the form of a black cat, and spat and trampled on a cross. She denied all these charges,
even under repeated torture, and at the demand of her son a local canon undertook her
defense, yet the court found her guilty and sentenced her to penance (including a
pilgrimage to Rome) and to banishment.
A woman at Villars-Chabod named Antonia, tried in 1477, denied at first that she was
a witch, but after being tortured and left in prison over a month she confessed to
attending the “synagogue” and paying homage to a demon named Robinet. She had been
induced to join the “heresy” because of financial problems; at the synagogue, the demon
had given her a purse filled with gold and silver, but when she returned home she
discovered that the purse was empty. Amid all the details of the synagogue and of
sorcery, there is reference to her having cured people’s illnesses with the aid of her
demon and with a charm, suggesting that she, too, was established as a kind of local
healer.
Women more than men were liable to accusation if they became known as
troublesome, and especially if in quarrels with those about them they uttered curses that
could be interpreted as having had the intended effect. A woman in the hospital at
Provins in 1452 was bitten by a dog kept there, and in her fury she hit the woman in
attendance and uttered a curse that she might die in three days, which in fact happened.
Imprisoned, the woman attempted to hang herself in her cell, but the jailer resuscitated
her. The charges pressed against her soon went well beyond mere sorcery: she was
accused of belonging to the sect of Vaudois, of standing in circles and invoking demons,
of consorting with the Devil in the form of a large black cat, of killing children, and so
forth. Eventually, the case was transferred from the provost’s court to that of the
archbishop of Sens, and then appealed to the Parlement de Paris, as was the case a few
years later at Arras. Another person accused of joining the Vaudois was the Carmelite
theologian William Adeline, who in 1453 confessed that he had done so to curry favor
with a knight whose displeasure he had incurred; when the presiding demon saw him at
the assembly, he said, “The best one has come,” and Adeline allegedly enjoyed great
esteem among the Vaudois.
Often, a witch’s reputation for sorcery and other misconduct was built up over several
years before she was finally brought to trial. When a fifty-six-year-old widow named
Andrée Garaude was executed for witchcraft at Bressuire in 1475, it became clear that
she had long been at odds with the community. About eighteen years earlier, someone
had killed all her goslings, and in her rage she called on the Devil for revenge, whereupon
he appeared to her as a black dog named Sathanas and agreed to satisfy her desires if she
would serve him and attend the sabbath. After some reluctance, she consented. Apart
from the usual details of the sabbath, she confessed that she had used a wax image
against more than one of her neighbors, she had killed another neighbor’s goat by
afflicting it with a reddish powder, and she had desecrated the local church, urinating in
the holy water fount and defecating in the nave at the Devil’s command.
Vulnerability to prosecution was increased if a woman had relatives who had been
convicted of witchcraft or if she herself was known for general immorality. When
sickness broke out among both the infants and the animals at Boucoiran in 1491, a
woman named Martiale Espaze realized that she had been accused of sorcery by other
women detained for the same offense, and thus she fled. Her husband asked her if she
was in fact a sorcerer, and she told him she was not, yet she was fleeing to Gabriac to
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1858