Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France by Virginia Krause (review)

This brief, compelling study provides non-specialists with a welcome critical introduction to the complex, contested field of early modern demonology. Its four chapters adopt different perspectives concerning ‘the audible invisibility of the demonic world’ (p. 4), but the result is a survey that is anything but anodyne. Virginia Krause, co-editor of a forthcoming critical edition of one of European demonology’s foundational texts, Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris: Du Puys, 1580), and a much-respected contemporary expert in the field, begins by asserting the distinctiveness of her own study. Arguing that a key aspect of demonology has thus far been overlooked, she makes of it her primary, innovative focus: spoken confession. With the testimony of the accused at the centre of collective attention, demonology reveals the nature of its distinctiveness from other early modern discourses of singularity and deviation from the norm: its commitment to a powerful, oppressive, and constraining ‘auricular regime’ (p. 44 and passim). Yet this insistence on confession is also the regime’s downfall, for with the growing promotion of ocular proof, ‘demonology faltered, crippled by its dependence on audible truths’ (p. 101). Adding to the growing body of work at the intersection of law and literature, Krause brings a cogent account of the legal history of the period (drawn principally from John Langbein’s Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977)) together with close and often fine analysis of the written record. Particularly good are her last two chapters, as discussion of Montaigne’s ‘Des boyteux’ in relation to arguments about Roman canon law prepares for the final chapter’s detailed exploration of the differing subject positions of the accused in records of the trial of the Marlou witches in 1582–83. Underwritten by a Foucauldian concern with assujettissement, itself further conjugated by engagement with Judith Butler on how modern subjects ‘give account’ of themselves, this book represents a timely intervention into a range of contemporary debates. The ‘Conclusion: Lessons from the Demonological Night’, for instance, makes briefly explicit the parallel between demonology and counter-terrorism that runs implicitly throughout, even as it settles differences between Foucault’s early critical assessment of confession and his late praise for parrhesia. Krause perhaps overstates her case at times; and the picture she paints is arguably distorted by three factors. The first is her almost exclusive reliance on legally inflected source material. The second is an over-enthusiastic endorsement of the distinction between ‘realist’ and ‘illusionist’ hypotheses concerning the Sabbat. (Thibaut Maus de Rolley’s Élévations: l’écriture du voyage aérien à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2011), an odd gap in Krause’s otherwise rich bibliography, offers a more nuanced account of the stakes of transvection, and of its rich philosophical and poetic pre-history.) Lastly, Krause’s passing claim that demonologists, initiated into the arts of humanist textual scholarship as part of their legal training, were also in effect committed to literature, seems contentious. Narrative, certainly, but ‘literature’? These, though, are quibbles. This engaged and powerful study will, quite properly, provoke questions, arguments, and productive counter-claims, alongside further investigation of its richly elaborated and carefully argued themes.