Question

1) What did people believe witches could do in the 16th and 17th
centuries?
2) Which laws made witchcraft punishable by death?

Answer 1

Answer:

1.At the dawning of the third millennium, a belief in the reality and efficacy of witchcraft and magic is no longer an integral component of mainstream Western culture. When misfortune strikes at us, our family or a close neighbour, we do not automatically seek to locate the source of all our ills and ailments in the operation of occult forces, nor scour the local community for the elderly woman who maliciously harnessed them and so bewitched us.

Nor do we believe that knowledge, love or power can be ours for the taking if only we employ the correct rites, charms or incantations to bring them within our grasp. Despite the interest in the modern pagan movement, the figures of the witch and the magician are conspicuously absent from the national stage and remain, for most people at least, simply the stuff of storybooks, firmly relegated in the popular consciousness to the realm of the late-night movie and the pages of fantastic fiction.

However, this has not always been so; and even now in parts of the non-Western world, where technology has failed to achieve total dominance over the traditional rhythms of agrarian life or to guarantee material prosperity and social justice, beliefs in witches and sorcerers are still firmly retained which bear significant and striking similarities to those held by Europeans throughout the early modern period.

2.In 1542 Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act which defined witchcraft as a crime punishable by death. It was repealed five years later, but restored by a new Act in 1562.