The Witch Trials Essay

A few of the famous accused witches were Bridget Bishop, Sarah Osborne, and John Proctor. These three alleged enchanters did not have much in common, apart from how they acted in the Village. All of them showed some sign of going against the grain of society, whether that be a female owning a bar, trying to take her dead husband’s property, or a male with Quaker ties. Evidence has helped to show the likelihood of the accusing party choosing those who broke societal norms to be witches.

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

The Trial of Tempel Anneke reveals a disgusting trend of society’s attitude towards witchcraft in early modern Europe. It exhibits a sick double standard that displays a society that offers no true justice and demonstrates outright inequity. It is also a depressing display of extreme negligence and hypocrisy. Suspected witches were not able to secure a fair trial due to their social disposition or lack thereof. Harnessing the power of witchcraft in the eyes of society was a clear indication of a pact made with the Devil and those who did so represented power and dark knowledge. Their blind way of thinking becomes so massively ingrained in the ideology of society that eventually paved the way for the emergence of witchcraft’s clear role as the universal scapegoat. The trial and recordings illustrate an early modern European ignorance and flawed methodology.

“You're a witch!” is something that was probably said a lot in Salem, Massachusetts in the year 1692. The people of Salem went crazy and in the end 20 people were killed because they were believed to be witches. The Salem witch trials were caused by jealousy of wanting. What kind of wanting? Woman who wanted men, people who wanted to be wealthy, and the people who wanted attention.

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 Massachusetts Bay settlers had blamed and sentenced individuals for witchcraft some time recently, initiated in 1648 with convicting Margaret Jones, yet no one in the province had ever admitted to being a witch before or forebodingly expressed that there were different witches out there (Woolf, 2004). Confession of this Indian slave strengthened the greater part of the fundamental feelings of trepidation of the colonists and therefore urged them to carry the hunt and punish the

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.

One of the most interesting aspects of the European witch trials between 1450 and 1750 is the frequency with which accused witches confessed to the crime of witchcraft throughout the legal proceedings. While some confessions were offered voluntarily, most were not, and extreme measures were often employed by prosecutors to force confessions from the accused. Among the questions this raises, a prominent one is why obtaining confessions to witchcraft was so crucial. This paper argues that confessions were so important in continental Europe because of the critical developments they facilitated: namely, confessions allowed prosecutors to secure convictions of witchcraft within a judicial system that required high standards of proof; they produced information that was invaluable to the creation and spread of the concept of witchcraft; and they validated the guilt of the accused, the reality of

This caused problems for the courts though. The courts knew that witchcraft was a “indisputable crime” but they also knew that these crimes where “difficult to prove” (SP, 11). This is why the evidence used during witchcraft trials varied greatly. The most sought out evidence was always confessions from the accused. This can be seen in the Oyer and Terminer court cases when the magistrates refused to take no for an answer from the accused and persisted on the accused confessing.

The idea of torture being an important and commonly used way to question accused witches is also supported by source thirty-four in Witchcraft in Europe, which is The Malleus Maleficarum written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in 1487. The Malleus Maleficarum is a handbook filled with many different sections covering a variety of witch beliefs, and its ninth action covers the method of sentencing that is to be used on the accused witch during questioning (Kors, 211). “And while she is being questioned about each several point, let her be often and frequently exposed to torture…” (Kors, 213). This source was the first encyclopedia covering witch beliefs that was available during the fifteenth century and was used quite often because of the beliefs it contained, which were held by Catholics and Protestants alike (Kors, 180). With The Malleus Maleficarum being cited often during that time, it is easy to assess that the wide use and acceptance of this handbook points to a time when the torture of accused witches was virtually accepted and pretty much commonplace practice.

In response to The Hammer of Witches and the papal bull issued by Pope Innocent VIII, major witch hunts broke out in Europe. Moreover, these were aided by new technology, the printing press, which helped to spread the mania, even across the Atlantic to America. It is not surprising that the witch hunt started around the13-15th century. During this time, Europe was overpopulated and in a poor condition with dirty streets, crime and diseases everywhere. There had to be a scapegoat for all of the mess which the church decided was witchcraft. A complex social matrix was created once an accusation was made: the accusers would try to prove the source of what had been troubling them, and ideally to gain control over that source by forcing her to back away and remove the

Once a person was accused of being a witch, the authorities needed concrete or tangible evidence before they would prosecute or put the accused to death. A guidebook published in 1486, called "Malleus

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 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

Prior to the 11th century the Catholic Church did not even acknowledge the existence of Witches. To accuse or take action against one suspected of being a "dark witch", Vampire or other supernatural being was punishable by cannon law. It was only towards the