How Social Tensions led to Witchcraft

The history of witchcraft during seventeenth century New England is inherently a history of direct confrontations within communities where relationships become tainted with suspicion, revenge and anger. The documents in Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England have retold the events and stories of Puritan New England to give the modern reader an understanding of the repressive social institutions of religion and family structure which were controlling factors that lay behind the particular cases discussed in …showed first 75 words of 929 total…

…showed last 75 words of 929 total…within the community and it inhabitants. In the case of the Parsons, witchcraft was not so much the result of anything magical or religious, it was how to deal with the “difficult” people of the town. Strange occurrences were explained as witchcraft and coincidences were used as evidence, and combined with the social tensions of those days, would motivate the witchcraft accusations which then led to more strain among the people of early Puritan society.