Question

The international military, political, economic, and demographic crisis of the seventeenth century had its social aspects too. The later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries saw the climax of a unique wave of social violence. This was the great surge of witch-hunting, the witch craze as it is often called, which peaked between 1550 and 1650. Medieval and early modern witches sometimes called “wise women” or “cunning men” were probably most often herb healers who combined spells and charms with their folk remedies. Most were women (though about a fifth were men), and more were old than young. Those accused of witchcraft frequently came from the marginal elements of society: beggars, poor widows without families, midwives (commonly blamed for high infant mortality). They were often outsiders in other ways –quarrelsome neighbours, people known to be disrespectful of authority, emotionally disturbed people. Only when a local witch-hunt was in full cry did suspicion reach as high as the middle or upper classes of society. European views of witchcraft had undergone a drastic transformation in the fifteenth century. The Inquisition had decided that witches were agents of Satan and as such a major threat to Christendom. Books like the ‘Hammer of the Witches’ (1487) by Heinrich Kraemer and Johan Springer spread the notion that these local weavers of spells and cures had gained theirmagical powers by swearing allegiance to the devil. In return, they have received “familiars”, demons in the guise of animals, to do their will, as well as the powers traditionally assigned to witches: the ability to conjure up storms, ruin crops, kill livestock, cause illness or death in humans, and transform themselves into animals. Satan’s servants were also believed to rub themselves with a salve that allowed them to fly through the air to the Witches’ Sabbath, where they paid obscene homage to the Devil, feasted, danced, and flung themselves into orgiastic sex in defiance of all the laws of God and Man. Using torture to gain confession to these crimes, both ecclesiastical and civil courts burned or hanged tens of thousands of alleged witches during the 1500s and 1600s. This savage persecution has been interpreted in many ways. It has been seenas an attempt to suppress a genuine witch cult (a view not now generally accepted), as scapegoating of social outsiders made to take the blame of misfortunes like illness or bad harvests, or simply as a form of mass hysteria. The witchcraze has also beencharacterised as an expression of widespread male hatred and fear of women. Some Scholars see the willingness to believe in a diabolical conspiracy of witches as a product of feverish religious temper. Perhaps three-quarters of the persecution occurred inthe German States, the Swiss Cantons, and France, all areas of intense religious conflict, and as Reformation religiosity waned, this brutal campaign against the “witches” also came to an end

a)On the basis of your reading of the above passage, make notes on it using headings and sub headings. Use recognizable abbreviations where necessary. Give a title to your note making.b)Write the summary of the passage in not more than 80 words, using the notes made.

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Answer 1

Answer:

sorry i dont know this oops!