Rosalyn Schanzer's Witches: The Salem Witch Trials

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In Rosalyn Schanzer’s Witches! The Absolutely True Disaster in Salem, the author discusses how the Salem Witch trials started and how the Puritans believed the witches should be tortured or killed for being a witch. Many people were accused of being witches. Many people thought the accused should die but some were somewhat nice and didn’t think they should die just in prison. Every puritan believed them because the dad was a reverend and everyone believed him so they all accused people. The causes of the Salem Witch Trials were disease, revenge, and attention.

In the book, one of the causes of the Salem Witch Trials was disease. In Sam Dean’s paper on Bon appetit it says “Cases of ergot poisoning (known as ergotism) were well-documented in medieval Europe, and often caused victims to experience the same symptoms as the “bewitched” Salem girls.” This is showing how crop poisoning caused disease which led to the Parris girls getting sick and having the weird symptoms. On pg 22 it says “He consulted with doctors and tried dosing the girls with every elixir.” This is showing how desperate Parris was to getting his children well again because of the disease. On pg 19 it says “Betty and Abigail began to twitch and choke and contort their bodies into strange abnormal shapes, crouch beneath …show more content…

So the cause of disease was because of some bad rye grain and it made them think it was witchcraft. Then the feud with the Parris’s and the Nurse family cause the revenge part of the Salem Witch Trials. Then for attention more people went to the hangings and they faked being hurt in the court when a witch walked in all for attention. The significance of the trials were don’t make some stuff up it will kill people and make innocent people die. That is how the Salem Witch Trials were

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