First the Judge must consider whether those denials do or do not proceed from the vice or witchcraft of taciturnity: and, as was shown in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Questions of this Third part, the Judge can know this from her ability or inability to shed tears, or from her insensibility under torture and quick recovery of her strength afterwards. For then the grave suspicion would be aggravated; and in such a case she is by no means to be freely discharged, but, according to the sixth method of sentencing, she must be condemned to perpetual imprisonment and penance.
But if she is not infected with the taciturnity of witches, but feels the keenest pains in her torture (whereas others, as has been said, become insensible to pain owing to the witchcraft of taciturnity), then the Judge must fall back upon his last expedient of a canonical purgation. And if this should be ordered by a secular Judge, it is called a lawful vulgar purgation, since it cannot be classed with other vulgar purgations. And if she should fail in this purgation she will be judged guilty.
The seventh case is when the accused is not found guilty by his own confession, by the evidence of the facts, or by legitimate witnesses, but is only found to be accused by a witch in custody, and there are also some indications found which bring him under light or strong suspicion. As, for example, that he had had great familiarity with witches; in which case he would, according to the Canon, have to undergo a canonical purgation on account of the general report concerning him; and on account of the suspicion against him he must abjure heresy, under pain of being punished as a backslider if it was a strong suspicion, but not if it was a light one.
The eighth case occurs when the person so accused is found to have confessed that heresy, but to be penitent, and never to have relapsed. But here it is to be noted that in this and the other cases, where it is a question of those who have or have not relapsed, and who are or are not penitent, these distinctions are made only for the benefit of Judges who are not concerned with the infliction of the extreme penalty. Therefore the civil Judge may proceed in accordance with the Civil and Imperial Laws, as justice shall demand, in the case of one who has confessed, no matter whether or not she be penitent, or whether or not she have relapsed. Only he may have recourse to those thirteen methods of pronouncing sentence, and act in accordance with them, if any doubtful question should arise.
Question XXXIV
Of the method of passing sentence upon a witch who annuls spells wrought by witchcraft; and of witch midwives and archer-wizards.
The fifteenth method of bringing a process on behalf of the faith to a definitive sentence is employed when the person accused of heresy is not found to be one who casts injurious spells of witchcraft, but one who removes them; and in such a case the procedure will be as follows. The remedies which she uses will either be lawful or unlawful; and if they are lawful, she is not to be judged a witch but a good Christian. But we have already shown at length what sort of remedies are lawful.
Unlawful remedies, on the other hand, are to be distinguished as either absolutely unlawful, or in some respect unlawful. If they are absolutely unlawful, these again can be divided into two classes, according as they do or do not involve some injury to another party; but in either case they are always accompanied by an expressed invocation of devils. But if they are only in some respect unlawful, that is to say, if they are practised with only a tacit, and not an expressed, invocation of devils, such are to be judged rather vain than unlawful, according to the Canonists and some Theologians, as we have already shown.
Therefore the Judge, whether ecclesiastical or civil, must not punish the first and last of the above practices, having rather to commend the first and tolerate the last, since the Canonists maintain that it is lawful to oppose vanity with vanity. But he must by no means tolerate those who remove spells by an expressed invocation of devils, especially those who in doing so bring some injury upon a third party; and this last is said to happen when the spell is taken off one person and transferred to another. And we have already made it clear in a former part of this work that it makes no difference whether the person to whom the spell is transferred be herself a witch or not or whether or not she be the person who cast the original spell, or whether it be a man or any other creature.
It may be asked what the Judge should do when such a person maintains that she removes spells by lawful and not unlawful means; and how the Judge can arrive
