Argumentative Essay On Witch Hunt

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Witchcraft attracts attention, especially at this time of year; everyone "knows" something about it. As a historian, I'm interested to see my subject, the past, being put to all kinds of uses in the present. Here are some ideas about witch-hunting that are distinctly dodgy. It's sometimes suggested that witch-hunting was a more or less conscious male device for repressing women. In fact, although there is a relationship between women and witch-hunting, it's a complex one. Witch-hunters didn't target women as such, they targeted witches – and about 25% of witches were men. Witch-hunting certainly functioned as an encouragement to conform to patriarchal values, but witch-hunting wasn't a cynical male conspiracy. So what about the "wise women",…show more content…
Usually the authorities themselves are said to have profited, but sometimes it's neighbours who coveted the alleged witch's property. In truth, while some courts did confiscate the accuser's goods, many did not, and most witches were too poor to have possessions worth coveting anyway. This idea fails to take witchcraft itself seriously. People tend to think that witchcraft is not (and was not) real, so they conclude that witchcraft accusations were "really" about something other than witchcraft. The idea of accusations for money is readily grasped because we, today, take money seriously. Another idea worth debunking is the "swimming test". The theory goes that witches were detected by dropping them in water: the guilty floated and were executed, while the innocent sank (and drowned). In fact, ropes were tied to suspects to pull them out – and the swimming test itself was rare. I'm sometimes told that witches practised a pagan religion that had gone underground with the coming of Christianity. This idea was popularised in the 1920s and had some scholarly credibility until about 1975, but has been recognised as a myth ever since. Most witches were executed in the 16th and 17th centuries (about 50,000 of them – not nine million, by the way). There were still survivals from paganism (a few traditional charms had pre-Christian origins), but witches and witch-hunters alike were

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