ABSTRACT
Dorothea von Montau was by any standards an extraordinary woman—but was she a saint, or was she a witch? A moot distinction, concludes the narrator of Günter Grass's novel The Flounder, since she lived in that infamous fourteenth century, an age “when witches as often as not doubled as saints.” 1 With perhaps equal plausibility, J. K. Huysmans has a character in his novel Là-bas conclude that in the following century Gilles de Rais combined satanic practices with a genuinely mystical spirit: “Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. [Gilles] carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy…. Unresponsive to mediocre passions, he is carried away alternatively by good as well as evil, and he bounds from spiritual pole to spiritual pole.” 2
