How the Church Invented the Witch: The Waldensians and the Making of the European Sabbat

The European witches' sabbat was assembled in the Alpine valleys of the 1420s and 1430s from interrogations of Waldensian heretics. This is the documented story of how a twelfth-century poverty movement founded by a Lyon merchant became the template for the diabolical sect, how the word Vaudois became a synonym for witch across France and the Low Countries, and what happened to the actual communities in Piedmont who survived to be massacred in 1655 and returned in 1689.