Your primary sources this week include various late 17th and 18th-century views on witchcraft. Your task is to understand the conflicts and changes in English attitudes toward witchcraft in this period to better understand the decline in witchcraft accusations in this period. The shift in attitudes about witches was a not as simple as the rise of scientific thought or reasoning.
The paper uses the same format as your first short paper. It should be 2-3 pages, double-spaced, normal font, and use intext citations.
Read the following documents in at the end of Sharpe:
Document 24: Joseph Glanvill defends witch beliefs, 1681
Document 25: Witch-hunting advocated, 1722
Document 26: Refuting witch beliefs, 1736
Document 27: Some eighteenth-century comments
Here are some guided questions to help you develop your paper. Overall your paper should address the question: What were the conflicting viewpoints on witchcraft at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries?
1. What are the reasons that Glanvill and Boulton provide for continued witch hunting in the late 17th and early 18th centuries? Are these justifications for witch hunting different from earlier writers?
2. Why do other writers oppose witch hunting? What are their specific reasons? Do they seem to believe in the existence of witchcraft?
3. What are the major points of difference in the pro and anti witchcraft hunting ideas?