Jules Michelet and Witchcraft: Between the Mist of the Visible and the Corporeality of Writing
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Abstract
This article displays some reflection about the book Satanism and witchcraft; a study in medieval superstition published by Jules Michelet in 1862, which puts into tension the link between the body, witchcraft, transgression, and sacrifice in the figure of the witch and sorceress in the Middle Ages. For that we appeal to diverse studies of this oeuvre and the witch as the center of its
reflective interests, thus this article threads a poetic of sacrifice that sublimates Evil as the intensity of transgression. The witch is the woman that will be partially hidden alongside with her enchantments and holding a know-how to cure from a botanic of transgression. Thus, the witch-victim that dies in the firepit displays the panic and terror that a hegemonic culture goes through
in the popular culture that is embodied in the sacrifice of an inquisitorial process, given that the witch knows the magic power of healing or killing knowledge and the link between Botanics and medicine.