A worthy comrade of Remy was Peter Binsfeld, suffragan Bishop of Trèves and foremost opponent of John Weyer. He is said to have burnt no fewer than 6,500 persons and to have so desolated his diocese that in many villages round Trèves there was scarcely a woman left. His _Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum_[281] begins with the following case, which with those mentioned above affords a complete view of the usual witch confessions. John Kuno Meisenbein, a youth about eighteen years old, was studying ‘poetry and the humaner letters’ at the High School in Trèves, when he confessed to the authorities that his mother, brother, sister, and self were all in league with the devil. He said that in his ninth year his mother had initiated him as a sorcerer, and had carried him up the chimney on a goat to a heath near Trèves, where he took part in the usual sabbat and had intercourse with a female demon named Capribarba. The mother, Anna Meisenbein, a woman of good position, had already escaped to Cologne, but a son and daughter were arrested, strangled, and burned. ‘They died with much sorrow and penitence.’ The eldest son, John Kuno, thereupon urged the judges to use all means to capture his mother, ‘that by punishment and momentary death in this world she might escape eternal damnation’. Moved by this most creditable and merciful petition (_honestissima et plenissima misericordiae petitione excitatus_), the prior wrote to his friends at Cologne, and the unhappy woman was arrested and taken back to Trèves. At first she protested her innocence, ‘but when more severe tortures were employed’ she made the usual admissions. Having lost a baby, she had, for a moment, doubted the goodness of God. Whereupon a man in black raiment appeared at the side of the bed, and promised if she would renounce God and serve him he would give her peace of mind. She did so, and he became her lover, and gave her money, which however vanished. He called himself Fedderhans, and had asses’ feet. Then follows the usual story of the sabbat. ‘This woman’, concludes the bishop, ‘was burnt alive October 20, 1590, and had a good end.’ They offered to behead John Kuno as a reward for his filial piety and repentance, but he said he was unworthy of such a favour and was therefore strangled and burnt. ‘He had a most edifying end,’ says the bishop, who proceeds to comment upon sexual intercourse between witches, sorcerers, and demons, ‘which is so certain that it is an impudence to deny it, as St. Augustine saith,[282] being supported by the confessions of learned and unlearned, and by all the doctors of the Church, though a few medical men, advocates of the devil’s kingdom [an obvious reference to Weyer, whom he abuses in the preface], have dared to deny it’.[283]