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    Famous Witches - La Voisin (c.1640 - 1680)

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    Guðríður Margrét Guðmundsdóttir
    Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, was a French sorceress in the 17th century who practiced divination, witchcraft, and sold poisons and potions. She had a large clientele of wealthy aristocrats seeking love, fortune, or death of rivals. La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair scandal during King Louis XIV's reign. She implicated many prominent figures, including the king's mistress, in her trial. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and burned at the stake in 1680.

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    Famous Witches - La Voisin (c.1640 - 1680)

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    Guðríður Margrét Guðmundsdóttir
    152 views1 page
    Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, was a French sorceress in the 17th century who practiced divination, witchcraft, and sold poisons and potions. She had a large clientele of wealthy aristocrats seeking love, fortune, or death of rivals. La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair scandal during King Louis XIV's reign. She implicated many prominent figures, including the king's mistress, in her trial. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and burned at the stake in 1680.

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    Magick and spells

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    Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, was a French sorceress in the 17th century who practiced divination, witchcraft, and sold poisons and potions. She had a large clientele of wealthy aristocrats seeking love, fortune, or death of rivals. La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair scandal during King Louis XIV's reign. She implicated many prominent figures, including the king's mistress, in her trial. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and burned at the stake in 1680.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as ODT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as odt, pdf, or txt
    152 views1 page

    Famous Witches - La Voisin (c.1640 - 1680)

    Uploaded by

    Guðríður Margrét Guðmundsdóttir
    Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, was a French sorceress in the 17th century who practiced divination, witchcraft, and sold poisons and potions. She had a large clientele of wealthy aristocrats seeking love, fortune, or death of rivals. La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair scandal during King Louis XIV's reign. She implicated many prominent figures, including the king's mistress, in her trial. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and burned at the stake in 1680.

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    Famous Witches - La Voisin (c.

    1640 - 1680)
    Catherine Monvoisin (maiden name Catherine Deshayes, and popularly known as "La
    Voisin"), was a French sorceress, who was one of the chief personages in the infamous
    “affaire des poisons” which disgraced the reign of Louis XIV.

    Her husband, Monvoisin, was an unsuccessful jeweller, and she took to practising
    divination techniques such as chiromancy and face-reading in order to retrieve her
    and her husband's fortunes. She gradually added the practice of witchcraft, in which
    she had the help of a renegade priest, Etienne Guibourg, whose part was the
    celebration of the "black mass," a parody of the Christian mass.

    She practised medicine, especially midwifery, procured abortions and provided love
    powders, potions and poisons. She was promiscuous throughout her marriage, and one
    of her chief accomplices was one of her lovers, the magician Lesage (real name, Adam
    Coeuret). Her love powders included such ingredients as the bones of toads, the teeth
    of moles, Spanish flies, iron filings, human blood and the dust of human remains.

    Gradually, the great ladies of Paris flocked to La Voisin, who accumulated enormous
    wealth. Her clients included: Olympe Mancini, the Comtesse de Soissons (who sought
    the death of the king's mistress, Louise de La Vallière); her sister Marie Anne Mancini,
    the Duchesse de Bouillon; François Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville, the Duc de
    Luxembourg; Françoise-Athénaïs, the Marquise de Montespan (another of the king's
    mistresses); and the Comtesse de Gramont ("La Belle Hamilton"); among many
    others.

    La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair (“L’affaire des poisons”), a
    murder scandal in France during the reign of King Louis XIV which launched a
    period of hysterical pursuit of murder suspects, during which a number of prominent
    people and members of the aristocracy were implicated and sentenced for poisoning
    and witchcraft.

    The furor began in 1675 after the trial of Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, the
    Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was forced to confess to poisoning her father and
    siblings. She was sentenced to death and, after torture with the water cure (being
    forced to drink sixteen pints of water), was beheaded and burned at the stake. This
    case drew attention to a number of other mysterious deaths, and many fortune-tellers
    and alchemists suspected of selling not only divinations, séances and aphrodisiacs, but
    also "inheritance powders" (i.e. poison), were rounded up and tried.

    La Voisin’s testimony implicated a number of important individuals in the French


    court, particularly the king's mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, who she claimed
    had bought aphrodisiacs and performed black masses with her in order to gain the
    king's favour. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and was burned in
    public on the Place de Grève in the centre of Paris in 1680.

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