With our Essay Lab, you can create a customized outline within seconds to get started on your essay right away. 1692 Salem Witch Trial Education | Salem, MA History Indeed, Germany, one of the central countries of the Protestant Reformation, is often referred to as the focal point of the European witch hunts. She is a tour guide in Glasnevin Cemetery Museum, a popular historical site in Dublin, and a published fiction and non-fiction writer. In 1691, a group of girls from Salem, Massachusetts accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft, igniting a hunt for witches that left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting a trial. Classical authors such as Aeschylus, Horace, and Virgil described sorceresses, ghosts, furies, and harpies with hideous pale faces and crazed hair; clothed in rotting garments, they met at night and sacrificed both animals and humans. Two of the accused women confessed to being witches and were reprievedparadoxically, if you admitted to being a witch, you were freed. She is a former faculty member of the Humanist Institute. Headley proceeds to talk about Millers other works, and how they basically all tell the story of The Crucible (and of his own marriage and relationship to Monroe) in different ways. Torture was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. In the Near Eastin ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and Palestinebelief in the existence of evil spirits was universal, so that both religion and magic were thought to be needed to appease, offer protection from, or manipulate these spirits. Written in the early 1950s, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1692 Salem witch trials . One of these women was Tituba, who was there at the. []. Parris promised to pay the fee to allow Tituba to be released from prison. why did the witch-hunts occur? According to author Carol F. Karlsen . The ultimate purpose of such a system was to create unity and, therefore, to fight any force that sought to break it. While she was imprisoned, two others accused her of being one of two or three women whose specters they'd seen flying. Men who brand women as dakan capitalize on deeply rooted superstitions and systems built on . Sermons and didactic treatises, including devil books warning of Satans power, spread both the terror of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him. Moreover, just as the growth of literacy and of reading the Bible helped spread dissent, so did they provoke resistance and fear. This began the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Among others, it argued that those guilty of witchcraft should be punished, and equated sorcery with heresy. But the reason as to why Arthur Miller felt the need to write The Crucible in the first place was because the unfortunate reality that history seemed to have repeated itself again. She included in her confession complicated tales of witchcraftall compatible with English folk beliefs, not voodoo as some have alleged. While people were being falsely accused of witchery without definite facts. The Black Death: Europes Deadliest Pandemic in Human History. A character named Abigail in the play acquired immense power, and manipulated the situations in the witch trials. The most common suspicions concerned livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents, sibling rivalries, and local politics. Samuel Parris moved to Salem Village in 1688, a candidate for the position of Salem Village minister. Their acts were seen as patriotic and holy. Cotton Mather, a prolific author and well-known preacher, wrote this account in 1693, a year after the trials ended. Millers play helps one understand what the Salem Witch Trials did to peoples emotions and mentalities. Latest answer posted April 17, 2020 at 1:25:04 AM. Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play "The Crucible" (1953), using . This was a time when paranoia, hysteria, and deceit gripped the Puritan towns of New England. A witch hunt is seen as an intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence. If theyre that much trouble? Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigails mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. Many teachers use The Crucible alongside their discussion of McCarthyism. Aligns with CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.5- Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing, and engaging. The settlers of New England faced innumerable struggles and hardships. Along with this older tradition, attitudes toward witches and the witch hunts of the 14th18th centuries stemmed from a long history of the churchs theological and legal attacks on heretics. Widely influential, it was reprinted numerous times. B.A. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. People thought without a trace of logic, accusing and punishing innocent, witches, left and right. This is highly similar to the homicides that led to rise of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. Throughout the ages, people repeatedly use witch hunts as a method for dealing with issues that are widespread. In the play "The Crucible," Arthur Miller uses a great trial in the Salem witch trials to describe how he felt during the Red Scare in the 1950's. The Red Scare was a national hunt for Communists, or "Reds" as they were called. The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. Witch Hunts In Arthur Miller's The Crucible | ipl.org They viewed their difficulties through a theological lens, and rather than attribute the blame to chance, misfortune, or simply nature; they thought that they were the Devils fault in collaboration with witches. The accusers is constitutionally finding scapegoats to back up their culpability. Those include fear, personal motives, unfair treatment of the accused, and accusers. The witch executions occurred in the early modern period, the time in Western history when capital punishment and torture were most widespread. It was this combination of sorcery and its association with the Devil that made Western witchcraft unique. Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus maleficarum. The Salem witch trials and McCarthyism have an uncanny relation to one another. Why did Arthur Miller write The Crucible? In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. Older women were more frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women, because they had had more time to establish a bad reputation, and the process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced. Its hard to imagine that there was once a time when witches were not seen as cackling women with pointed hats, black cats, and bubbling cauldrons. The Salem witch trials proved to be one of the most cruel and fear driven events to ever occur in history. This was a dissertation that endorsed witch-hunting and is believed to have inspired Shakespeares Macbeth. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. Witches were considered Satan's followers, members of an antichurch and an antistate, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a "counter-state" in the early modern period. Mather and his fellow New Englanders believed that God directly intervened in the establishment of the colonies and that the New World was formerly the Devils territory. What is the setting for Act 2? What Caused the Salem Witch Trials? - JSTOR Daily The Devil was deeply and widely feared as the greatest enemy of Christ, keenly intent on destroying soul, life, family, community, church, and state. Still creepy, but slightly less creepy? Many critics described Death of a Salesman as the first great American tragedy, and Miller gained an associated eminence as a man who understood the deep essence of the United States. By 143550, the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIIIs publication in 1484 of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (Desiring with the Greatest Ardour) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1486 of Heinrich Krmer and Jacob Sprengers Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women. This tendency to believe in the certainty of one's convictions as well as the belief that their practices of exclusion were justified among the cultural conditions of Salem. Like the Spanish colonies, the English colonies repeated the European stereotype with a few minor differences. This pattern took shape in 10501300, which was also an era of enormous reform, reorganization, and centralization in both the ecclesiastical and secular aspects of society, an important aspect of which was suppressing dissent. Cotton Mathers account of the witch trials reinforced colonial New Englanders view of themselves as a chosen generation of men. The witch hunts provided this outlet. The events in Salem and other towns in New England took place in a region of isolated villages and towns. It was because of these that witch hunters made so many false accusations. "In Act 1, what explanation does Miller give as to why the witch hunts developed in such a community in The Crucible?" Many historians see its publication as a watershed moment in witch-hunting history. The play is set in Puritan Society in the late 1600s in Salem, where most people are devout Christians and hold a strong belief of both God and the Devil.
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