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The first three people accused and arrested for allegedly afflicting Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, 12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard, [16] were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. [44] Some historians believe that the accusation by Ann Putnam Jr. suggests that a family feud may have been a major cause of the witch trials.
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]
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 ...
Many times the child accused of witchcraft, due to being shunned, became aggressive and threatened community members, thereby enforcing community beliefs that the child was a witch. [ 6 ] The sixteenth century brought forth more prevalent child involvement in witchcraft hunts and accusations, which slowly turned the narrative to the persecution ...
Usually, accusations of witchcraft were made by neighbors of accused witches. Witches were sometimes said to have communed with demons or with the Devil , though anthropologist Jean La Fontaine notes that such accusations were mainly made against perceived "enemies of the Church". [ 7 ]
Ghana's parliament on Friday passed a bill to protect people accused of witchcraft, making it a crime to abuse them or send them away from communities. The new law was suggested after a 90-year ...
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 ha.
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]