Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

The Pays de Vaud, conquered in 1536 by the Swiss Protestant canton of Bern, which ruled it for over 250 years, holds the unenviable distinction of being, for its size, the most intensely witch-hunting region of Francophone Europe and probably of Protestant Europe as well. No fewer than 971 executions have been counted here between 1580 and 1620, scattered across ninety-one of its 142 seigneurial jurisdictions. Until 1595, Vaud averaged fifteen executions for witchcraft a year; over the next quarter-century, they doubled. Witch burnings continued every year long after 1620, with over a hundred executions recorded in 1629–1630. Although this region has produced important recent scholarship about the fifteenth-century origins of the witches Sabbath, the Pays de Vaud has had no recent monograph about its peak witch-hunting period.

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Profiting from a recent discovery enabling her to blend fresh archival information with scattered older materials, Fabienne Taric Zumsteg, with customary Swiss attention to detail, has dissected the gruesome history of witch hunting in a completely unremarkable Vaudois village of fewer than fifty households (pp. 96–101). Almost forty residents of Gollion were accused of witchcraft between 1616 and 1631, and over two dozen of them were put to death. Like other villages in Vaud, Gollion had no single traumatic witch hunt, although nine people were once burned within two months; with microscopic precision, Zumsteg distinguishes no fewer than six separate affaires in seventeen years, each involving several people and sometimes overlapping, chronologically.

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