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There were also a significant number of trials in England and Germany. The charges were generally mild. Diabolism, believed to involve nocturnal orgies and traditionally linked to accusations of heresy, was a very rare charge in the witch trials. After 1334 the political dimension of witchcraft accusations disappeared, while the charges ...
Usually, accusations of witchcraft were made by neighbours and followed from social tensions. Accusations were most often made against women, the elderly, and marginalized individuals. Women made accusations as often as men. The common people believed that magical healers (called 'cunning folk' or 'wise people') could undo bewitchment. These ...
Bishop Antonio Venegas de Figueroa (1540) cautioned against confusing witchcraft with mental illness. [22] When French surgeon Pierre Pigray (1589) was asked by the Parliament to examine several people accused of being witches, [23] he dismissed the allegations on the basis that the accused were deluded and in need of medical care. [24]
The sex of witches in outbreak witchcraft cases in New England from 1620 to 1725 recorded a whopping 156 accused females, with only 49 males in the list. [7] In New England alone, at least 344 people were accused of witchcraft between the same years listed above in total, making seventy-eight percent of that group women who had been accused of ...
A common accusation was desecration of the eucharist. [1] Women were in majority among the accused, except in the cases in which the accused were men of low status such as Romani people, vagrants and beggars. [1] Torture were commonly used and when used to make the accused naming their accomplices, the trials could grow to be very large.
The Maryland Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in Colonial Maryland between June 1654, and October 1712. It was not unique, but is a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took place also in Europe.
The latest effort comes from a group dedicated to clearing the names of all those accused, arrested or indicted for witchcraft in Massachusetts, whether or not the accusations ended in hanging.
Witch-hunts began to occur in North America while Hopkins was hunting witches in England. In 1645, forty-six years before the notorious Salem witch trials, Springfield, Massachusetts experienced America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons accused each other of witchcraft. In America's first witch trial ...