By Katie BrownCurrent PhD Biblical Studies, BA Classics and ReligionKatie is a postgraduate research student in Trinity College Dublin, where she also received her Bachelor's Degree in Classical Civilisation and World Religions and Theology. According to a theory posited by economists Leeson and Russ, churches across Europe sought to prove their strength and orthodoxy by relentlessly pursuing witches, demonstrating their prowess against the Devil and his followers. How Does Arthur Miller Use Witch Hunts In The Crucible. Torture was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. It used to be that women were only madthemselvesbecause of their lusts. Another accusation that often accompanied maleficium was trafficking with evil spirits. [emailprotected], For more info, go here: https://teresajusino.com But the reason as to why Arthur Miller felt the need to write The Crucible in the first place was because the unfortunate reality that history seemed to have repeated itself again. In 1689 Parris was formally called as the minister, given a full deed to the parsonage, and the Salem Village church charter was signed. Local feuds, for example, could prove detrimental to communities, as neighbors and families turned against each other and condemned their rivals to the pyre and the gallows. The most common suspicions concerned livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents, sibling rivalries, and local politics. In a piece over at The Daily Beast, Maria Dahvana Headley writes about Arthur Millers history with Marilyn Monroe, and how that affected his plays, which perpetuated very specific ideas about women through the American literary canon. Part of their belief system was awareness for anything "evil". One of the most known is The Holocaust that happened during WWII. Through their reactions to the witch trials, characters in Arthur Millers The Crucible portray two major themes of self-preservation and mass hysteria. A character named Abigail in the play acquired immense power, and manipulated the situations in the witch trials. The Salem witch trials end up being a crucible, that is, a time of great testing and purifying, for the townspeople. The girls accused a lot of people and got a lot of people of hang for being witches. There were additional hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations continued even though the differences between the folklore of the Europeans and Native Americans introduced some minor variations into the accusations. Most readers are unfamiliar with McCarthyism. The Salem witch scare had complex social roots beyond the communitys religious convictions. With The Crucible, Miller extrapolated that, citing womens instability when it came to the instability of an entire community. As competition flared up following the Reformation, churches turned towards offering salvation from sin and evil to their congregations. Also the fact people would accuse people of witchcraft which would then accuse other people of witchcraft and etc. Very few accusations went beyond the village level. Across New England, where witch trials occurred somewhat regularly from 1638 until 1725, women vastly outnumbered men in the ranks of the accused and executed. King James VI of Scotland, a monarch notorious for his role in Scotlands witch-hunting craze, believed that he had been personally targeted by witches who conjured dangerous storms while he sailed across the North Sea to Denmark. The Devil, whose central role in witchcraft beliefs made the Western tradition unique, was an absolute reality in both elite and popular culture, and failure to understand the prevailing terror of Satan has misled some modern researchers to regard witchcraft as a cover for political or gender conspiracies. Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team. He mentions that, firstly, the witch-hunts developed from what he names a 'paradox.' In the article Are You Now or Were You Ever, Arthur Miller claims that the McCarthy era and the Salem witch trials were similar and he does this through his choice of diction, figurative language, and rhetorical questions. They viewed their difficulties through a theological lens, and rather than attribute the blame to chance, misfortune, or simply nature; they thought that they were the Devils fault in collaboration with witches. Anyone who failed to subscribe to Puritan social norms could become vulnerable and villainized, branded as an outsider, and cast in the role of the Other. These included those that were unmarried, childless, or defiant women on the fringes of society, the elderly, people suffering from a mental illness, people with a disability, and so forth. Drawing on research on the witch trials he had conducted while an undergraduate, Miller composed The Crucible in the early 1950s. Arthur Millers play The Crucible, which forms the basis of many Americans knowledge of the trials, takes liberties with the story. We can guess from the circumstances that Parris enslaved Tituba in Barbados, probably when she was 12 or a few years older. Aligns with CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.7- Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. Because accusations and trials of witches took place in both ecclesiastical and secular courts, the law played at least as important a role as religion in the witch hunts. Describe a relatively recent historical event that resembles the situation that unfolded in Salem. Poor agricultural success, conflict with Native Americans, tension between different communities, and poverty were not what the Puritan communities envisioned when they set out. While people were being falsely accused of witchery without definite facts. George Burroughs and the Salem Witch Trials, Mary Easty: Hanged as a Witch in Salem, 1692, M.Div., Meadville/Lombard Theological School. Witch hunts Although the lurid trials at Salem (now in Massachusetts) continue to draw much attention from American authors, they were only a swirl in the backwater of the witch hunts. The Black Death: Europes Deadliest Pandemic in Human History. During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam the two were afflicted teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parriss niece both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigails hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up, into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procters hood very lightly. One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. A combination of multiple different forces came together to create the circumstances in which these witch hunts took place, so there are numerous reasons to consider. Those include fear, personal motives, unfair treatment of the accused, and accusers. A neighbor of the Parris family, Mary Sibley, advised John Indian and possibly Tituba to make a witch's cake to identify the cause of the initial "afflictions" of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. Children were often accusers (as they were at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. Parris' sermons in late 1691 warning of Satan's influence in town is also not known, but it seems likely that his fears were known in his household. Largely because of that mistake, he is buffeted by a couple of elements shaped to suit the underlying narrative of Millers story, and thus not found in primary sources. Also, the clergy in authority expounded punishment, rather than penitence and forgiveness, for those deemed witches. In other words, there was how things actually happened during the Salem Witch Trials, and there was how Miller wrote about them, taking lots of liberties to tell this story through a prism that made sense to him. . Even though the clergy and judges in the Middle Ages were skeptical of accusations of witchcraft, the period 130030 can be seen as the beginning of witch trials. Although these figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly exaggerated claims of some 20th-century writers. The accusations were usually made by the alleged victims themselves, rather than by priests, lords, judges, or other elites. Successful prosecution of one witch sometimes led to a local hunt for others, but larger hunts and regional panics were confined (with some exceptions) to the years from the 1590s to 1640s. The number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. "In Act 1, what explanation does Miller give as to why the witch hunts developed in such a community in The Crucible?" Witches were considered Satan's followers, members of an antichurch and an antistate, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a "counter-state" in the early modern period. In about 1689, Tituba and John Indian seem to have married. Miller transforms Tituba, a young Native American girl, into an African slave who led a group of young women into the forest to participate in magic rites. Where previously it was believed no mortal could control the weather, European Christians gradually came to believe that witches could. As just one example, the king of Italy, Charlemagne, dismissed the concept of witchcraft as a pagan superstition and ordered the death penalty for whoever executed someone because they considered them to be a witch. The responsibility for the witch hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. Three-fourths of European witch hunts occurred in western Germany, the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland, areas where prosecutions for heresy had been plentiful and charges of diabolism were prominent. How Long Will Joe Goldbergs Rampage Be Left Unchecked? In The Crucible, with Hales transformation Miller is emphasizing that humanity will always seek redemption, the truth will triumph the lies, and people will constantly try. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. ", EDSITEment is a project of theNational Endowment for the Humanities, Salem Witch Trials: Understanding the Hysteria, Origins of Halloween and the Day of the Dead. What took place in Western society to allow for the popularity of the Malleus, and for such a drastic shift in attitude towards the very existence of witchcraft?