Following the trials and executions, many involved, like judge Samuel Sewall, publicly confessed error and guilt. On January 14, , the General Court ordered a day of fasting and soul-searching for the tragedy of Salem. In , the court declared the trials unlawful. However, it was not until —more than years later—that Massachusetts formally apologized for the events of In the 20th century, artists and scientists alike continued to be fascinated by the Salem witch trials.
Playwright Arthur Miller resurrected the tale with his play The Crucible , using the trials as an allegory for the McCarthyism paranoia in the s. Additionally, numerous hypotheses have been devised to explain the strange behavior that occurred in Salem in One of the most concrete studies, published in Science in by psychologist Linnda Caporael, blamed the abnormal habits of the accused on the fungus ergot, which can be found in rye, wheat and other cereal grasses.
Toxicologists say that eating ergot-contaminated foods can lead to muscle spasms, vomiting, delusions and hallucinations. Also, the fungus thrives in warm and damp climates—not too unlike the swampy meadows in Salem Village, where rye was the staple grain during the spring and summer months. Also in Salem, the Peabody Essex Museum houses the original court documents, and the town's most-visited attraction, the Salem Witch Museum, attests to the public's enthrallment with the hysteria.
Editor's note - October 27, Thanks to Professor Darin Hayton for pointing out an error in this article. While the exact number of supposed witches killed in Europe isn't known, the best estimate is closer to tens of thousands of victims, not hundreds of thousands. Here the idea of the dual-gendered sabbath first emerged as the result of the presence of a significant number of boy witches, who were pressured into confessing that they had played music at sabbaths.
These imagined, gender-specific p. Subsequent trials against prominent local men who had been accused of witchcraft were both driven by, and helped to strengthen, the idea that men could attend sabbaths. This idea then spread to other Catholic parts of Germany by means of a demonological treatise, Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum , which the suffragan bishop of Trier, Peter Binsfeld, published in , drawing on his first-hand experience of the Rhine-Meuse trials.
Demonologists were both deeply misogynistic and perfectly capable of imagining men as witches. How can these two, apparently contradictory, positions be reconciled? Thought-provoking answers to this question have been offered by Apps and Gow, and by Claudia Opitz-Belakhal. Apps and Gow suggest that demonologists understood weak-mindedness meaning a lack of rational and intellectual strength, not mental illness in the modern sense as the primary characteristic of the witch, as weakness of mind allowed the devil to seduce a person into witchcraft in the first place.
Women were fifty times more likely than men to be drawn to the devil, according to Bodin, because of the strength of their animal appetites and carnality. But even this did not construct the witch as exclusively female, because it had always been possible for demonologists to imagine men having sexual intercourse with female demons. Popular beliefs about witchcraft were likewise gendered in ways that meant that women were, overall, associated more easily than men with harmful magic.
In Tuscany, for example, only two of the people tried for maleficium by the inquisitorial tribunal in Siena between — were men. Harmful male witches also appeared rarely before the courts in England, the Netherlands, and New England.
Labouvie argued that this association resulted from long-standing popular beliefs that linked women with the world of spirits, night-flying, the mixing of poisons, and the casting of harmful spells.
Men in the Saar region were associated with positive, practical magical techniques aimed at preventing and curing illness and at ensuring the maintenance, recovery, or increase of property and goods.
The association between women and harmful witchcraft was never exclusive, however. In her study of the German Duchy of Mecklenburg, for example, Katrin Moeller has shown that, while some magical practices were associated more strongly with one gender than the other, no magical p.
Men could be accused of practising harmful magic, even in relation to the apparently quintessentially female area of childbirth, while women were believed to engage in the supposedly male activity of enrichment through magical means by using techniques such as butter and milk magic to improve their dairy yields. The idea of the sabbath was absent in Iceland: here, men were far more strongly associated than women with malevolent magical powers in local folkloric stereotypes that pre-dated, and then held firm during, the period of the witch trials.
For all regions we need to know more about the gendering of popular magical beliefs, and especially beliefs about harmful magic, for the late medieval period. We also need to make beliefs about witch families—meaning groups of people related by blood or marriage among whom the ability to work witchcraft was imagined as being passed down from generation to generation—much more central to the analysis, in order to explore how they were gendered and what impact they had on patterns of prosecution.
Finally, we need to analyse more systematically the extent to which the interactions between different social groups that occurred in the context of witch trials reconfigured gendered witch stereotypes among both the learned and the unlearned. Who were the key mediators in such processes of cultural exchange and what role did printed texts play in them?
Beliefs about witchcraft were one thing, but individuals only came to trial if they were formally accused of the crime. What sorts of women were particularly vulnerable to p. Historians agree that older women—those aged 50 and above—were over-represented among the accused in many regions, although they disagree about why this was so. Macfarlane and Thomas suggested that wealthier neighbours were increasingly likely to refuse such requests because of the economic pressures of the early modern period, but felt guilty about their behaviour because it contravened long-standing traditions of Christian charity.
In this economic explanation of accusation, older women, who were often widows, were more vulnerable because they were most likely to be poor and dependent on neighbourly assistance.
Lyndal Roper also concluded that old women were disproportionately represented among the victims of early modern German witch-hunts. This was not because of socio-economic tensions, however, but because post-menopausal women were feared and reviled in an age that revered fertility.
On both counts, old women were more easily imagined as witch-like by contemporaries. Robin Briggs suggested that women were more likely to be accused of witchcraft between the ages of 40 and 60 because early modern people were imagined to attain the apex of their exercise of power at this stage of their lives.
Witchcraft was understood as the exercise of magical power, so it was plausible to imagine witches as at the peak of their malevolent powers at this age, and to fear them accordingly.
Moreover, in many parts of Europe women were formally accused of witchcraft years, and sometimes decades, after they had first gained a reputation as witches.
Their age at trial thus resulted from the fact that communities could cope informally with reputed witches for lengthy periods before the final step of formal prosecution was contemplated. However real world examples of this are hard to come by.
Most studies of witchcraft are not quantitative and do not examine social networks as we have done. While this study suggests there is no evidence that those labelled with this harmful tag were uncooperative, it does not fully explain why such accusations stick in some cases and not in others. Our conclusion is that witch accusation has evolved from competition between households. Labelling may have become a way for people to get ahead of their rivals and gain a competitive advantage in reproduction or resources.
However, the sources of competition may be different in different cases. There are other explanations that may apply too. All around the world conceptions of witchcraft share many common features. For example, middle aged women are the most common victims, and accusations of poisoning are frequently involved. But there are also many differences. Another idea for the origins of witchcraft denunciations is that they are common when patriarchal institutions are trying to establish dominance over matriarchal ones.
The more research we do, the closer we can get to understanding and tackling the mechanisms behind these practices that can be devastating for women across the world. For centuries, scholars have attempted to identify similarities among the accused.
Most agree that those accused of witchcraft tended to be eccentric individuals who stood out from their Puritan neighbors in some way. Quakers , for example, were easy targets. Most of the accused were Godfearing individuals and respected townspeople. After the hysteria was over, Massachusetts recognized the witch trials for what they were and began a centuries-long process of atonement. Judges, juries, and accusers publicly apologized, but the apologies were of little comfort to affected families.
By the state had exonerated the accused from all wrongdoing and offered monetary compensations to surviving family members. In the Massachusetts state legislature officially cleared the names of the last of the accused witches. The Crucible itself has met with censorship in some communities and has been banned from some schools. This article was originally published in Elizabeth Purdy, Ph. Hoffer, Peter Charles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Norton, Mary Beth.
Roach, Marilyn K.
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