Salem Witchcraft

All who threatened or endeavored "to hinder or harass the Inquisitors, whole who oppose them, every last(predicate) rebels, of whatsoever rank" would be subject to excommunication "and except more terrible penalties, censures, and punishment . . . and that without any right of invoke" (Malleus xliv-xlv).

Malleus associates witchcraft chiefly with women. Much attention is devoted to why perfidious witchcraft "is found more in so fragile a sex than in men." Women, it is decl atomic number 18d, "are found to be given to superstition and witchcraft." In particular, midwives " defeat all others in unhallowedness" (Malleus 41). Malleus presents a (spurious) etymological proof for the connection between women and witchery, which is that the Latin for woman, femina, is derived from fe, Latin for faith, and minus, Latin for small or weak: "Therefore a wicked woman is by her nature quicker to waver in her faith, and consequently quicker to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft" (Malleus 44).

A careful look at the text of Malleus from the emplacement of 20th-century scientific method yields a reading of misogyn

Increase Mather's son and heir, Wonders of the Invisible World absorbms to throw off functioned as an apologia for (and throwback to) the civil/religious administration of 1692 (and 1644 and 1638 and 1630 and 1620) Massachusetts mouth. Citing the raft of New England as "a people of God" (9), Mather explained (and rationalized) the justice of the prosecutions and executions, more or less in line with Bradford's view of 1620 that the favored of God would experience corporal good and that those not so favored would get their just deserts. For example:

How could mother Alice escape condemnation and hanging, being arreigned upon this testify; when a poore woman hath beene cast away, upon a cousening oracle, or quite a a false lie, devised by Feats the juggler, through the malicious abetment of some of hir adversaries? (Scot 123).

No.

(Hathorne desired the children all of them to look upon her, and see if this were the person that hurt them; and so they all did look upon her, and verbalize this was one of the persons that did torment them. Presently [= at that very moment] they were all tormented.)

Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have make? . . . Why do you thus torment these poor children?

Indeed, equally as important as the history of a witchcraft judiciary to the Salem case is the fact that Massachusetts Bay Colony was a theocracy in both conception and execution. conjuration Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" articulated the value that would dominate Massachusetts Bay. As the document famously states:

shore leave was evermore accounted the great privilege of an Englishman; but certainly, if the devil ordain be heard against us and his testimony taken, to the seizing and apprehending of us, our liberty vanishes, and we are fools if we boast of liberty (Brattle 291).

A Protestant tidy sum of stature equivalent to Malleus appeared in England in 1589, when Reginald Scot promulgated The Discoverie of Witchcraft. In 1598, James VI of Scotland (later James I of England,
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