A Case of Witchcraft; The Trial of Urbain Grandier. By Robert Rapley. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998. 277 pp. $29.95. The details and causes of the 1634 trial and execution of Urbain Grandier, a French parish priest in the town of Loudon, have long been a subject of popular and scholarly writing in France. Grandier's intelligence, penchant for politics, acid tongue, and impregnation of a city magistrate's daughter earned him powerful enemies in Loudon, a town bitterly divided between Protestants and Catholics, and supporters and opponents of Cardinal Richelieu's po...
