EDMONTON – A rare medieval manuscript on how to recognize, question, torture and burn witches is being resurrected at the University of Alberta. It’s one of only four copies in the world, with the other three housed in libraries in France, Brussels, and Oxford.
History professor Andrew Gow, who came across the originally miscatalogued book and is now working on translating it from medieval French to English, describes the content as “atrocious.”
“If I were to describe this book, I’d say, well, think of all of the most evil books in Harry Potter and the Malfoy’s library, well those were imaginary evil. This is real evil, right here,” he says.
However, due to the timing of its creation around 1460, ahead of mass state-sponsored witch hunting in Europe, Gow also considers the text to be a priceless cultural artifact that holds great insight into the history of Europe.
“It wasn’t until books like this appeared and spread the idea that witchcraft is actually a form of Satan worship, a form of service to the devil, that witchcraft becomes a capital crime,” he explains.
In addition to changing the way witchcraft was looked at in medieval Europe, the work may also be responsible for a common image we associate with witches: them riding on brooms.
That, along with records of witch trials and appeals can be found in the manuscript, which was donated to the U of A back in 1988 by Dr. John Lunn, who emigrated to Canada from England in 1957, and was Alberta’s assistant deputy minister of historical resources in the late 1970s.
Gow and his grad student, Francois Pageau, hope to release the manual to the public once they finish translating it.
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