Nicolas Jacquier · 1458
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Nicolas Jacquier (d. 1472) was a Dominican inquisitor who had sat on the Arras vauderie trials. His Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum, written in 1458, is the first sustained inquisitorial defence of the reality of the witches’ sabbath.
For centuries the Canon Episcopi had held that women who believed they rode out at night with Diana were merely dreaming. Jacquier argues against it that the gatherings of the fascinarii are bodily, real and heretical, and therefore fall under the inquisitor’s jurisdiction rather than the confessor’s. He builds the case chapter by chapter from scripture, the Fathers, scholastic demonology and canon law: how demons delude the senses and assume bodies, what offerings they demand of their devotees, how far their power over men and the elements extends, and why God permits it. He draws too on depositions he had heard himself.
First printed in 1581, more than a century after it was written, the Flagellum is one of the founding texts of the learned witch-hunt.
The translation is made from the composite demonological volume printed at Frankfurt in 1581, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and covers Jacquier’s own preliminaries and treatise. The compiler’s dedication and index to the whole volume are left out, as they belong to the collection rather than to Jacquier’s text.