ABSTRACT
Pierre De Lancre was appointed by Henry IV of France to investigate the activity of witches in the Labourt region of the Basque country in 1609, and published an account of his proceedings in 1612. Here Gerhild Scholz Williams discusses De Lancre’s text as an argument for royal authority. De Lancre’s construction of the Basque witches as a kind of “anti-monarchy” was also part of the larger tendency to imagine witchcraft as the antithesis of established institutions and values, as examined by Stuart Clark in Chapter 15.
