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Bridget Bishop Research Paper

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I am going to prove the accused, Bridget Bishop, innocent of being a witch. You think you have proof that Bridget Bishop is a witch. I have proof that Bridget Bishop is not a witch. I will give you many good, reasonable reasons for explaining that she is not a witch. The explanations will prove useful in the defence. You claim that you have good reasons for suspecting that Mrs. Bishop is a witch. You think that Mrs. Bridget Bishop is a witch because she has been wearing black for the past few days. The truth, which you refuse to accept, is that Mrs. Bishop’s cat passed away on Sunday, February 20, 1692. In case you didn’t know, black is a color of mourning, and she is mourning the loss of her cat.
Three girls, Abigail Williams, Mary Walcott, and Ann Putnam, claim that Mrs. Bishop was cursing them. The fact is, on Thursday, February 17, 1692 Bridget was only scolding them. The girls were chasing her cat around the yard when she was trying to feed her cat. The next day, Friday, February 18, 1692, the girls were throwing their scraps on Mrs. Bishop’s path. The girls said that Bridget …show more content…

Has it occurred to you that her daughter could be sick? On Tuesday, February 22, 1692, Bridget Bishop’s daughter, Christian Oliver, became sick with the measles. You said that she was throwing tantrum because her mother was cursing her. Miss Christian Oliver was simply struggling to get out of bed and got caught in a blanket.
You said that on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 23, 1692 Mrs. Bridget Bishop was making a potion, and only witches make potions. What really happened,was the night before, her daughter fell ill, and Bridget was making soup to help her get better.
These are my reasons for believing that Bridget Bishop is not a witch. There is no real proof that Bridget Bishop is a witch, and I have plenty of proof that Mrs. Bishop isn’t a witch. Thank you for reading my reasons for thinking that Bridget Bishop isn’t a

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Mary Dyer was born in England in 1611. She married William Dyer and went to Massachusetts in 1635. She was a good friend with Anne Hutchinson and shared the same views; they were Quakers. She was the mother of 8 children, two died shortly after birth. Mary had a stillborn daughter that was deformed and they buried in secret, because it was believer that either if a women preached or listen to a woman preacher their child would be deformed or that the deformed child was consequences of the parents sins.

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The only evidence needed to be gained to prove that someone is a witch is accusations, spectral evidence, and that the person can’t recite the lord's prayer. The main reason of the witch hunts were to prevent the work of the devil. If the person accused doesn’t confess to witchcraft they were put to death. If the person does confess they would sign a document writing down their confession which will be shown to the

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The girls of the Salem witch trials lie to the society as to not get in trouble. Abigail leads them all in their lies by telling Mercy, “...listen now;if they be questioning us, tell them we danced- I told him as much already... He knows Tituba conjured Ruth’s sisters to come out of the grave...” (Miller 174).

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In Ann Putnam’s deposition, she believed she had seen the apparition of a minister. She was terrified, thinking it was a witch, and immediately wrote a letter to the court telling them of her apparition (doc c). Not only were the people of Salem stating false facts, the women were forced to take all of their clothing off so the hierarchy men could look to see if she had the mark of the devil (doc G). These accounts show that if the Puritans believed something was real, they would stop at nothing to find

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Ignorance of medical and scientific explanations: Puritan attitudes towards the witch trials were largely governed by the authoritative figures present at the time. Any medical explanation given was disregarded, thus showcasing how the villagers’ views could be easily manipulated. They chose to only consider two possible extremes for the cause of this outbreak; either the women were possessed or they were fabricating such behaviors. Chadwick Hansen describes the behavior of the bewitched being a 'neurotic syndrome '. It was known patients experiencing this disorder turned "their mental worries into physical symptoms such as blindness, paralysis of various parts of the body, choking, fainting, or attacks of pain"(The

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In his book, “A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (1702),” clergyman John Hale comes forth to confront the recent events going on at the time. Initially, Hale alludes to the questionable actions and activities of the townspeople being accused of witchcrafts, and being imprisoned as punishment. In addition, he discloses how everyone suspicious will be accused, not even young children are safe from the hands of this fate. Hale’s purpose of publishing this book was to describe the incident of the Witch Trials, and to reveal his experience of the trials, since his own wife was accused. By employing a didactic tone, Hale relays the actions of the past that targeted the Puritans and those wrongly accused of witchcrafts, so this occurrence

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While everyone in town believed the crying teenage girls that claimed witches were upon them, Rebecca Nurse used logical reasoning and claimed that they were acting just like regular teenage girls. Reasoning through tricky situation is a skill I also possess. Through the beginning of ninth grade I used reasoning to make new friends. Many people wanted to be my friend, but some of those who did told lies about people that I had been talking to in order for me to give more of my time to them. I disregarded the lies and today some of the “bad people” are now my friends.

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In Document B, Demos presents that most of the accusers of witches were single females in their younger years of age. In the late 1600s, women were extremely dependent upon men for their financial stability, overall safety, and mental/emotional well being. In an interpretation of this document, it can be assumed that these younger female women were seeking family ties and protection in a harsher time period. On the same hand, Document C, a most likely extremely biased account, recounts the “bewitched actions” of Bridget Bishop, a witch, upon the afflicted. Samuel Parris, the examiner of Bishop, seems to shed a negative light on Bishop.

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Bridget Bishop, a resident of Salem, was the first person to be tried as a witch. Surprisingly, Bishop was accused of witch craft by the highest number of witneses. After Bishop, more than two hundred people were tried of practicing witchcraft and twenty were executed. Many of these accusations arose from jealous, lower class members of society, especially towards women who had come into a great deal of land or wealth. Three young children by the names of Elizabeth, Abigail, and Ann were the first three people to be “harmed” by the witches.

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“Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you,” (Act I, 160). She was the first person in the play to accuse a person of seeing people summon spirits of the Devil. This caused a massive, wide-scale witch hunt to take place; families torn apart, mothers, fathers, and even children murdered for what was considered to be the greater good. Now, others began to accuse people of witchcraft and people who had been lifelong friends to each other now had no choice other than to point fingers at each other or be put to death. Widespread panic and unreasonable action was sweeping through everyone in Salem, all because of a little lie by

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Carol Karlsen 's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England provides a sociological and anthropological examination of the witchcraft trends in early New England. By examining the records, Karlsen has created what she suggests was the clichéd 'witch ' based on income, age, marital status, etc. She argues that women who had inherited or stood to inherit fairly large amounts of property or land were at particular risk, as they "stood in the way of the orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to the next." These women, Karlsen suggests, were targeted largely because they refused to accept "their place" in colonial society.

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However, records from the Salem trials show that her original convicted crime was not witchcraft, but having an “independence of mind”, and being an “unsubmissive character”. She was “…indicted for the bewitching of certain persons” and blamed for a smallpox outbreak that she had ‘caused’ by

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In the book, The Witches: Salem 1692, the author Stacy Schiff attempts to condense a large volume of research into a cohesive narrative that tries to avoid to much speculation. There is some contention that the book does speculate into the motives of primary accusers that some reviewers have intimated are bordering on fiction. However, the author defends her arguments logically, and her inferences do seem to bridge the gaps effectively. One of the items that causes some confusion, to both the historically curious, and to the researcher is that the author has created a list of dramatis personae in which the historical figures are labeled as a cast of characters which might make the book seem fictional.

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I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!" is what Abigail says to win the mercy of the two men. In this part of the book Abigail is not the one putting everyone in a crucible. In this part Reverend Hale and Reverend Parris are the two that are putting everyone on trial. They are trying to get to the bottom of this whole witchcraft story and who better to get that the specialist himself, Reverend Hale.

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  But they’re speakin’ of witchcraft. Betty’s not witched.” (Miller 462).  Abigail feels it would be better to confess to dancing and be whipped than be accused of witchcraft.

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