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Witchcraft Dbq Essay

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more competence as an explanation due to evidence now being needed to prove someone guilty, there was still a aspect of psychological pressure towards obeying God and putting themselves forward for punishment in order to live a better afterlife.

The religious theory surrounding witchcraft is centred on Reformation, which brought a challenge to Catholicism from Luther. By the 1550’s there were religious wars in Germany. Calvin went on further to attack Catholics and Calvinism spread throughout Europe as a result. At the end of the sixteenth century, Europe had been divided between Catholics and Protestants where England, Germany and the Netherlands were mostly protestant. Whereas, Spain, Italy and most of France were Catholic. Initially the …show more content…

Including the fact that religious change produced, conflict and even war especially in Germany and France which were also centres of witchcraft, suggesting the appearance of a link. Second, the period tends to coincide with the peak of witch-hunt when the bible was widely circulated in the vernacular. Protestant priests preached things such as “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live”. They were keen to root out magic in all its forms because they associated it with catholic practices and superstition. There was confessional conflict as Hugh Roper sees witchcraft as being motivated by catholic and protestant desire to show godliness in a time of religious schism. The witch-hunt cultivated feelings of moral superiority plus helped to remove or reduce feelings of guilt because of religious changes. This again can be a form of psychological projection, which is a type of defence mechanism. This involves individuals attributing their own unacceptable thoughts and motives to another person. Therefore, people scapegoated others if they had done something wrong to get rid of their own guilty conscience by making themselves believe the accused individual was in the

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