perhaps no treatise more authoritative, and certainly no treatise more revelatory of the human side of trials for witchcraft and of the psychology of those involved in such trials than the Discours des Sorciers (An Examen of Witches) of Henry Boguet, “Grand Juge de St. Claude, au Comté de Bourgogne.” Boguet’s appeal to authority is but to confirm his own long and infinitely patient experience. “I have founded the following Examen upon certain trials which I have myself conducted, during the last two years, of several members of this sect, whom I have seen and heard and probed as carefully as I possibly could in order to draw the truth from them.” There is not a chapter of the Examen which does not bear witness to this; not a page, scarcely a paragraph that is not indicative of the most scrupulous inquiry, the most particular research, the minutest interrogations, all informed by a just if tempered zeal and the nicest conscientiousness, by candour, dig-
