Witch Of Edmonton

As the story progresses people fear for their own safety and begin accusing their neighbours of witchcraft in order to escape being hanged. Salem became overrun by the hysteria of witchcraft. Mere suspicion itself was accepted as evidence. As a Satan-fearing community, they could not think of denying the evidence, because to deny the existence of

Most observers now agree that witches in the villages and towns of the late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century New England tended to be poor. They were usually not the poorest women in the community, but the moderately poor. Karlsen tries to show that a woman who was vulnerable was most likely to be accused of being a witch. Even women who had gained wealth because of the death of a husband were prime candidates.

Towards the middle of the play more accusations keep appearing. Well respected and known towns people begin being accused of being a witch. Most towns’ people are now in disbelief because such accusations should not be. “Believe me, Mr. Nurse, if Rebecca Nurse be tainted, then nothing’s left to stop the whole world from burning. Let you rest upon the justice of the court; the court will send her home, I know it.” (Miller71)

Suddenly people seemed very paranoid and soon residents were placing blame on one another and accusing each other of witchcraft. In a fifteen month period between 1691 and 1692 nearly twelve dozen people were accused of witchcraft in or near Salem (Norton, p8).

John Demos’s nine point portrait of a witch is one way to analysis the case of Rebecca Nurse. To do so, one must first evaluate and understand the history of Rebecca Nurse and her role in the Salem in the late 1600’s. Rebecca Nurse was the wife of Francis Nurse, a farmer who became wealthy after buying and tending a large plot of land between Salem Village and Salem Town. Together they had eight children, and as a family they were prosperous. Connecting this information to Demos’s portrait of a witch, Rebecca Nurse falls under the first four points made in his sketch. These first two points are that she was “female” and that she was of “middle age”. However, the latter point is slightly inaccurate because Nurse was older than sixty years. The final two points that Rebecca Nurse falls under in Demos’s portrait of a witch are that she was of “English” and “Puritan” descent and culture, and that she was “married”, with little or no children. Again, the latter point is not fully accurate because Rebecca Nurse, while married, had, in fact, eight children in her lifetime. The significance of these traits of Rebecca Nurse agree, for the most part, with the

In The witches Stacy Schiff starts off by giving accurate background information of what happened in Salem. Fourteen women and five men died in 1692 because of the witch trials. Then Schiff starts to get in to detail. In the village minister’s house, the two little girls crawled under the furniture it was a great hassle to get them out, they would make made silly noises, spread their arms out like wings and pretended they could fly. Betty Parris nine years old who was the parson’s daughter, and cousin Abigail Williams who was eleven years old. These actions were absurd hence they have always been exemplary children. Soon enough comments began to spread through Salem: The children had been bewitched. Then Clergymen started coming then the

People in Salem thought that there was witchcraft going on when people were acting weir. One piece of evidence that the people of Salem used to prove that there was witchcraft was Mr. Collins saw Betty fly over the barn. “Mrs. Putnam glancing at Betty: How high did she fly, how high?” Page 12. Word about Betty flying over the barn spread through the town. The Revere is worried that people will think that his daughter Betty will be accused of witch craft. Abigail was caught dancing with Tituba by her uncle. “Abigail: Uncle, we did dance; let you tell them I confessed it and I’ll be wiped if I must be. But they’re speaking of witch craft. Betty not witched.” Page 9. The people of Salem are blaming people of witch craft if they are acting

Even though many believed in witchcraft and supported the trials, some villagers did not. One of the villagers that did not support the trials was a farmer, John Proctor. But because they did not support them, they were accused of witchcraft because anyone who did not believe in witches or defended them was accused of being one as

for the village, show up as complaints on witchcraft indictments in1692. Similarly, many of the accused witches in Salem belonged to the Porter faction or, according to Boyer and Nissenbaum, represented the projection of the grievances caused by such factionalism upon more obtainable targets like Rebecca Nurse and Martha Cory. Through such a reconstruction of the factional village of Salem, Boyer and Nissenbaum explain the Salem witchcraft episode from within the larger history of the transformation to a modern capitalist society, and the

The witchcraft crisis through colonial New England is visualized through the work of Mary Beth Norton and Carol F. Karlsen. The scholars demonstrate deep understanding in the subject, and both present valid information through their overall theses. In order to understand the complete story of witchery in the seventeenth-century, these two books intrigue the reader in what the authors want to present. Although, their research seems bias, both historians similarly delve into the topic with an open mind, and successfully uncover information that has not be presented before. Not only does Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare and Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman both represent the study of witchcraft through feminist ideals, Karlsen’s

“Thus, it is striking to find that many victims of witchcraft accusations were poor beggar women who were said by their neighbors to have laid a curse not God 's, but the devil 's on a household in which something had gone wrong.”(Klaits, p. 87) Women who did not have a man to support them would go through the village and beg for food for themselves and their family. If they were denied, and something happened in the house, they begged at the neighbor would say that the beggar woman had placed a curse on the house. This could have been anything from the neighbor 's child becoming ill to even the cow not giving milk anymore. These accusations usually came after the beggar was refused charity and walked away mumbling something mean. They were usually then reported once something went wrong within the home they had looked for the charity at.

In the 1680’s and 1690’s there was mass hysteria in New England over supposed witchcraft. The most famous outbreak was in Salem, Massachusetts, hence the name Salem Witch Trials. In Salem, there were young girls who started acting strangely, and they leveled accusations of witchcraft against some of the West Indian servants who were immersed in voodoo tradition. Most of the accusations were against women, and soon the accusations started to shift to the substantial and prominent women. Neighbors accused other neighbors, husbands accused their wives, etc. and it kept going on for a while. There was this nature of evil and the trials didn’t end until nineteen Salem residents were put to death in 1692, more importantly before the girls

Salem Village was a very traditional, colonial community where the women stayed at home cooking and cleaning while the men worked and made the decisions. After watching Three Sovereigns for Sarah I noticed that the girls were bored of the same bible study and were immediately fond of the idea of voodoo and magic which came about because of Tituba, their housemaid. The girls wanted to believe there was something there, a spirit of sorts so they forced themselves to act in such a way that they would cause question and suspicion among the villagers. The girls wanted attention whether it was on good or bad terms so they played along with the hysteria of witchcraft, blatantly lying to the faces of those who were superior to them. The girls knew there was no evil spirits

People often fear things they do not understand. In Nigeria, churches are accusing defenseless children of witchcraft; a boy’s “family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism ” (The Boston Globe para. 2); permanently impairing the boy. The boy’s father did not understand why or how what his son was and tried to kill him out of fear of the consequences. Pastors were accusing either orphaned or children from poor families as witches because they could not fight back, as way to establish their credentials. Hysteria made the townspeople actually believe and fear witchcraft in both Nigeria and Salem. In the case of “The Dying Girl that No One Helped” one person did not get involved because the police” might have picked [him] up as suspect” he feared the outcome and did not understand the importance of the situation.

When in reality, there were no witches, it was all false notations of Abigail's’ lie that lead into something greater than it should have been.“It were only sport in the beginning, sir, but then the whole world cried spirits, spirits” (Mary Warren, Act 3, p. 100)