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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.4 (2001) 643-644



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Book Review

Le diable chez l'évêque.
Chasse aux sorciers dans le diocèse de Lausanne (vers 1460)


Le diable chez l'évêque. Chasse aux sorciers dans le diocèse de Lausanne (vers 1460). By George Modestin (Lausanne, Cahiers lausannois d'histoire médiévale, 1999) 403 pp.

Lausanne's early-witchcraft school marches in the new century, issuing its sixth recent monograph drawn primarily from one remarkably rich inquisitorial file in local archives. This volume, although typically labor-intensive, [End Page 643] adds relatively little to our overall picture of the early context of the Witches' Sabbath, which emerged five years ago with volumes XIV and XV of this series.1 Modestin reinforces the extremely close connections between some early trials preserved at Lausanne and the anonymous Errores Gazariorum (114-120), and underlines the role of George of Saluzzo, Lausanne's energetic mid-fifteenth-century bishop, in spreading the new witchcraft doctrines through endemic persecutions in his seigneurial lands (see esp. 146-153). But this work will interest nonspecialists less than the simultaneous appearance of a volume in the same series presenting five major early fifteenth-century texts that first defined and explained Alpine witchcraft.2

William Monter
Northwestern University

Notes

1. See Monter's review of Catherine Chène, Juger les vers: Exorcismes et procès d'animaux dans le diocèse de Lausanne (XVe-XVIe siècles), Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXVIII (1997), 129-131.

2. M. Osterero, A. Paravicini Bagliani, and K. Utz Tremp (eds.), L'imaginaire du sabbat. Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.-1440 c.) (Lausanne, 1999).

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