Joseph Bergin

The Rise of Richelieu.

Family traditions early years Richelieu and Lucon the making of a politician the arts of survival games of patience.

Le Voyage aux saints: les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle)

To this dichotomy, Goodare adds two more categories: the ‘folkloric witch’ known to villagers through stories, fairy-tales, and legends, and the ‘envisioned witch’ known through dreams and nightmares, but also through trance states. Unfortunately, while Goodare gives more discussion to witches out of stories and legends than do many surveys, this category does not really intrude much on his analysis of the dynamics of village suspicions, accusations, and trials. The category of envisioned witch, which would include Ginzburg’s benandanti and their ilk around Europe, also gets more treatment than in many other syntheses, but still does not really affect the clearly central dichotomy of demonic vs. village witch. Goodare excels at showing the true balance of that dichotomy. Deeply indebted to Robin Briggs, he stresses how suspicions of witchcraft at the village level only rarely escalated into courtroom proceedings. Instead villagers most often dealt with witchcraft by avoiding the witch, placating her or negotiating with her to remove a curse, or employing counter-magic themselves. In several chapters, witch-hunting is itself pushed quite far to the periphery. One almost wonders why Goodare did not pursue that approach to its fullest extent and write a survey of early modern European witch-beliefs and dynamics that did not still present witch trials as its ultimate focus. But of course, trials produced such a preponderance of documentation that they can hardly be shifted to the margins of historical analysis, even if they may (in many contexts) have been marginal to most ordinary people’s actual experience of witchcraft. Indeed, we typically only know about the other sorts of experiences that framed witchcraft by catching traces of them in trial records. While Goodare is keen to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of witch-beliefs, he has a clear and singular answer for what drove the legal mechanisms of witch-hunting: state power, and in particular the power of the ‘godly state’. Godly rulers, deeply concerned not just to enforce criminal codes but to impose moral order on their populations, appeared at the end of the Middle Ages and really came to the fore during the period of the Reformation. They disappeared in the course of the Enlightenment, when reason was exalted over religion as the most important foundation for social and political life in Europe. With them, major witch-hunts came and went as a significant phenomenon in European history. Overall this is a very welcome addition to the burgeoning literature of witchcraft, and it ranks with the very best introductions and overviews of the subject. It brings together the latest scholarship and the latest scholarly trends in an engaging presentation. It ends with an up-to-date review of further readings, and an appendix that breaks down the ‘intensity of witch-hunting’ by country and region. It is well-suited for students, and experts will want to consider the new landmarks and guideposts it sets up in familiar terrain.

Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et "foi des simples". Études d'anthropologie religieuse (XVI e –XVIII e siècles) by Dominique Julia (review)

Now that the quarante glorieuses of postwar French historiography are themselves becoming an object of increasing historical curiosity, several scholars who are little known to a wider public have been gaining the recognition they deserve. The golden age of the French historical sociology of religion, as it was called, was inspired primarily by the distinguished medievalist Gabriel Le Bras; the subsequent shift toward religious anthropology was the work of an early modernist who was the radical opposite of Le Bras, Alphonse Dupront. Dominique Julia managed the feat of being a disciple of both men! It was Dupront, who published scarcely anything during his lifetime, that founded an influential research institute, the Centre d’Anthropologie Religieuse Européenne (CARE), of which Julia, an indefatigable researcher and participant in collective projects, has been a pillar over the years. The essays in this collection cover only part of his oeuvre, as Julia has been active in several other major fields of research without ever abandoning his earlier terres d’élection. These include the history of schooling, literacy, reading habits, universities, colleges, teaching orders, pedagogical credos, childhood, pilgrimages, miracles, and historiography. Nor is this all: from the outset, his publications have been accompanied by the hard-graft of inventorying and editing extant sources. Hardly any of this enormously varied output, which runs to approximately 200 items, has been in book form, apart two early forays—one with Michel de Certeau and Jacques Revel on language politics during the French Revolution, another with Roger Chartier on education in early-modern France.