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« on: September 30, 2009, 05:02:08 PM »
This is a really fascinating thread, with which I am finally catching up. I don't think I ever read that novel, although we got Scholastic paperbacks at school and I remember the excitement of ordering the books and finally having them arrive.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is of course originally a quote from the King James translation of the Bible, and I thought Angelique did quote it in one of the scenes where she was scheming to have Vicki framed as the Witch in 1795. I still don't have the 1795 DVD sets and I gave the videotapes away, so I have no way of checking right now. The scene I remember has Ang going on to gloat that a Witch found guilty will be reduced to "ashes"--or maybe fire--but isn't the scene where she uses spellcraft to create a spectral fire that drives Vicki out of her hiding place and into Trask's clutches.
Philippe, in certain areas of France and Germany, the Witch-craze in the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries reached the point where hundreds of people were accused and tried in the space of a very few years. And I believe it was all heavily localized, as was the case in Massachusetts in 1692-93. So some districts were heavily afflicted by the craze and others had minimal activity. To this day the cause of all of it remains obscure. The study of Witchcraft in early modern Europe has become a MAJOR cottage industry amongst academic historians in the past quarter century, oddly enough.
G.