years. He had renounced God, defiled the Cross, dedicated his infant daughter to the
Devil (who then killed her), aroused storms, ridden to the “synagogue” on a stick, eaten
the flesh of infants, and had sexual intercourse with Belzebut (who appeared for the
purpose in the form of a twentyyear-old woman). His ecclesiastical judges then released
him to the secular court, which demanded to know the names of his associates in the sect;
when he claimed to know no names, the judge said it was impossible for him to have
belonged to the sect so long and not know names. Instruments of torture were shown him,
and he named eight persons; after lunch, the judge had the instruments of torture readied,
but Vallin said he could not give further names, no matter what was done to him. The
next day, the judge tried to induce him to name priests, nobles, or wealthy men from the
area, but he could not oblige.
Prosecution for witchcraft was often encouraged by developing regional governments;
when Claude Tholosan tried witches in southeastern France, he did so as agent of the
rising regional state of Savoy. The central authority of the royal government, however,
sometimes served as a braking influence in the witch trials. It was the Parlement de Paris,
for example, that eventually overturned the convictions at Arras. The cautious stance of
the national government is perhaps best reflected in a case at Marmande in 1453. In the
midst of an epidemic, eleven or twelve women at Marmande were seized by a local mob.
Three of them confessed under torture that they had killed children by their sorcery,
whereupon the local authorities had them burned. Two others confessed but then
recanted, and when the authorities refused to execute them the outraged popu-lace seized
and burned them. The rest of the women refused to confess under torture; two of them
died from their torture, but the others were eventually released. In the end, the royal
government disciplined the consuls of Marmande for having failed to maintain public
order during this crisis.
In places like Arras and the diocese of Lausanne, where the ritual and heretical
elements of witchcraft remained prominent and the element of sorcery was proportionally
less developed, witches were predominantly male. Indeed, one man in the Val de Travers
who confessed having attended the sabbath told of several men who had been in
attendance, and his judges had to ask him whether there were not women as well.
Elsewhere, however, women outnumbered men—by about two to one in the Dauphiné
and elsewhere still more strongly.
Occasionally, there is evidence that the women tried as witches were local healers.
The vulnerability of such women can be seen in the trial of Catherine de Chynal in the
Aosta Valley in 1449. Her personal history was tumultuous: born in Basel, she had
moved to the Valais when young, married, left her husband and moved about, and had
children by two men. She was accused in part of practicing medicine without having the
requisite education; she told of a charm that she had used successfully to keep wounds
from becoming inflamed, yet she was accused of harming people with her magic. One of
the people she was supposed to have bewitched was a priest who came to her hoping she
could relieve a tumor of his, but the medicine she gave him seemed to aggravate his
condition and he died soon afterward. She was charged not only with harming people but
with causing a cow to stop giving milk, and when the cow’s owner beat a pail to restore
the flow of milk Catherine was later discovered to have borne the effects of this magical
beating. Worst of all, she was accused by one Pierre Proveschy (himself a “heretic” or
witch) of having attended a “synagogue,” denied God, kissed the Devil on the posterior in
The Encyclopedia 1857