The Arras Witch Treatises ed. by Andrew Colin Gow etal. (review)

This sourcebook arrives in the reader's hands through a combination of chance and meticulous, drawn-out labor. The impetus for producing The Arras Witch Treatises came from the accidental discovery in 2005 of a manuscript version of Johannes Tinctor's Invectives contra la secte de vauderie (Invectives Against the Sect of Witches, c. 1465). Two of the book's editors, Andrew Colin Gow and Robert B. Desjardins, happened upon a rare copy of Tinctor's treatise in the Bruce Peel Special Collections library at the University of Alberta where it had lain dormant, miscataloged, and virtually unknown to scholars since 1988. For over a decade, Gow and Desjardins, along with François V. Pageau, who joined as co-editor in 2012, have engaged in the careful research and translation of not only Tinctor's Invectives, but of a whole suite of late medieval documents relating to the 1460 witch trials at Arras. The book under review here, which contains translations of Tinctor's Invectives and the so-called Anonymous of Arras' Recollectio casus, status, et conditionis Valdensium ydolatrarum (A History of the Case, State, and Condition of the Witches), is the first fruit of this labor to come out in print; a second volume of related translations is forthcoming.

The book opens with a brief yet effective introduction to the two treatises and the context in which they were produced. The editors move deftly between the Arras affair's microhistory—its participants, its victims, and the lineaments of the grim spectacle as recorded in contemporary accounts—and the broader milieu that gave rise to the affair and to which it, in turn, contributed in meaningful ways. This milieu, the witch craze that gripped Europeans from roughly the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, was marked by innumerable accusations and executions, dubious legal proceedings, and the development of demonological theories. Treatises such as the well-known Malleus maleficarum (1487) were instrumental to demonology's elaboration during this period, but the Malleus' fame has often overshadowed the treatises it followed or preceded. Tinctor's Invectives and the Recollectio, as The Arras Witch Treatises' editors are keen to note, anticipated the Malleus by over twenty years. The editors' aims are therefore to affirm the Arras episode's significance for the witch craze, to assimilate the two translated texts into the corpus of witch treatises, and to offer new comparative material to scholars who at times treat the Malleus as the first and last word in studies of late medieval and early modern demonology.

The editors make the strongest case for the Invectives and Recollectio's importance, I think, in their examination of the treatises' authorial voices and rhetorical strategies. Both Johannes Tinctor and Jacques du Bois (the most probable identity proposed by scholars for the Anonymous of Arras) were learned men of the times. Du Bois served as dean of Arras' cathedral chapter and Tinctor was a noted intellectual who published commentaries on Aristotle and Aquinas. The two authors—and Tinctor especially—were thus imbricated in the intellectual tradition of Scholasticism, a tradition that emphasized logical reasoning and argumentation. The Arras Witch Treatises' editors underline du Bois' and Tinctor's methodological framework not only to advocate for the treatises' literary heft, but also to attune modern-day readers to the mechanisms by which such pernicious ideas and calls to violence were normalized. The treatises emerge, then, not as the frenzied ramblings of extremists but as cultivated and considered theses that would have been perceived by contemporaries as viable academic works.

Though light and limber, the book includes copious footnotes and a thoughtfully curated bibliography. Still, the editors' project website and the digitized version of the Tinctor manuscript are nowhere cited in the published volume. And although a brief internet search would immediately direct the inquisitive scholar to these online resources, the explicit integration of printed and digital matter would certainly have been a boon. The editors' additions of modern...