Comparing The Salem Witch Trials In 1691 And 1692

Salem, Massachusetts in 1691 and 1692 was a frightening place to be. In January 1692, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris became ill, beginning a several-months-long crusade against the devil and those who were believed to be in league with him, including Parris’ Indian slave, Tituba. The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 was a prime example of what happens when religious fanaticism and rampant hysteria combine with superstition about the religious rituals of those outside of Christianity. The effects of the Salem Witch Trials continue to interest people over three-hundred years later, spawning several movies and television shows incorporating some aspect of the trials within them.

In the time before the trials began, Massachusetts was

In 1671, a case of so-called witchcraft occurred at Groton, and Samuel Willard, then the minister in the village took an interest. Two years later, he published a volume of sermons entitled Useful Instructions for a professing People in Times of great Security and Degeneracy: delivered in Several Sermons on Solemn Occasions, constituting of three sermons, one of which preached the consequence of this supposed manifestation of the Devil. The victim was Elizabeth Knapp, who exhibited the symptoms that were (then) associated with possession, but would now be considered a marked case of hysteria, which will be covered later in the essay. The first case of the Salem Witch Trials involved Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of the minister of Salem, Samuel Parris. They would later accuse the family maid, Tituba and two women of the village, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne of bewitching them. This started a chain reaction, and many more people in the village became “afflicted,” and accused many others in the village of witchcraft. The question is why? A possible theory into why so many people decided to begin accusing their neighbors of witchcraft was due to a claustrophobic community lifestyle. People lived in a small, face-to-face society where they could not easily move away from neighbors with whom they found themselves in competition, or whom they disliked, and who became natural scapegoats for violent emotions that could not be expressed within the close family circle for fear of damaging it. Although it was very un-Christian of the people of Salem Village, what could be a better way to rid yourself of a terrible neighbor than to accuse him or her of witchcraft? Another theory is because of the New England witch stereotype. According to Stacy Schiff, New England witches were traditionally marginal: outliers and deviants, cantankerous scolds and