Ritualized Violence against Sorcerers in Fifteenth-Century France

This article examines local practices for controlling sorcery in the context of a small group of fifteenth-century letters of remission in cases where the crime is that of inflicting mortal injury on a putative sorcerer. The people thus targeted are often local healers, and the aggressive violence begins in an attempt to undo perceived harm or illness caused by the healer. The author shows how one aspect of their integration rests uncomfortably (for the healers) upon a substrate of manipulative and ritualized violence. The death is thus represented by the letter writers as an accidental effect of a process whose aim was not murder at all. The stories told in these letters underscore the close relations between village practices, storytelling, and royal justice.