ABSTRACT
The witch-hunt De Lancre conducted, together with his colleague Jean d’Espaignet (1564–after 1643), during the summer and autumn of 1609 in the Pays de Labourd, a Basque-speaking territory on France’s border with Spain, is justly ranked among the most famous and notorious of the early modern period. De Lancre's sensationalist 1612 account of his experiences one historian has described it as a work of 'scholarly pornography' includes the most detailed description of the witches' sabbat of the early modern period. The Tableau offered perhaps the most detailed and explicit account of the sabbat in early modern literature, and was one of the very first printed works to describe the sabbat in such detail as a Black Mass that is, as a systematic inversion and parody of the Catholic Mass. De Lancre also devoted an entire chapter to the 'incestuous' Spanish dances that were performed with 'even more liberty and insolence' at the sabbat.
