Alfred Soman
Ashgate Variorum
Hardback
352
1992
The Parlement of Paris was the largest secular court in Christendom. Although its criminal archives have been preserved virtually intact historians of the period of the great witch trials as well as scholars of the Ancien R?gime in general have been discouraged by the notorious difficulties of research into them and have effectively avoided these records. Alfred Soman was the first historian to have undertaken the task. In the fifteen articles republished here which include both detailed investigations of particular cases and broad-ranging overviews he contends that criminal justice in the 16th- and 17th-century France was far more humane and less severe than traditional assumptions would suggest. As early as 1588 the High Court began to take steps to restrain indiscriminate witch hunting particularly in the eastern provinces where prosecutions were instigated not in conformity with but in defiance of the highest judicial authority in the land.
Ashgate Variorum
Hardback
352
1992
The Parlement of Paris was the largest secular court in Christendom. Although its criminal archives have been preserved virtually intact historians of the period of the great witch trials as well as scholars of the Ancien R?gime in general have been discouraged by the notorious difficulties of research into them and have effectively avoided these records. Alfred Soman was the first historian to have undertaken the task. In the fifteen articles republished here which include both detailed investigations of particular cases and broad-ranging overviews he contends that criminal justice in the 16th- and 17th-century France was far more humane and less severe than traditional assumptions would suggest. As early as 1588 the High Court began to take steps to restrain indiscriminate witch hunting particularly in the eastern provinces where prosecutions were instigated not in conformity with but in defiance of the highest judicial authority in the land.