preview

The Salem Witch Trials Is Unknown

Better Essays
Open Document

It is due to contrasting views and opinions that the real cause of the Salem Witch Trials is unknown. It is through major factors like the personal context of the historian that there are these differing thoughts. The people and society that a person is surrounded by for an extended amount of time can help to mold and create the personal opinions that a historian may hold. Historian’s thought have been shaped and changed by the people and places that they spent a large amount of time around, they adapted the accepted opinions of those areas and have used those opinions to explain different parts of history, using their own experiences and lives as a way to relate to historical situations. The Salem Witch Trials is a controversial topic …show more content…

Many historians who were writing at this time must have had the belief in both witchcraft and the Devil, which would explain why they believed that this was a logical and acceptable explanation as to why the Witch Trials occurred. This theory is ultimately the result of the personal context of historians, which has affected how this event was constructed and recorded. One historian in particular, Cotton Mather, a Puritan Minister, was also under the impression that the cause of the Witch Trials came down to the existence of the Devil and witchcraft. He, like many others, could not find a reasonable explanation for the behaviour of the afflicted girls and came to the conclusion that, “Some scores of people, first about Salem, the centre and first-born of all towns in the colony, and afterwards in several other places, were arrested with many preternatural vexations upon their bodies, and a variety of cruel torments, which were evidently inflicted from the daemons of the invisible world....” Historical viewpoints have evolved and developed along with the world. And while it was acceptable to use the existence of witchcraft to explain the events of the Salem Witch Trials in the pre-enlightenment world - with the rise of scientific discovery, the enlightened world therefore challenged religious beliefs and superstitions, while looking upon them with skepticism. This would mean that the concept that supernatural forces

Get Access