Word: witchcraft
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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William Stoughton, Class of 1650, was a "prominent, wealthy, and unpopular" leader in Massachusetts life during the latter half of the seventeenth century. His grandiloquent sermons and the leading role he played in the witchcraft trials led a contemporary to describe him as a "pudding-faced, sanctimonious, and unfeeling witch-hanger...
...Arkansas, whom Randolph asked about witchcraft, put it differently: "Them things are goin' on same as they always did, but it's all under cover nowadays. The young folks lives too fast an' heedless. More than half of 'em are bewitched anyhow, so they don't care what happens. It looks like the Devil's got the country by the tail, on a downhill pull...
...WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND (163 pp.)-Christina Hole-Scribner...
...Scots peasant who confessed her practices as a witch in language as fanciful as one of her great contemporaries, Poet Robert Herrick. Isobel (whom the authorities first hanged, then burned for safe measure) is one of the highlights of Christina Hole's scholarly, sober history of English witchcraft.* Her familiarity with it began when her old nurse destroyed her milk teeth as fast as they fell out, to keep them from evil hands...
...Witch in Time. Sharp practices, thefts, murders were often promptly confessed by the evildoer when he heard that the local white witch was on his trail. It was this popular, pagan confidence in witchcraft that caused the Church to fear it like the Devil himself. On the European continent, a steady procession of harmless men, women and children went to terrible deaths as witches. In England, where religious problems were less acute, and the authorities considered witchcraft more a criminal offense than a heresy, the record was not so dark. Torture, to extract confessions, was rarely employed, and Author Hole...