. The term “witchcraft” (Fr. sorcellerie) can be used for maleficent magic or sorcery, but in France from the 1430s onward this and related terms were applied to an alleged “sect” of conspiratorial Devil worshipers bent on overturning the order of Christendom.
This notion of conspiratorial witchcraft arose in southeastern France and southwestern Switzerland and quickly spread. From ca. 1428 and through the 1430s, large-scale trials occurred from the Dauphiné across to the Valais. The trial records indicate growing concern with a new type of conspiratorial witchcraft, and the concept of this offense was developed especially in writings of the 1430s: the anonymous Errores Gazariorum, the chronicler Johann Fründ’s report about witches in the Valais, the secular judge Claude Tholosan’s treatise regarding the witches he encountered in southeastern France, and (slightly later) Martin Le Franc’s more skeptical report of recent witch beliefs in the Champion des dames. Also produced in the 1430s was the Dominican friar Johannes Nider’s highly influential Formicarius, which told of witch trials in Switzerland around the turn of the century. This literature was followed in the 15th century by other important writings on witchcraft; especially important works written in France were Nicolaus Jacquerius’s Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum (1458) and Johannes Tinctoris’s Sermo de secta Vaudensium (1460). These writings told how the witches met at “synagogues” or “sabbaths,” where they paid homage and rendered an obscene kiss to the Devil (who often appeared as a black cat), made a pact with the Devil in their own blood, ate their own offspring, had indiscriminate sex with others in attendance. At these assemblies, they received powders and unguents to be used for destroying people and crops. The witches of the Valais were said to claim that they had recruited about 700 members for their “sect” and boasted that within a year they would be so powerful that they could rule Christendom and sit in judgment over it.
The association of witchcraft with the heresy of the Waldensians is reflected in the term Waudenses or Vaudenses (Vaudois in French), used for witches as early as 1437 in Pope Eugenius IV’s Ad nostrum, alerting inquisitors to them. The term was used regularly in the 1450s, particularly in connection with the affair at Arras beginning in 1459, when thirty-four people were arrested and twelve burned for Vauderie. In this case, the ritual elements of witchcraft were accentuated and the role of sorcery (or maleficent magic) was negligible. Yet it is difficult to determine whether the witches spoken of as Vaudois had a genuine link to the Waldensian heresy or whether the term was being applied loosely; some of the accused in the 1430s may have been Waldensians, but certainly the Vaudois of the 1450s show little sign of having belonged to this sect.
Although witches are occasionally recorded as having confessed without torture, the use or threat of torture was often a major factor in obtaining confessions. It was important in coercing alleged witches to give the names of other people they had seen at the sabbath. The dynamics of prosecution can be seen clearly in the trial of Pierre Vallin at La-Tour-du-Pin in 1438. Vallin was convicted by an episcopal official and an inquisitorial vicar of invoking demons and serving “Belzebut” more than sixty-three years. He had renounced God, defiled the Cross, dedicated his infant daughter to the Devil (who then killed her), aroused storms, ridden to the “synagogue” on a stick, eaten the flesh of infants, and had sexual intercourse with Belzebut (who appeared for the purpose in the form of a twentyyear-old woman). His ecclesiastical judges then released him to the secular court, which demanded to know the names of his associates in the sect; when he claimed to know no names, the judge said it was impossible for him to have belonged to the sect so long and not know names. Instruments of torture were shown him, and he named eight persons; after lunch, the judge had the instruments of torture readied, but Vallin said he could not give further names, no matter what was done to him. The next day, the judge tried to induce him to name priests, nobles, or wealthy men from the area, but he could not oblige.
Prosecution for witchcraft was often encouraged by developing regional governments; when Claude Tholosan tried witches in southeastern France, he did so as agent of the rising regional state of Savoy. The central authority of the royal government, however, sometimes served as a braking influence in the witch trials. It was the Parlement de Paris, for example, that eventually overturned the convictions at Arras. The cautious stance of the national government is perhaps best reflected in a case at Marmande in 1453. In the midst of an epidemic, eleven or twelve women at Marmande were seized by a local mob. Three of them confessed under torture that they had killed children by their sorcery, whereupon the local authorities had them burned. Two others confessed but then recanted, and when the authorities refused to execute them the outraged popu-lace seized and burned them. The rest of the women refused to confess under torture; two of them died from their torture, but the others were eventually released. In the end, the royal government disciplined the consuls of Marmande for having failed to maintain public order during this crisis.
In places like Arras and the diocese of Lausanne, where the ritual and heretical elements of witchcraft remained prominent and the element of sorcery was proportionally less developed, witches were predominantly male. Indeed, one man in the Val de Travers who confessed having attended the sabbath told of several men who had been in attendance, and his judges had to ask him whether there were not women as well. Elsewhere, however, women outnumbered men—by about two to one in the Dauphiné and elsewhere still more strongly.
Occasionally, there is evidence that the women tried as witches were local healers. The vulnerability of such women can be seen in the trial of Catherine de Chynal in the Aosta Valley in 1449. Her personal history was tumultuous: born in Basel, she had moved to the Valais when young, married, left her husband and moved about, and had children by two men. She was accused in part of practicing medicine without having the requisite education; she told of a charm that she had used successfully to keep wounds from becoming inflamed, yet she was accused of harming people with her magic. One of the people she was supposed to have bewitched was a priest who came to her hoping she could relieve a tumor of his, but the medicine she gave him seemed to aggravate his condition and he died soon afterward. She was charged not only with harming people but with causing a cow to stop giving milk, and when the cow’s owner beat a pail to restore the flow of milk Catherine was later discovered to have borne the effects of this magical beating. Worst of all, she was accused by one Pierre Proveschy (himself a “heretic” or witch) of having attended a “synagogue,” denied God, kissed the Devil on the posterior in the form of a black cat, and spat and trampled on a cross. She denied all these charges, even under repeated torture, and at the demand of her son a local canon undertook her defense, yet the court found her guilty and sentenced her to penance (including a pilgrimage to Rome) and to banishment.
A woman at Villars-Chabod named Antonia, tried in 1477, denied at first that she was a witch, but after being tortured and left in prison over a month she confessed to attending the “synagogue” and paying homage to a demon named Robinet. She had been induced to join the “heresy” because of financial problems; at the synagogue, the demon had given her a purse filled with gold and silver, but when she returned home she discovered that the purse was empty. Amid all the details of the synagogue and of sorcery, there is reference to her having cured people’s illnesses with the aid of her demon and with a charm, suggesting that she, too, was established as a kind of local healer.
Women more than men were liable to accusation if they became known as troublesome, and especially if in quarrels with those about them they uttered curses that could be interpreted as having had the intended effect. A woman in the hospital at Provins in 1452 was bitten by a dog kept there, and in her fury she hit the woman in attendance and uttered a curse that she might die in three days, which in fact happened. Imprisoned, the woman attempted to hang herself in her cell, but the jailer resuscitated her. The charges pressed against her soon went well beyond mere sorcery: she was accused of belonging to the sect of Vaudois, of standing in circles and invoking demons, of consorting with the Devil in the form of a large black cat, of killing children, and so forth. Eventually, the case was transferred from the provost’s court to that of the archbishop of Sens, and then appealed to the Parlement de Paris, as was the case a few years later at Arras. Another person accused of joining the Vaudois was the Carmelite theologian William Adeline, who in 1453 confessed that he had done so to curry favor with a knight whose displeasure he had incurred; when the presiding demon saw him at the assembly, he said, “The best one has come,” and Adeline allegedly enjoyed great esteem among the Vaudois.
Often, a witch’s reputation for sorcery and other misconduct was built up over several years before she was finally brought to trial. When a fifty-six-year-old widow named Andrée Garaude was executed for witchcraft at Bressuire in 1475, it became clear that she had long been at odds with the community. About eighteen years earlier, someone had killed all her goslings, and in her rage she called on the Devil for revenge, whereupon he appeared to her as a black dog named Sathanas and agreed to satisfy her desires if she would serve him and attend the sabbath. After some reluctance, she consented. Apart from the usual details of the sabbath, she confessed that she had used a wax image against more than one of her neighbors, she had killed another neighbor’s goat by afflicting it with a reddish powder, and she had desecrated the local church, urinating in the holy water fount and defecating in the nave at the Devil’s command.
Vulnerability to prosecution was increased if a woman had relatives who had been convicted of witchcraft or if she herself was known for general immorality. When sickness broke out among both the infants and the animals at Boucoiran in 1491, a woman named Martiale Espaze realized that she had been accused of sorcery by other women detained for the same offense, and thus she fled. Her husband asked her if she was in fact a sorcerer, and she told him she was not, yet she was fleeing to Gabriac to stay with her cousins. Her husband later told the authorities he had no reason to think her a sorceress. Others, however, were not so sure. Witnesses told how she and her mother had fled to Boucoiran some years ago when a relative was executed elsewhere for witchcraft and her mother was suspected. Martiale herself was pregnant at the time and claimed to be a widow. In Boucoiran, she had a reputation for sexual promiscuity. Eventually, she was captured at Gabriac and brought back to Boucoiran, where she confessed that she had attended the sabbath. She had killed and witnessed the killing of children; she once did so in the course of a quarrel in which she had been accused of theft. But she had also killed pigs, not out of vengeance but simply in compliance with the Devil’s command.
Especially poignant as an example of a woman’s vulnerability is the case of Jehanneta Lasne of Vacheresse, who confessed under torture at Fribourg in 1493 that she had attended assemblies of the witches’ sect, presided over by a figure who called himself Sathanas. She had been induced into this sect because her husband would beat her, and one night she went into the woods and cried out asking God or the Devil to come to her aid. Sathanas then appeared and told her that if she denied God and took him as her master he would comfort her and her husband would cease beating her.
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