The Architecture of Persecution: Nicolas Rémy's Daemonolatreiae
This comprehensive study examines Nicolas Rémy's Daemonolatreiae Libri Tres (1595), one of early modern Europe's most systematic documentations of judicial violence. Rémy, Procureur-General of Lorraine, boasted of prosecuting 800-900 people for witchcraft between 1581-1606, producing a treatise that functioned as operational manual for persecution. Through detailed analysis of the text, its historical context, and its mechanisms, this work reveals how learned individuals operating through proper legal procedures with absolute conviction can produce catastrophic injustice.
The study integrates multiple analytical frameworks?historical analysis, gender studies, legal history, psychology, epistemology, and comparative analysis?to examine how systematic persecution operates. It explores the cognitive mechanisms enabling mass violence, the bureaucratization of atrocity, how legal procedures legitimate killing, and the epistemology of authoritarian systems that transform uncertainty into weaponized threat. The work demonstrates that Rémy's prosecutions overwhelmingly targeted vulnerable women, operated through torture producing false confessions, and exemplified patterns of scapegoating and enemy construction visible throughout history.
By examining witch-trials as blueprint for institutional violence rather than as mere historical curiosity, the study draws essential lessons for recognizing and resisting similar patterns in modern contexts. It insists that historical memory constitutes ethical obligation?to honor victims, understand perpetration, and prevent recurrence of systematic persecution that continues to threaten vulnerable populations.
