Le diable chez l'eveque: Chasse aux sorciers dans le diocese de Lausanne (vers 1460) (review)

The early witch trials in western Switzerland are among the most interesting and important of all witch trials, and thanks to a team of scholars at the University of Lausanne we now have editions, meticulous examinations, and translations into French of the most revealing trial records: those in manuscript Ac 29 in the Archives Cantonales Vaudoises. The present volume, edited by Georg Modestin, contains the records for four individuals, two men and two women, tried between 1458 and 1464. It closes the gap left by previous volumes in the series, which presented materials from as early as 1448 and as late as 1498. Modestin's work follows the same high standards seen already in the previous editions.

Of the cases given in this volume, that of Perrissone Gappit (1464) is especially important because it contains the testimony of three witnesses, thus allowing the voices of the accusers to rise above those of the inquisitors. Perrissone's stepson testified that she was a "heretic" (which is to say, a witch) and that she had been the cause of an illness of his. Then her husband told with bitter tears how she had been the cause of his difficulty in speaking. A neighbor woman said Perrissone had successfully cursed her and members of her family, and after the witness gave birth Perrissone had tried more than once to snatch her newborn baby away from her.

The trial of Guillaume Girod is of interest in part because it shows with clarity how the authorities posed as friends of the accused: the procurator of the bishop of Lausanne spoke to Guillaume in the manner of a counsellor, reminding him how he had gone to him at the castle of Lucens and admonished him charitably to confess his guilt and return to the bosom of the Church—and now, in the castle of Ouchy, the accused had reaffirmed his willingness to make a spontaneous confession, which he then made. Pierre dou Chanoz was considerably less compliant: he needed to be raised from the ground on an instrument of torture more than once before making what the record calls a "spontaneous" confession. At one point, when he had confessed his guilt and was asked if he had anything further to tell, he asked for time to consider. (The reader may be reminded of the trial for Satanic ritual abuse in Washington state, analyzed in detail by Lawrence Wright, in which time to consider meant time for the accused father to develop false memories roughly parallel to those of the accusing daughters.) Even after one series of confessions, Pierre retracted his testimony, swearing "by Jesus who was sold for thirty pence" that he had told not a word of truth in his previous statements.

In his introduction Modestin raises the question how we should understand the testimony: whether we should follow Norman Cohn in seeing the record as essentially a monologue on the part of the inquisitor (with words placed in the mouths of the accused by the tribunal) or Carlo Ginzburg in reading the text as a collaboration and a kind of dialogue between the judges and the accused. The key difference between the evidence Ginzburg has chiefly in mind and the present cases is that here "torture is omnipresent," and thus the confessions spring mainly from the inquisitors' imaginations. But who in particular was responsible for this series of trials? Modestin plausibly assigns the initiative to the bishop of Lausanne, George de Saluces, who had acquired experience in witch-hunting when he was still bishop of Aosta, and who had been bishop of Lausanne in 1448 when there was an earlier wave of prosecution in his diocese. Modestin reminds us that the bishop was temporal...