During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a host of "unnatural" figures plagued the residents of the Franche-Comté. The sudden increase in activity by these figures was a puzzle that the county's leading intellectuals and jurists attempted to understand and, if possible, curtail. In their eyes, a key part of this process was classifying these apparitions; if an appropriate category could be found, their relationship to God's plan could be ascertained, and a fitting response could be developed. The problem facing these analysts was that such figures fell outside traditional means of classification. By definition, they could not be unnatural; nature was itself God's creation, and no other entity or being had creative force. If they were "natural" creations, however, they followed no pattern which these jurists and demonologists had ever seen. Certainly they could not be regarded as a type of witch, because they avoided many of the actions which were seen as distinguishing witches in the Franche-Comté. Through a study of trial records and demonological treatises produced in the county during this era, this paper examines how jurists, demonologists, and other Comtois attempted to comprehend and, thereby, control such visions that fell outside the usual parameters of witchcraft accusations. Key aspects of their understanding were their conceptions of nature and the natural.

In 1573 Gilles Garnier, a peasant from the Franche-Comté, confessed that he had transformed himself into a wolf and that, while in this guise, he had murdered several children. Using his claws and teeth he savaged a ten-year-old girl, ate part of her, and brought the rest to a local retreat where his wife lived. In a second episode, he strangled another 10-year-old, this time a boy, bit off one of the child's legs, and ate his thighs and stomach. Garnier was only captured when several peasants interrupted him while in the process of attacking another victim and thought they recognized Garnier's face, albeit in its wolf form. After a long and sensational trial that would be reported throughout Europe, Garnier was burned alive.1

Although Garnier's case was the most publicized, it was only one of a series of similar occurrences that troubled the Franche-Comté in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to chronicles and judicial records, the region was overrun with werewolves. The earliest recorded case in the county occurred in 1521 when three men were condemned to death for destruction of property and murder while in the shape of wolves. Later in that century rumors spread near Dole, the administrative capital of the province, that the surrounding villages were "infested with wolves the size of donkeys" who were assumed to be werewolves. A German student at Dole's university, Luc Geizkofler, recorded that the villagers saw in these werewolves the hopelessly damned who had sold their souls to the devil. Sensational cases were regularly reported where these creatures carried away children and withstood mass attacks by peasants wielding burning sticks and knifes.2 Franc-comtois folklore also contained other suspect figures or forms that only fit partially within the traditional framework of witchcraft and that were seen as especially active at this time; the rumor spread that, in one of Dole's southern suburbs, Choisey, the Devil himself guarded a cave full of jewels. More prevalent among these beings, however, were several suspicious ladies in white. Living in the river Loue, about ten miles south-east of Dole, was Mother Lusine, half-woman, half-serpent who wore a diamond broach and could become an aerial spirit taking the form of a serpent of flame. Many other places, particularly feudal ruins, were seen as harboring white ladies; while one at Moissey, about ten miles north of Dole, was known for her "fantastic hunt" through the clouds above the forest of la Serre, another at Montbarry, alongside the Loue, preferred to dance until two in the morning in the Boudier woods.

The sudden increase in activity by these figures was a problem that the county's leading intellectuals and jurists attempted to understand and, if possible, curtail.3 In their eyes, a key part of this process was classifying these apparitions; if an appropriate category could be found, their relationship to God's plan could be ascertained—at least as far as human understanding allowed—and a fitting response could be developed. The problem facing these analysts was the such figures fell outside traditional means of classification. One possibility might be to see them as a type of witch, but they did not participate in many of the actions which were seen as distinguishing witches in the Franche-Comté: flying huntsmen never met at a Sabbath, dwarvish guardians cast no spells on cows and pregnant women, and ghosts had no marks from which they suckled incubi and succubi. Another approach would be to analyze them according to natural philosophy, as divine if unusual creations. This method had promise, because, by definition, such figures could not be unnatural; everything which existed was in some way God's creation and, therefore, natural. No other being had creative force. If they were "natural" creations, however, they followed no pattern which these jurists and demonologists had ever seen. As such, standard judicial and spiritual methods could not easily contain these anomalous occurrences. Using the example of the county's leading demonologist, Henri Boguet, and legal cases from the region—particularly those involving werewolves—this paper examines how jurists and demonologists attempted to comprehend and, thereby, control such visions that fell outside the usual parameters of witchcraft accusations. A cornerstone in this understanding was their concept of nature and the interrelationships among all created things.

Recently Lorraine Daston has precisely summarized the basic concepts about nature which underlay early modern medicine, law, theology, and philosophy.4 She describes a system developed from the thirteenth century where distinctions were drawn between the natural, supernatural, preternatural, unnatural, and artificial. Although variant interpretations existed throughout Europe by the early seventeenth century and different fields of inquiry emphasized particular aspects of these concepts, the ideal types underlying such distinctions provided a common foundation supporting these analyses and debates. Moreover, this system was in no way dependent on the binary distinctions, such as that between nature and culture, that would develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather, all were seen as aspects of a divinely-created whole, and that connection with divinity gave nature a moral force, not just a physical existence. The "unnatural" in whatever form could not then be a subject of dispassionate study, because it was a potential threat to God's plan for salvation.

As a university-educated lawyer, judge and demonologist, Henri Boguet would have been conversant with at least this basic framework, as would his colleagues and likely readers. Boguet was a native of the Franche-Comté, born around the middle of the sixteenth century. Trained as a lawyer, he would be appointed Chief-Justice of the St.-Claude diocese in late 1587 by Ferdinand de Rye, archbishop of Besançon. In this capacity he was in charge of conducting the many trials against those suspected of heresy in that region, and it has been argued that his enthusiasm for this task contributed to the "outbreak" of witchcraft during his tenure in office. His most famous work, The Discourse on Witches, apparently grew out of his experiences as a judge and his demonological studies. Although the exact date of its first edition is unclear, it was published several times in the 1590s and reprinted repeatedly through 1611. Members of Dole's university and Parlement praised his learning, as did the rector of Besançon's Jesuit college. The step-by-step exposition of trial methods that ends The Discourse would become standard parlementary and inquisitorial procedure in the region when faced with such cases, and Boguet's treatise on Burgundian law, whose publication would shortly follow, reflected similar judicial principles and received similar praise. The Discourse, then, echoed accepted thinking among the region's intelligensia about the supernatural troubles with which they seemed to be plagued.

From early in his preface, Boguet linked witches and other magical manifestations with the strange and wonderful: "Now I do not gainsay that the stories told of witches are very strange; for there is matter for much wonder ..."5 In this case, wonder for Boguet encompassed many qualities ranging from the standard crimes of which witches were accused—attending the Sabbath, practicing maleficia, making a pact with the Devil, and changing shapes—to the more atypical aspects, such as the Franc-comtois werewolves and zombies. His witches and witchcraft were thus broad categories, acting as catch-all terms for what he perceived as abnormal and perverse.6 Given this definition, perhaps it is not surprising that those people most susceptible to such charms and most likely to practice these activities were foreigners. Boguet noted that many of the witches originally came from neighboring Savoy. From here it was a small but significant step to see appearance, mannerisms, and language as revealing propensities to witchcraft.7 Culture, and cultural difference, became signs of corruption with Boguet's Franc-comtois practices providing the "natural" standard. Although this interpretation was only directly stated several times in The Discourse, the assumptions which reinforced it will underlie much of the following discussion about nature and its relationship to other categories of the natural which I have previously introduced.

The connections between magic, variations of nature, and disease were based on similar standards for the natural, and Boguet and his judicial colleagues shared these means of describing and understanding the supernatural and unnatural. In his dedication to the archbishop of Besançon, Boguet followed common rhetorical practice when he bemoaned that witches had "infected many districts."8 More than a rhetorical formula, the phrase also reflected one common means of comprehending the atypical. Building on Galenic principles, early modern medical theory developed an elaborate physiological and psychological taxonomy. Human psychology was believed to be based on a balance of four humors, each of which enhanced an aspect of the human personality. According to this theory, an excess of black bile caused melancholy, and those who believed themselves to be demons or werewolves, to be haunted by white ladies, or to have visited dwarvish treasure troves were most likely to be excessively melancholic and psychologically unbalanced. Demonologists such as Johannes Weyer—who was also a medical doctor—would develop this diagnosis to challenge the very foundations of witch trials, arguing that those who believed themselves to be witches or werewolves were actually delusional and, therefore, more in need of pity and assistance than punishment and purgation. Boguet was, however, more representative of the era, in that he believed that witches did exist in fact but also considered witches and werewolves to be deluded and melancholic. In this, as in many other areas, Renaissance theorists were building on classical models. One frequently cited source in such discussions was Aetius' On Melancholy written in the late fifth century. There Aetius described a disease called lycanthropia or "wolves fury" that incorporated many of the characteristics associated with werewolfism in early modern Europe albeit without the actual, physical transformation; the afflicted disturbed graves, ate bones, suffered from thirst, had a hollow, haggard appearance, and even howled.9

As the case of the Franche-Comté's werewolves also makes clear, distinctions between illusion and reality were fundamental for demonologists and jurists such as Boguet. Consensus was that nature itself was by definition real, while distortions such as witches, werewolves, and flying spirits were more likely to be corruptions of the senses which humans used to interact with nature. In other words, they were illusions, but opinions about what comprised the illusionary varied. Boguet followed the most common conviction when he described them as illusions, but illusions with substance. According to this theory, the Devil and his minions produced an illusion that would withstand examination by all the senses rather than cloaking a person in a wolf's form that would dissipate when tested. Unaided by grace, even reason was susceptible to this deception. Such perspectives developed from Catholic doctrine such as that found in the Canon episcopi, first recorded in 906: "Whoever ... believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or to worse or to be transformed into another species or similitude, except by the Creator himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel."10 Later demonologists, who clashed in other areas, would even agree on this interpretation; Johannes Weyer, Jean Bodin, Francesco Maria Guazzo, and Henri Boguet would all echo, to some extent, the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum who assert that werewolfism was a product of transmutations and glamours "by which things seem to be transmuted into other likenesses."11 Boguet especially condemned the belief that werewolves and other unusual apparitions were real as deceptions and confusions wrought by the Devil and provided classical and contemporary examples to support this assertion.

The problem for humans, who were assumed to be susceptible to such illusions, then became how to learn what nature/reality truly was; how to educate the senses, reason, and soul so that they recognized nature and applied its standards to see through deceptions? Boguet's answer was that experience and observation were the only teachers. Boguet himself attempted to enhance a reader's knowledge by filling his work with examples from his courts and those throughout the county. Repeatedly Boguet highlighted how a particular action revealed the unnatural source or motivations of a suspect or how a certain case could be seen as unnatural through a variety of signs. Boguet himself relied throughout his work on distinctions between illusion and reality based on his own observation of nature, and the section in which he discussed werewolves provides one example. Here Boguet separated werewolves from "natural wolves" based on visible characteristics: their size, the type of pelt, the shape of paws, or the humanness of their face or expression.12 Moreover, he supported his method and conclusion through another source of experience: books or, in this case, books 18 and 19 of St. Augustine's The City of God, where Augustine examined transformations.

This question was made more complex because mankind's great enemies, the Devil and his demons, had inherently a greater knowledge of nature and creation than man:

Boguet himself integrated several of these assumptions when he distinguished between natural wolves and werewolves. For Boguet, natural wolves conformed to both the true properties of wolves as created by God and the properties of wolves understood by man through the senses and reason. This confirmation was also dialogic, because this outward nature and its confirmability reflected the wolf's inner nature—their inherent wolfishness, if you will. Boguet cited many authorities to support this assertion: Augustine, Gratian, Gregory the Great, John Cassian, and Tertullian as well as Scriptural examples. For Catholic Boguet, as well as many other demonologists, to assert that the Devil could completely transform a person would be to equate God and Satan through a shared power to transubstantiate, a power that only could belong to the Creator. As such, those who believed in the alteration of a being's fundamental nature, especially that of man, were clearly heretics. This belief led Boguet to support a traditional distinction: the Devil may perform marvels (mira), but only God accomplishes miracles (miracula). In other words, the Devil and his minions must work within the confines of the natural order, but God, as the creator of this order and as divinity, may intervene in nature without any mediation. Thus, the problem that Boguet and others like him faced was distinguishing between marvels (the preternatural) and miracles (the supernatural.)14

According to these theories, God's willingness to allow the Devil to distort nature compounded the difficulties that demonologists and jurists like as Boguet faced in making such distinctions. Like other demonologists Boguet noted that the Devil craved to imitate God, although all of his imitations were inherently flawed; the example of the Black Mass was but one of many that proved how "Satan in every way apes the living God."15 Yet Boguet and his colleagues refused to see this demonic activity as an excuse for human evil and unfortunate events: "For hail is caused naturally be a mingling of vapours and exhalations rained into the middle region of the air. But these matters, like all other natural phenomenon, are at Satan's commandment."16 To give misfortune such authority might suggest that God's power could be in some way undermined, and Boguet insisted throughout The Discourse that both good and evil could only exist "with the permission of God," an assertion that he supported through scriptural and canonical references.17 To perform true miracles—that is, to reform the divine order of nature—the Devil would then have to be powerful enough to overturn God, an inconceivable opinion for Boguet. Given the intimate relationship between God and nature, where nature was God's immediate creation and shared in and reflected divine truth, nature then could be "made use of," but its truth could never be fundamentally changed.18

The physical, substantive existence of werewolves would thus be an unimaginable perversion of the laws underlying nature. They would be a similar corruption of the nature of God's greatest creation: the human being. By Boguet's era Catholic doctrine had long asserted that the body and soul were both essential to personhood and inseparable; the body was not merely temporal housing for the soul. The integration of body, soul, and spirit comprised the human being in both substance and form.19 Influential medieval theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, would argue that the body was an expression of the soul in material form, an interpretation supported by the Council of Trent. Although Boguet's approach was more concrete, it echoed these teachings. Boguet maintained that "Lycanthropy [that is, werewolfism] is an illusion, and that the metamorphosis of a man into a beast is impossible. For it would necessitate one of two things:—either the man who is changed into a beast must keep his soul and power of reason, or he must lose this at the moment of metamorphosis." Boguet justified this assumption by reference to medical theory of the time; "Now the first point cannot be admitted, since it is impossible for the body of a brute beast to contain a reasoning soul." Given that reason was seen as distinguishing man from the rest of God's creations, such a transformation would fundamentally alter the substance of a man. Moreover, it would lessen this individual since, according to Boguet, a man's wisdom was linked to the size and temperature of his brain, and observation showed that those with small heads are less wise.20

Similar suppositions underlay Boguet's abhorrence for certain other demonological speculations, such as the debates over whether demons and humans could actually have offspring:

The process of interpreting this framework and accessing divine law placed judges, according to Boguet, in the frontlines of a war against preternatural or unnatural distortions of nature. Their opponents were witches, werewolves, white ladies, phantoms, and sprites. Whatever their provenance and motivations, then, these figures must be prevented from effecting others and punished for their defiance of God's law, nature. Boguet carried this crusade further when he argued in his introduction that true Christians should naturally and willingly participate in this war:

Franc-comtois jurists and demonologists did, however, apparently agree that the close connection between God and nature, with its supposedly apparent natural standards, gave their administration of these standards a moral imperative. Because God was 'the Author of nature," the natural order was by definition a moral order. Laws then must be enforced because they upheld a human and a divine order; to quote Boguet, "[witches] are guilty of an offense against natural principles, of a crime which is severely and inexorably vindicated by the law."24 Boguet and his colleagues thus gained an almost sacral role as administrators and guardians of God's law. As such, their methods of inquiry, prosecution, and punishment could be justified, if any justification was even needed, as necessary means of acknowledging the power and propriety of "the Author of nature."
 

Notes

1. The most detailed accounts can be found in François Bavoux, "Loups-Garous de la Franche-Comté: identification du refuge et observations sur le cas de Gilles Garnier," La nouvelle revue franc-comtois 1 (1954) and Montaigu Summers, The Werewolf (London: 1933), esp. pp. 226-28.

2. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca: 1976), 144-151; Daniel Bienmiller and Michel Mullet, "Univers folklorique et sorcellerie a Dole aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles," Cahiers dolois 1(1977); and Catherine F. Oates, Trials of Werewolves in the Franche-Comté in the Early Modern Period (Ph.D. dissertation, London, 1993).

3. There are many important themes in Franc-comtois folklore, witchcraft, and demonology that time constrains prevent me from addressing. Among them are why fears in this era were given such forms, why these cases were apparently reported more frequently or stridently during this time, and why the administrative, judicial, and ecclesiastical elites seemingly felt a greater need to prosecute those cases which came to their attention. I will develop these themes for the Franche-Comté in my book, Visitations: The Haunting of an Early Modern Town, and on an European-scale in a collection which I am editing titled, Witches, Werewolves and Wandering Spirits: Folklore and Traditional Belief in Early Modern Europe.

4. Lorraine Daston, "The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe," Configurations 6:2 (Spring 1998): 154-57.

5. Henri Boguet, An Examen of Witches, trans. Montague Summers (London: John Rodker, 1929; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971): xl.

6. I am not arguing that Boguet was the only demonologist who was interested in these questions; nature and its distortion was a fundamental topic for many demonological treatises and the debates over miracles that plagued the French Reformation. For examples, see Jean de Viguerie, "Le Miracle dans le France du XVIIe siècle," XVIIe Siècle 35 (1983): 313-31; Jonathan L. Pearl, "French Catholic Demonologists and Their Enemies in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," Church History 52 (1983): 457-67; and Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

7. Boguet, xxxiii and 20.

8. Ibid., xxvii-iii.

9. From Charlotte F. Otten, ed., A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 24-25. Many classical examples of man-animal transformations exist. To cite some of the more well-known examples, think of Circe in The Odyssey, Apileus' The Golden Ass, and Ovid's Metamorphosis.

10. As quoted in H. Sidky, Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, drugs, and disease: an anthropological study of the European witch-hunts (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 218.

11. As quoted in Ibid., 218-19.

12. Boguet, 136-55.

13. Ibid., xli-xlii. In this sense Boguet stresses demonic power to a far greater degree than Thomas Aquinas, to whom he often refers. See Daston, 155, where she quotes Aquinas: "Besides, being a naturall Magician he may performe many acts in wayes above our knowledge, though not transcending our naturall power, when our knowledge shall direct it."

14. For examples from Aquinas, see Summa theologica, Ia, 105.6-8 and Summa contra gentiles, III, Arts. 99-100. For these difficulties see Boguet where he offers the following explanation for the Devil's harsh voice or abnormal speech: "it is impossible for art to imitate nature so closely but that there is always some difference between the two." (27) This passage also illustrates the terminological ambiguities that exist throughout many works which do not discuss nature directly but use it as an epistemological foundation.

15. Boguet, 61.

16. Ibid., 63.

17. On pp. 8-9 the examples come from Psalm 78, 1 Cor. 5, and 1 Tim 1. Key passages from Psalm 78 (the Ephraimites) include "Yet they sinned still more against him, rebelling against the Most High in the desert. They tested God in their heart ...(17-18); "He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again. How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert! They tested him again and again and provoked the Holy One of Israel. They did not keep in mind his power, or the day when he redeemed them from the foe ..." (39-42). For 1 Cor. 5:12, the passage is "God judges those outside. 'Drive out the wicked person from among you.'" and, for 1 Tim. 1,:15-16. see "The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And I am the foremost of sinners; bu recevied mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life."

18. Paula Findlen concisely describes the sixteenth-century view of the relationship between God and Nature in "Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture," 6:2 (Spring 1998) Configurations: 243-67: "the act of creation was [seen as] a divine game played by God himself ... While God's game belonged primarily to the heavens and in the original Creation, nature's resided on earth in a series of daily / creations that occurred in imitation of the original moment in which the universe was made." (252-53)

19. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), part 3 and Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) are important and useful summaries of extremely complex debates on these topics.

20. Boguet, 143.

21. Ibid., 27.

22. Ibid., xxxv.

23. ADD, 10F23, 7 Sept. 1629.

24. Boguet, 22.