of her country was burnt alive in the market place of Rouen, to the everlasting shame of France and England. _Sorcery and Magic._ It is impossible to understand the life of the Middle Ages unless it is borne in mind that men and women everywhere held an implicit belief in the reality of the supernatural and of evil spirits, who were for ever tempting them to wrong. The idea of natural law being unknown, it was not perceived that this belief conflicted with the notion of an intelligible cosmos, or that it violated the idea of human responsibility by assuming that man’s actions are attributable, not to himself, but to either good spirits or demons. It was man, however, who received the punishment. The air was believed to be thick with spirits; they might be seen as dust, as motes in the sunbeam, or in the falling rain. The sounds of the wind, of any clashing objects, of running streams and roaring cataracts, were the voices of spirits. From Scriptural texts, such as Genesis vi, 5, Luke iv, 7, and others, the logical deduction was drawn that intercourse between angelic and human beings was not merely possible, but continually took place. At first the Inquisition neither had nor claimed jurisdiction over dealings with evil spirits. The Church, indeed, was sometimes more rational than the people, for in 1279 an Alsatian nun would have been burnt by the peasantry for sorcery had she not been rescued by some friars. The question of repressing this crime had been raised in 1257, and before many years elapsed it was generally recognized that the Inquisition had some sort of jurisdiction over it. Astrology soon attracted its attention, and was ranked as heresy. Peter of Abano seems to have been the first to be prosecuted, and he would have been burnt as a relapsed heretic had he not taken the precaution to die in the ordinary way first. In 1324 the astrologer, Cecco d’Ascoli, was forced to abjure, but, being imprudent enough to relapse, was burnt three years later. Several people were excommunicated for sorcery early in the fourteenth century, and the growing belief in the reality and gravity of the offence was greatly stimulated by Pope John XXII.