La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages

The work traces the emergence, practices, and repression of witchcraft from late medieval village religiosity through early modern persecutions. It argues that social despair under feudal and clerical tyranny produced a popular counterculture in which women often acted as healers, ritual specialists, and custodians of older nature-based beliefs; it analyzes notions of Satan, sabbath gatherings, charms, and the witch as physician. The second half documents inquisitorial zeal, legal campaigns, and well-known trials that transformed communal rites into crimes, and concludes by considering the decline of prosecutions alongside the persistence of folk and fairy beliefs into a changing religious landscape.