Holy Office Inquisition Guatemala Summary

In the mid-seventeenth century there was a great increase in the number of witchcraft accusations, more precisely in a little country located in southern Europe called Malta. At this time in Europe there was a system of tribunals, a court of justice, created by the Catholic Church called the Roman Inquisition (Carmel. 1993: 316-317). According to Caramel Cassar, the purpose of these tribunals at first was to keep the Catholic faith alive and to eliminate the spread of the Protestant faith (Carmel. 1993: 316-317). Unfortunately at the start of the seventeenth century the Catholic Church had a bigger

Upon meeting some of the accused I felt very surprised that these reputable women would ever be suspected of witchcraft. Never had I seen such pure women be convicted as witches, never the less there were suspicions and I must investigate it to my full potential.

The Jesuit missionaries were also falsely represented in the film. They were rendered as heroic, very kind and almost Christ like in the movie. “They were martyrs and defenders of Indian rights.” They used nothing but the word and teachings of God to persuade the Guarani, and allowed the tribe to behave as they wished. Actual Jesuit missionaries of the 1700s did not defend Indian rights. With the development of missions, there came various rules and regulations that Jesuits and the Spanish were adamant on enforcing. Jesuits required that women wore cotton gowns and were not permitted to reveal private areas of the body. They also segregated males, females and children by gender. Women were placed in institutions in order to preserve their virginity for the reason that Jesuits believed it was honourable to become celibate. Joffe and Bolt illustrate that men and women were consistently in the presence of one another and often revealed their bodies. “The film overlooks how catholic missionaries imposed more

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.

Before the 1500s, prosecution of witches was rare. Trials were conducted against those who were seen as suspects of “practicing harmful magic and occasional mass trials" (Bever, 2009, p. 263). These accusations were often made by children and that of their imagination. The decline; however, occurred not through the prosecutions but through its “suppressing roles” and the overall “decline in witch beliefs” (Bever, 2009, p. 285). The title of the article is “Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic” and it is written by Edward Bever. Bever is the Associate Professor of History, SUNY College at Old Westbury.

In this study she addresses the accused and the accusers, the young, the old, the poor, and the cute. In chapter seven she constructs an interesting analysis and a statistically significant interpretation of those females who were possessed, and why these particular females responded to their possession in Puntan society. In order to prove her case she used evidence associated with those who were the accusers and the accused during the witchcraft trials. On the whole, she proved that women who were out of the social norms of colonial society were more likely to be suspect of witchcraft. In Puntan New England this was mainly non-married women, widows, and non-conformist females. These distinctive behaviors and demographics were seen as potential threat to New England Society, especially during a period of great change or social upheaval.

Witchcraft was defined for the masses by the publication of the Malleus Maleficarium also known simply as the Handbook. Written by two Dominican friars in 1486 it’s purpose was to be used as a handbook to identify, capture, torture, and execute suspected witches. Opinions stated as facts and written in the Malleus Maleficarium, “handbook”, were based their faith, church doctrine, and the Bible. No doubt a religious masterpiece in it’s time this handbook is a neatly woven together a group of beliefs, experiences, wisdom of ancient writers, religious ideas, and God inspired writings that justify it’s purpose. Written by and used by Catholics this handbook proved useful for Protestants as well. Based on biblical interpretation and ideas the handbook provided Protestant Church leaders biblical authority to prosecute witchcraft as well. Translated into today’s vernacular phrases such as, “everybody knows that women are feeble minded” or “everybody knows that women are more superstitious than men” and “all women have slippery tongues” are included in the handbook and presented to the reader as foregone conclusions. Specific

For more than two hundred years, individuals were persecuted as witches throughout the continent of Europe, even though the witch hunt was concentrated on Southwestern Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Poland, and parts of France. In a collective frenzy. witches were sought, identified, arrested, mostly tortured, and tried for a variety of reasons. The total number of witches tried exceeded 100,000 people. This essay is supposed to identify three major reasons for the witch craze in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe.

In 1492, the Spanish defeated the Moors, an inquisition took off and Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. This paper will argue how the Spanish Reconquista resulted in the inquisition and the expulsion of Jews and Moors in Medieval Spain. The sources that will be used are several primary sources, and secondary sources. The Spanish Reconquista inspired the ideas of religious nationalism, a common anti-Semitism among the Spanish people, the idea of a catholic state and catholic rulers, and other practical and economic influences.

Were the witch-hunts in pre-modern Europe misogynistic? Anne Llewellyn Barstow seems to think so in her article, “On Studying Witchcraft as Women’s History: A Historiography of the European Witch Persecutions”. On the contrary, Robin Briggs disagrees that witch-hunts were not solely based on hatred for women as stated in his article, “Women as Victims? Witches, Judges and the Community”. The witch craze that once rapidly swept through Europe may have been because of misconstrued circumstances. The evaluation of European witch-hunts serves as an opportunity to delve deeper into the issue of misogyny.

The witchcraft phenomenon of the Renaissance period was shaped by a wide range of cultural factors; witchcraft was not necessarily subject to a single cohesive idea or concept, and it was often instead a conglomeration of many different societal concerns, concerns which spanned through all spheres of society. Textual evidence from this period provides insight into the way in which witches were conceived, and how witches were dealt with, while visual images present a companion visualisation of the tensions, which influenced created the witch, and the imagery, which came to be associated with witchcraft.

Witch hunts blazed across Europe over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries not just killing innumerable innocent people, but stripping women of much of the power they had once held, and changing society's perceptions of women all together. The economic hardships, religious rivalries, and troubled politics of the time made accusing your neighbors of witchcraft convenient. Where there was war and poverty, or merely bad luck, peasants would assume witchcraft and rush to blame an old, defenseless woman in trials which involved unbelievable cruelty and horrible sadism. As religion and the Catholic Church began to complement and perpetuate the increasing hysteria, European society as a whole could do nothing but

The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by Henry Kamen, was released in 1997 and is the third edition of the acclaimed book centered around the infamous tribunal. The years following the first publication saw increases in the quality of scholarship and an influx of research.  New historical interpretations subsequently began to demonstrate an enhanced insight, as works like Benzion Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition presented original perspectives. Kamen was consequentially compelled to reevaluate the evidence surrounding the Inquisition, ultimately causing him to divert from his previous conclusions and adopt a revisionist perspective exploring historical causation. The Spanish Inquisition has been repeatedly studied for

Agrippa’s The Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences is a document that offers a sharp rebuke of the Inquisition and the church of the era in which he was writing. Agrippa offers an indictment of the Inquisition in this document and subsequently exposes some of the hypocrisy of the Church. The document was originally printed in 1530 and written in Latin, and still provides important, if upsetting, insight into the ways that the Inquisitors enriched themselves, tortured people (especially women), and ultimately fouled their faith. Written against the backdrop of the Inquisition, which has created a reign of terror and a new set of power dynamics, Agrippa’s indictment of the Inquisition is an interesting counterpoint to the views of this horrible event that sought to justify it. Agrippa’s first-person accounts and emphasis on the cruelties of the Inquisitors help him to create an ethos as a writer. He is clearly a man of faith whose values are more in line with traditional thinking about Christianity than Inquisitors of his era. It is important to understand this document’s context by first explicating its content and then turning to an analysis of the document’s relationship with history.

However, the Spanish inquisition did not only care about what was public. What were personal beliefs could also be considered as heretical. During Marina Gonzalez’s trial it was noted that she could have committed acts without anyone knowing about it. It was not only the public act but the suspicion of the act that helped to condemn her.4 Record’s also speak of harming one’s conscience. The inquisitors always thought someone was lying if they did not confess, they were then warned about the damage to their conscience in this act. De Arguello’s Instructions affirm that the church was policing thoughts as well.5 Because it was almost impossible to prove what someone was thinking it is not surprising that the inquisitors never believed any denials