The Arras Witch Treatises ed. by Andrew Colin Gow, Robert B. Desjardins, François V. Pageau (review)

The witchcraft trials that took place in the town of Arras (then in the Burgundian Netherlands, now in northern France) in the early 1460s are of considerable importance for the spread of large-scale witch-hunting beyond the hunt’s original Alpine homelands. As the editors put it in their introduction, the Arras persecution was “the harbinger of a new and aggressive mode of persecution,” not the product of the medieval past (7). The indictments included all the trappings—night flight, infanticide, and the sabbat among them—that were to shape the image of the witch throughout the early modern period. Still, the fact that the victims were accused of Vauderie or Waldensianism shows how witchcraft and heresy merged in the minds of the late medieval inquisitors who first moulded demonology. Perhaps most important of all, though, is the fact that the late medieval Burgundian Netherlands were unusually urbanized and literate, meaning that there was (for once) no shortage of contemporary observers and commentators.

The editors are to be commended for making these two short but fascinating treatises available to a wider audience in English translation. The texts belong to a generation when witchcraft still seemed new—in fact, the second author, Johannes Tinctor, identifies it as such—and that as a result, the audience still needed to be persuaded of the existence of witches and the urgency of the threat they posed. The contrast in tone with later sixteenth-century authors is striking. This reviewer would be naturally inclined to agree with the editors’ assessment that demonology was not “a monolithic or coherent set of principles that some sociopathic churchman had dreamed up in a fit of paranoia or repressed rage,” but there is something desperate about both these texts, especially the first one (8). This is not surprising, as the editors are probably right to identify the anonymous author of the first treatise—the Recollectio casus, status et condicionis Valdensium ydolatrarum—as the inquisitor Jacques du Bois, who played a large role in the trials. Both he and (the more obscure) Tinctor, author of the Invectives contre la secte de vauderie, were writing in the face of serious opposition. By the time that Du Bois died (in 1462) and Tinctor translated his original Latin treatise into the French version translated here, the Parlement of Paris had already overturned the verdicts.

The first treatise, the Recollectio, is accordingly very much an occasion piece. It is short. It avoids discussing the basics of demonology and instead addresses specific charges that must have come up during and after the trials. Demonological ideas do feature, of course—the sabbat here emerges as a swingers’ party which offered demonic flying lessons—but the Recollectio opens with the refutation of particular charges, about the reality of demonic flight, the method of interrogating suspects, and the level of punishment warranted, that feel like one side of a very loud and angry phone conversation. Du Bois was responding to his critics, but at the same time revealing what their criticisms were. Particularly chilling is the advice he offers as to how to deal with the accused. The instructions to ignore protestations of innocence and only accept the “truth” are clearly based on Du Bois’s interrogations in real life. Difficult though it may be in light of the horrors that his victims faced, we can also glimpse the man’s own fears. His concerns that the Devil grants his allies the power and abilities to attain secular and ecclesiastical power do on the one hand reflect the widespread concerns for corruption in the medieval Church, but it also says a great deal about Du Bois’s own...