Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France

Abstract

Denounced by neighbors and scrutinized by demonologists, the early modern French witch also confessed, self-identified as a witch and as the author of horrific deeds. What led her to this point? Despair, solitude, perhaps even physical pain, but most decisively, demonology's two-pronged prosecutorial and truth-seeking confessional apparatus. This book examines the systematic and well-oiled machinery that served to extract, interpret, and disseminate witches' confessions in early modern France. For the demonologist, confession was the only way to find out the truth about the clandestine activities of witches. For the witch, however, trial confessions opened new horizons of selfhood. In this book, Virginia Krause unravels the threads that wove together the demonologist's will to know and the witch's subjectivity. By examining textual and visual evidence, Krause shows how confession not only generated demonological theory but also brought forth a specific kind of self, which we now recognize as the modern subject.

Magi och nation

“…Redan på 1500-talet fanns motstånd mot reales-hypotesen -att häxsabbat inträffade på riktigt; många argumenterade för att det handlade om illusiones Diaboli, drömmar eller hallucinationer som likafullt härrörde från djävulen. 24 De europeiska häxprocesserna är ett högst diversifierat fenomen både i termer av tid, straffsatser, kön, och anklagelsernas innehåll. När häxpaniken drabbade Sverige och Finland under andra halvan av 1600-talet var den redan över på kontinenten.…”

The Confessing Subject and the Construction of Modern Catholic Selves

“…Thus, the promotion of confession within the Catholic religious sphere coincided with an unprecedented questioning of the validity of confession in secular spheres, and the promotion of external and therefore circumstantial evidence as a precondition for a guilt-verdict. This process slowly led to the decline, and in some cases even dismissal, of the traditional status of (secular) confession as the Queen of Proofs (Mandrou, 1958;Langbein, 1974;Maclean, 1992;Krause, 2015). These antithetical processes should warn us against reading an all-encompassing process of subjugation by means of truth-telling that allegedly reshaped all spheres of life in early modern Europe.…”