ABSTRACT

Anita Walker and Edmund Dickerman argue in a thought-provoking 1996 article that some claims of demonic sexual seduction of children and young women in the early modern era might be understood as cases of rape.1 They suggest that historians could be more sensitive to the possibility of finding cases of sexual abuse in voluntary witchcraft confessions, and imply that too cautious an approach to interpretation may be allowing true historical stories to be obscured.2 Analyzing the witchcraft confession of a teenager, Magdeleine des Aymards, in 1606, they present the hypothesis that a story of child abuse might lie behind Aymards’s claims of repeated sexual interactions with demons. Their proposal raises methodological and ethical questions for historians. For if historians are bound professionally by the ‘scientific’ claims of the discipline, then is it not a futile exercise to pursue events that can never be confirmed definitively according to accepted methods? On the other hand, can wilful blindness in the face of suggestive evidence itself be on some level culpable?