Tag Archives: Sorcerer

Searching For Witchcraft In The Registers Of The Trésor Des Chartes (French Royal Archives)

This article offers some solutions to the limits of full-text search in Himanis provided by the exploration of indexation mistakes. It is based on my ongoing work on witchcraft in the Trésor des Chartes (French royal archives). The Trésor des Chartes contains the royal archives beginning with Philippe the Fair.

Research and current status of research

In the current status of my research, the study of the cases of witchcraft recorded in the JJ series of the Trésor des Chartes (medieval registers of the French royal chancery) was carried out partially and was not the object of a systematic survey within this enormous corpus.

In the registers of the Chancery, these cases are mainly met in the forms of letters of remission for individuals charged with witchcraft or for individuals charged with the murder of a man or a woman suspected to be a sorcerer or a sorceress.

In the context of my PhD research, which is focused on the repression of witchcraft in the Kingdom of France in the late Middle Ages, I am attempting to conduct this investigation, particularly by providing editions of these unstudied or unedited letters of remission that concern cases of witchcraft.

From the preliminary study on this question, an early inventory of these cases of witchcraft in the Trésor des Chartes was released mostly thanks to historiography. It was established from the analytical inventories of the JJ series and from the founding work of Pierre Braun1 and Claude Gauvard2. It enabled the identification of 90 acts contained in the registers of the Chancery reporting cases of witchcraft.

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