is accused by history and those who whisper at night of being the mother of the Jersey Devil--the Leeds Devil, as if was first called.... The book, her first, is called "Brigid's Charge." It is eerie, moving and difficult to be rid of, like a spell....	As the [legend] goes, it was a difficult labor. Somehow the Devil was invoked. Within moments the newborn baby became a man-sized thing with green scales, the head of a horse, huge wings and a dragon's tale. It flew about the room, breathing the noxious breath of hell as the midwife and the birth attendants dove to the floor. Then it flew out the window into history. Or maybe it was up the chimney. How did the story begin? Legend concerns itself mostly with the Leeds Devil. But for many years, Lamb had wondered about Mother Leeds. What prompted the birth of such a story? What was truth and what was real? Was she thought to be a witch? [Lamb believes it likely] that she was a healer, so she probably would have been suspected of being a witch, too. And so the book is about the legend's mother, the woman, the person. It's about her and more. It uses the legend to get places, to say things about life and people and religion and things that matter.	"For me the central theme is religious tolerance," Lamb said during a telephone interview. But even that explanation may be a disservice. It makes the book sound dry, stuffy. It isn't. It is history made alive. It's filled with the uncertainty, sadness, tension and joy that we call life. It's even a little saucy.... While research the book, Lamb came back to this area for about a month.... "I ended up wishing I could stay longer," she [said]. And so it will be with this book. People will visit, enjoy, learn and wish they too could stay longer. New Jersey...has gained a fine book, a book that proves the Jersey Devil is real and is very much with us today. Read it and you'll see how.
Excerpt from the Santa Barbara Review Reviewed by Marilyn Chandler Mcintyre, Ph.D.
Based on historical records, family archives and established New Jersey folklore, this first novel convincingly reconstructs the life of Deborah Leeds, eighteenth-century midwife and healer, accused of witchcraft and labeled for posterity as the devil's consort. An English immigrant brought to Burlington County to marry, "Mother Leeds" worked as herbalist and caregiver in a largely Quaker, and therefore unusually tolerant, community while bearing her own thirteen children. Her extraordinary skill attested to years of careful study, but also awakened fear and jealousy that led to suspicion, accusation, and finally ostracism. Indeed, as Lamb tells, it, Deborah Leeds does practice certain seasonal rites that induce visions and connect her with her inner sources of power, and with the lineage of women from whom she seems to have inherited her gifts. If what she practices is witchcraft, however, it is very different from the demonic dark arts of popular lore. Lamb's representation of the healer's gift, her visions, the power that lies in her touch, her capacity to see into and beyond the physical wound, invites readers to make a place in their imaginations for a category of experience and kind of knowledge not easily reckoned with in a world of empirical science, institutional religion, and standardized medicine. After thirty years of faithful service, during which time she shared her work with two other women and with her daughter, Deborah Leeds' position in the community was challenged by a newly arrived Edinburgh-educated physician to undertook to discredit her work and breed distrust among her neighbors by accusing her of witchcraft. His efforts came to a head at the birth of her thirteenth child who died within minutes, he claims to have seen the child turned to a flying demon, grow scales, and escape into the night.	Thereafter, as history has it, "The Leeds Devil terrorized the good people of New Jersey for five years--until enough were convinced to send for a Catholic priest to exorcise the demon." (291) The priest performed his rite and then announced that the devil had been banished for one hundred years. The legend lingers and still is told. Lamb tells Deborah Leeds' story with startling empathy for her ancestor's personal and political predicament and a lively imagination for the situation of women healers whose mysterious gifts both blessed and threatened their communities. The Jacobean dialect is beautifullly rendered, bringing the characters to life rather than making them quaint and alien. The simplicity and directness of the antique language overcomes its foreignness to contemporary readers and endows the story with a kind of dignity that may well leave one wistful for something lost in the diminishment of courtliness and courtesy. Lamb does not dismiss the idea of witchcraft, but imagines the kinds of rituals and secrets by which women like Deborah Leeds preserved and transmitted their craft to one another and recognized their own unusual powers. The strangeness of such a life is made accessible by the way Lamb links it to universal desires for spiritual awakening and assurances: appearing to reassure Deborah of the goodness of her vocation, Deborah's grandmother reminds her of her first act of healing and promises, "There will be more of that in your life. You dip your hands into Brigid's well itself and bring those waters to the world. You cannot turn away from that, and I know you will not," and then concludes, "A life lived in awe,...who should not desire that?"	The book is a provocative invitation to reflect on a long chapter in the history of medicine during which, in regulating and standardizing medical educations, those arts and mysteries of healing least subject to scientific investigation were effectively suppressed and driven into obscurity, and the women who practice them vilified. The integration of fact and fiction are carefully explained in the author's afterword, and what stands in the historical record faithfully recognized. Whatever one chooses to believe about the power of witchcraft and the power of witches, this book asks us to reconsider more than historical anomalies--to reflect on the lives and struggles of individuals who have discovered in themselves unusual powers of perception or vision or healing touch, have tried to bring them as gifts to the community, and have been despised, demeaned and often killed for their efforts. The story Lamb tells is not simply fanciful embellishment of history and folklore, but also a thoughtful reflection on the jealousies and power politics that divide communities and diminish the lives of extraordinary individuals who harbor gifts of an unexpected order.
Excerpt from Booklist Reviewed by Patricia Monaghan
Lamb's Quaker-wiccan historical novel may find an audience far larger than the memberships of those two religious group. Basically, it is a gripping story of how a woman's gifts are misunderstood and the misunderstanding ultimately leads to persecution. Deborah Leeds, a healer by heritage and training, leaves her native England in the early eighteenth century for America.	There she finds a kindred spirit and sometimes lover (her arranged marriage to a Quaker man brings prosperity and many children but no real intimacy) in the Irishwoman Erin and a land in need of her skills. When a medical doctor decides to break the grip of women healers on their community, however, things get really difficult and even violent.	Great historical detail, well-rounded characterizations and good pacing make this one of the best novels in the growing subgenre of fiction concerned with women's spirituality. The fact that Lamb is a descendant of her heroine adds an especially magical note to her endeavor.
Excerpt from The Bay Times Reviewed by Mariam Brown
Brigid's Charge is a very entertaining, engaging historical novel that chronicles the last gasp (for a time) of the practice of the Old Religion, a time when witches were hunted and killed, and their craft was commandered by what was to become our mainstream health and religious institutions.... Lamb has done her homework well. Brigid's Charge reads like an imaginative, accurate novelization of a true story. In various addendums to the book Lamb makes clear that she fleshed out the story in the absence of actual events.	Lamb has, however, immersed herself in the period, and so the characters, their beliefs, and the details of their lives--food preparation, furniture building, etc.--seems authentic and real. The information offered on witchcraft and herbal healing seems so genuine, the publishers bothered to issue a "don't try this at home" disclaimer at the front of the book. Deborah Leeds marries the man she's sent to America to wed--and bears 13 children (yikes!)--but her love is reserved for another woman. Again, Lamb handles tthis core plot element authentically within the context of the times.	We feel all the frustration two women would experience at the turn of the [18th] century, trying to express their love for one another. The story overlays their barely requited love with a sense of pending doom for Deborah Leeds' works as a midwife and healer. There isn't enough literature like Brigid's Charge around. It's an engrossing story that brings us back to the end of a time when an Earth-centered spirituality formed the core of human experience--and makes us long for a return to that wisdom.

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