The confessions of male and female witches are in agreement with ''indicia'' so strong that one can maintain they are genuine, real, and neither deceptive nor illusory. This relieves judges of any misgiving they may have. For when they confess to infanticide, parents find their children have been suffocated or their blood completely sucked out of them. When they confess to digging up corpses and violating the sacred nature of graves, one discovers that bodies have been torn from their graves and are no longer found where they had been put. When they confess they have given a piece of their clothing to Satan as a pledge, one finds this tell-tale scrap upon their person. When they say they have cast evil on such and such a person or animal, (and sometimes they confess they have cured them), it is self-evident they have been subject to malefice, they have been wounded, or they have been cured. Consequently, this is not an illusion. Here is the first rule which makes us see clearly what the witch has done, either through her confession strengthened by compelling ''indicia'' and very great, very strong presumptions, or by irreproachable witnesses. (''Tableau'' Book 6, discourse 5, section 5, in Maxwell-Stuart's ''Witch Hunters: Professional Prickers, Unwitchers and Witch Finders of the Renaissance,'' 2003, 1st ed., p. 33)

...''L'incredulité et mescreance du sortilège plainement convaicue'' (1622), produced twelve years after his long personal engagement with witches and witchcraft, spends an impressive amount of learning upon showing that magic of any kind is not an illusion and should not be dismissed by those who are pleased to think otherwise. This work aroused the ire of Gabriel Naudé, at one time physician to Louis XIII and later librarian to Cardinal Barberini, who in 1625 published a fierce response, ''Apologie pour tous les grands personages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnés de magie'', to which De Lancre, duly irritated, replied two years later with his final work, ''Du sortilège.'' (p. 38)

As already indicated, many historians have described de Lancre as a ridiculous obsessed fanatic. Terms like "gleeful," "gloating," "infantile," "sadistic" and "bigoted" have all been applied to him. But in his writing, de Lancre constantly emphasized the distastefulness of the task in which he was engaged. Certainly, he believed totally the testimony that he heard, sentenced people to death based on that testimony, and worked to convince his colleagues to follow his lead. But there is little evidence in his work to support the picture that has so often been drawn. (p. 142-143)

It would also be a mistake () to dismiss de Lancre as a crank, a bizarre or ridiculous figure. He was an earnest advocate of a worldview that was not insignificant in his time. He took seriously his instruction from respectable orthodox scholars, and did not waver from them for his long life. (p. 147)