Knowledge, Authority, and the Bewitching Jew in Early Modern France

The seventeenth century in France was a time of centralized power and deep suspicion on the part of those who held power toward those who did not. There were valid sources of knowledge (the church and the state) and invalid ones (Judaism and the supernatural, among others). It is therefore inherently ironic that many Christians sought to harness the powers of sorcerers—even Jewish ones—for their own purposes. This article takes the example of a Jewish magician from a late seventeenth-century novella by Anne de La Roche-Guilhen entitled “Marie de Padille, sous Pierre le Cruel, roi de Castille” to explore Jewish sorcery as it relates to questions of authority and power in early modern France.