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Weaving together a vast corpus of Catholic and Protestant sources into a textual continuum which is accessible to interpretative anthropology, Denis Crouzet deploys the concept of paroxysm to produce a semiotics of the violence perpetrated in the Wars of Religion and identifies four types of heretic. One is associated with eschatology, the second demonically possessed, the third obsessed with death, and the fourth is an instrument, in the paroxysm of violence, in reconciling the faithful.