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Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition. [14] Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility ...
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 story of the witchcraft accusations, trials and executions has captured the imagination of writers and artists in the centuries since the event took place. Their earliest impactful use as the basis for an item of popular fiction is the 1828 novel Rachel Dyer by John Neal. [133]
The 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, [66] the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663. [67] lithograph depicting Salem witch trials, 1892
Hutton and Davies note that folk healers were sometimes accused of witchcraft, but made up a minority of the accused. [31] [22] It is also possible that a small proportion of accused witches may have genuinely sought to harm by magical means. [32] Éva Pócs writes that reasons for accusations of witchcraft fall into four general categories: [6]
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 ...
Witch trials and witch related accusations were at a high during the early modern period in Britain, a time that spanned from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century. Prior to the 16th century, Witchcraft -- i.e. any magical or supernatural practices made by mankind -- was often seen as a healing art, performed by ...
During the scholarly reexaminations of the Salem witch trials during the 19th century, Bridget Bishop's claims on this estate were posited as the real reason for her being accused of witchcraft. In one of his books Upham makes clear that one of the police officials was married to one of her in-laws who had expressed jealousy of Bridget Oliver ...