How does your peers understanding of the article inform your understanding of seeing a same historical moment from more than one perspective?

Peer one below.

I found the article "This Map Shows the Scale of 16th-and17th Century Scottish Witch Hunts" very interesting. There were multiple words and phrases used that stood out to me. The first one was when they were discussing Isobel Young. They stated that she was prone to "patterns of verbal and sometimes physical aggression" and her husband stoked the fire b saying she has attempted "to kill him with magic after quarreling about an unsavory house guest". (Solly, 2019) This stood out to me because it appears that Ms. Young could have been dealing with a mental illness or even dementia, yet the people were quick to label her a witch, because she is a woman. The story depicts mostly women facing this label, trial and executions. This screams gender diversity to me. mental health was not pertinent back then, so the assumption f distressing behavior was quickly labeled as crazy and witch craft. Later in the story, Janet Boyman is introduced as "a healer who was then charged with sorcery, witchcraft and consorting with fairies". (Solly, 2019) It is stated that Europe's witch hun stemmed from "the enduring grotesque fears [women] generate in respect to their putative abilities to control men and thereby coerce, for their own ends, male-dominated Christian society". (Solly, 2019). This now brings in diversity of religion as a factor to consider. Christian beliefs played a large role in these trials, so when a women's actions did not match those of the Christian beliefs, they were deemed witches by society. This reflects implicit bias, because not everyone supported or followed the Christian teachings so they shunned anyone who was "different". This seems like a starting point for stereotyping and labeling people why are culturally diverse, and that has now been carried forward into all of the centuries since then.

Peer two below.

While reading the Smithsonian article "This Map Shows the Scale of the 16^th- and 17^th-Century Scottish Witch Trials" there were details and word that stood out to me as topics of diversity. Religion and gender were topics that were mentioned. Historian Steven Katz stated that this started with "the enduring grotesque fears [women] generate in respect of their putative abilities to control men and thereby coerce, for their own ends, male-dominated Christian society". Many of the people that were killed for witchcraft were women. While I was using the interactive map, I rarely came across men that were killed.

This resource tells us that there is a correlation between culture, identity, power, and their relationship to history. It appears to me that the execution of witches was part of the Scottish culture during this period. "Ultimately that hysteria claimed as many as 4,000 lives in Scotlanddouble the execution rate seen in neighboring England, as Tracy Borman points out in History Extra" (Solly, 2019). This shows that it was more common in the Scottish culture to believe in witchcraft and to execute someone for it.