Virginia Krause

Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Januar 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781316234952
• Artikelnr.: 42427311

Autorenporträt

Virginia Krause is Associate Professor of French Studies at Brown University. She received a research fellowship from the Newberry Library in 1999 and has been invited to speak at universities in the United States (Harvard, Cornell, University of Virginia, Dartmouth, University of Indiana, and Brandeis University), France (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and Université de Toulouse), and the United Kingdom (University of Hull). Krause currently serves on the external editorial committee of French Forum. She is the author of Idle Pursuits: Literature and 'Oisiveté' in the French Renaissance and is currently finishing a critical edition of Jean Bodin's De la démonomanie des sorciers (coedited with Christian Martin and Eric MacPhail).

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction
1. From the witch's mouth
2. Dark truth: demonology's auricular regime
3. Dismantling demonology's confessional
4. Becoming a witch
Conclusion: lessons from the demonological night.