Introduction — 7PART ONE1Death of the Gods — 232What drove the Middle Ages to Despair — 333The Little Demon of the Hearth and Home — 454Temptations — 585Diabolical Possession — 696The Pact with Satan — 857King of the Dead — 928Prince of Nature — 1019Satan the Healer — 11010Charms and Love Potions — 12411Communion of Revolt Witches' Sabbaths - The Black Mass — 13512Black Mass Continued - Love and Death - Satan Disappears — 148PART TWO13The Sorceress in her Decadence - Satan Multiplied and Vulgarised — 15914Persecutions — 17015A Hundred Years' Toleration in France — 18616The Basque Witches (1609) — 19417Satan Turns Ecclesiastic (1610) — 20518Gauffridi (1610) — 21519The Nuns of Loudun - Urbain Grandier (1633, 1634) — 24020The Nuns of Louviers and Satanic Possession - Madeleine Bavent (1640-1647) — 26121Satan Triumphant in the Seventeenth Century — 27722Father Girard and Charlotte Cadière — 28623Charlotte Cadière at the Convent of Ollioules — 32224Trial of Charlotte Cadière (1730, 1731) — 349Epilogue — 377Notes and Elucidations — 385Principal Authorities — 409Post ScriptumThis work is one of the most vivid, dark and confronting studies on witchcraft ever produced. Long before Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Michelet positions the medieval witch within a diminishing ancient culture of nature worship and the ruthless efforts of Christianity, with its cruel hostility towards nature, life (and women), to overwrite it. A nightmare of the most extraordinary verisimilitude and poetical power...Sorceress (the English translation of La Sorcière) by Jules Michelet is still one of the most vivid, dark and confronting studies on witchcraft ever produced. Long before Murray, it positions the medieval witch within a diminishing ancient culture of nature worship and the ruthless efforts of Christianity – with its radical hostility towards nature and life – to overwrite it. Michelet’s was an authority on the history of the Middle Ages, and his insistence that history should concentrate on ‘the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions’ placed him ahead of his time as a godfather of micro-history. Starting in the 13th century the book moves on towards belladonna, the Sabbath and pacts with Satan, into the hells of the Burning Times – social contexts, church intrigues and mass hysteria always included. Via Basque witches, the Black Masses and demoniacal possessions we enter the satanic decadence of 17th century France, and finally the end of the witch burning era in 18th century, with the trial of Charlotte Cadière. Though a solid work of history, the reader is not served a simple bone dry exposition of facts and theories, but something that tastes like a Bloody Mary.