Witch Craze Dbq Research Paper

The witch craze, during which hundreds of thousands of people were executed without trial, occurred during the renaissance and reformation in the late 1400s until the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in the 1700s. The “witches” were mostly female, and given no trial. During this time period, although people were beginning to get educated, the majority of people believed that women could be evil and crazy, but men couldn’t and were therefore better than women and could do what they desired, which included placing the blame of the world’s evils on women. This apparent evil nature of people, especially women, led to the death of over 100,000 victims accused of being witches, and their age and the spread of disease were the blamed causes of the supposed spread of witchcraft. Two Dominican monks, Kramer and Sprenger, claimed that women were naturally corrupted and evil, and that they were sexual beings, which supposedly led to the …show more content…
The testimony’s audience was likely a crowd thrilled to accuse and burn another innocent woman. She likely made up a confession to avoid torture, and she described something she knew the audience and her executioner would want to hear. Roger North wrote about another similar witch trial, in which the accused witch had been found guilty of torturing and killing kids. He tried to persuade the audience into hating the witch for his horrible deeds (doc 5). In 1970, Alan Macfarlane gathered statistics regarding the occupation of the husbands of the accused witches. The data shows that most witches were the wives of laborers and farmers, while the wives of men of a higher socioeconomic status weren’t as commonly accused of witchcraft (doc 6). The data also shows that the majority of victims were female (82% in Germany and 78% in Switzerland and