The Lamothe-Langon Controversy — Fabricated Medieval Witch Trial Records

The history of witch trial scholarship was significantly complicated by the work of Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, a 19th-century French author and forger. In 1829, Lamothe-Langon published what he claimed were records of massive 14th-century witch trials in southern France, including accounts of hundreds of accused witches being burned at Toulouse and Carcassonne by the Inquisition. These accounts were accepted as genuine by historians for over a century and were cited in major works on the history of witchcraft. It was not until the 1970s, when scholars Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer independently examined the supposed source documents, that the fabrication was exposed — no such records existed in the archives Lamothe-Langon cited. The revelation forced a significant revision of the timeline of European witch trials, pushing the beginning of the mass persecution phenomenon from the 14th century to the 15th century. The Lamothe-Langon affair is a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of historical research to deliberate fraud and the importance of returning to primary sources.