This book offers the first full English translations of two important demonological treatises produced in the wake of the series of trials known as the Vauderie of Arras, which took place in 1459–61. Held by a special inquisitorial court, the trials ended with the public execution of twelve defendants (another died in prison) for charges of vauderie—a term originally referring to the persecuted religious movement of the Waldensians, but which in the fifteenth century was also used in French-speaking regions to designate witches. The two treatises drew on their authors’ firsthand experience in Arras, and were instrumental in spreading accounts of the crimes attributed to the alleged new sect of witches. The first, Recollectio Casus, Status et Condicionis Valdensium Ydolatrarum, was probably written by Jacques du Bois, one of the trial judges, in 1460. The second, Johannes Tinctor’s Invectives contre la secte de vauderie, originally appeared in Latin in 1460. It was translated into Middle French, most likely by Tinctor himself, and enjoyed a particularly wide circulation. One of the first books to be printed in French in the Low Countries, the work also circulated in illustrated manuscripts that reached the Burgundian and French courts, and included one of the earliest depictions of the witches’ Sabbath. Both the Invectives and the Recollectio included many of the key notions subsequently publicized in the infamous Malleus Maleficarum of 1486. Nonetheless, the tremendous editorial success of the Malleus—which was inspired by witch prosecutions in Ravensburg and Innsbruck—eventually overshadowed the importance of the Arras treatises, which until lately have received only scant scholarly attention.

Reflecting the growing interest over the last few decades in the early phases of the persecution of witches in Europe, in 2006 Franck Mercier elucidated the historical significance of the Arras trials for the history of witch-hunting. In 1999, Émile van Balberghe and Frédéric Duval issued a critical edition of the French version of Tinctor’s Invectives, and in 2011 P. G. Maxwell Stuart published a partial English translation of the Recollectio. Drawing on these works, Gow, Desjardins, and Pageau have translated the complete treatises and added a brief introduction that charts the background for their composition.

The accurate and accessible translations make this book a helpful resource for teaching. Furthermore, by making the treatises available to scholars other than specialists of French demonology, they help to expound the broad geographic scope in which notions such as the witches’ flight to the Sabbath were already diffused a generation prior to the publication of the Malleus. As the editors point out, “ideas about diabolical witchcraft seemed to be circulating among a group of relatively prominent intellectuals in the second half of the fifteenth century. Tinctor and the Anonymous (Du Bois) made their own contributions to that circulation around 1460, and the author of the Malleus would be able to draw on them in the 1480s. … Precisely how those ideas were communicated we do not know, but they were the same ideas” (18). One could add that some of the witches’ crimes hitherto assumed to have made their first appearance in the Malleus—such as feeding toads with consecrated Hosts—already featured both in the Recollectio and in the original Latin version of the Invectives. This lends further support to the hypothesis that Heinrich Institoris, the Malleus’s author, was familiar with the Arras treatises. If this was indeed the case, it can certainly shed light on Institoris’s preoccupation with the sexual history of the accused witches that he prosecuted at Innsbruck and on his assault on female sexuality in the Malleus, because most of the first convicted witches to be executed at Arras had been prostitutes, and the descriptions of their orgiastic assemblies in the Recollectio included graphic details of their sexual transgressions. Reading this work could have convinced Institoris that lust was the key factor in leading women to join the devil’s sect. As this example makes clear, the potential of the new edition of the Arras treatises promises to transcend its already valuable contribution for classroom use. It will surely contribute to fine-tuning existing assumptions about fifteenth-century demonology, and students and scholars alike will benefit from its publication.