How were the people of Salem convinced that their town was inhabited by witches? The shared religion and common beliefs of the people of Salem along with the biases against poor, ill, reclusive, and otherwise different and unlikeable people in the town are all factors that will be examined. On the same note, the relationships between the accused and the accusers will be looked at, with facts gleaned from Rosalyn Schanzer’s Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem and transcripts from the trials themselves, posted to the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. This essay will not just focus on the previously stated topics, but how, when combining their own cunning and the facts of living in a world affected by poverty, discrimination, and religion, the Afflicted Girls in Salem, Massachusetts convinced others that the accused were, in fact, witches.
The inhabitants of both Salem Town and Salem Village, Massachusetts were exclusively Puritan, and as Puritans they believed in “two entirely different worlds”: the Natural World and the Invisible World, the latter of which was filled with phantoms, the Devil, and other evils such as witches’ spirits (Schanzer 13-14). …show more content…
The other afflicted girls, called so because they behaved as if possessed and claimed to be tortured by witches, all behaved similarly. In court, during the trial of Bridget Bishop, the first person to be executed in Salem during the witchcraft hysteria, it was documented that “as soon as [Bishop] came near all fell into fits” (Boyer et al). The accusations against the witches were always similar: the girls screamed that they were being pierced with pins, stabbed with knives, that they were burning, or that they could not control their own
The inhabitants of both Salem Town and Salem Village, Massachusetts were exclusively Puritan, and as Puritans they believed in “two entirely different worlds”: the Natural World and the Invisible World, the latter of which was filled with phantoms, the Devil, and other evils such as witches’ spirits (Schanzer 13-14). …show more content…
The other afflicted girls, called so because they behaved as if possessed and claimed to be tortured by witches, all behaved similarly. In court, during the trial of Bridget Bishop, the first person to be executed in Salem during the witchcraft hysteria, it was documented that “as soon as [Bishop] came near all fell into fits” (Boyer et al). The accusations against the witches were always similar: the girls screamed that they were being pierced with pins, stabbed with knives, that they were burning, or that they could not control their own