The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil

The study of early modern witchcraft and demonology has grown by leaps and bounds over the last generation and shows no signs of abating. Taking their lead from Stuart Clark's seminal 1997 Thinking with Demons, a host of important works have advanced the field significantly from its early concerns with the dynamics of witch hunting and its consequences. Recent studies have turned to examine demonism as an intellectual system, which both drew from and fed a host of other premodern discourses—not the least being theology, natural philosophy, history and politics—and the effect that these fields had on its content as they themselves were refashioned in response to the broader epistemological developments of the period. As more scholars have been moved to think with demons, the publication of valuable new critical editions and translations of primary source texts has helped open the field to new scholars and students more generally. Jan Machielsen's Science of Demons, then, marks a welcome addition to this burgeoning literature. Timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Clark's study and the fortieth of Sydney Anglo's The Damned Art—both of which passed otherwise poorly marked—this volume is a fitting tribute and an important resource in its own right.The book is comprised of nineteen tightly written essays by some of the top names currently engaged in the study of early modern witchcraft and demonism. Each examines the contribution and principal works of a particular demonographer within the historical and intellectual context in which he operated. Along with intellectual biographies centering on some of the better-known figures of the period such as Heinrich Institoris, Johann Wier, Jean Bodin, Reginald Scot, Martin Delrio, King James VI, and Pierre de Lancre, one of the many boons of this collection is that it also includes studies of some comparatively less well-known men such as the Burgundian Dominican Nicolas Jacquier, the Piacenzan lawyer Giovanfranceso Ponzinibio, and the Spanish Jesuit Juan Maldonado. The book concludes with a handy appendix that lists critical editions and English-language translations of the major demonological texts of the period.The essays are organized into five sections. The first three are chronological and chart the development of the field from the middle of the fourteenth century as scholastic musings about the power and mission of the devil are given real-world application by inquisitors, through the first printed witch-hunting manuals, into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the heyday of European witch hunting. The other two deal with the relationship between demonology and theology and demonology and the law respectively during this final, most pernicious period of demon thinking.Given that Machielsen has opted to structure his treatment of the field through a series of interconnected intellectual biographies rather than thematic studies, it is inevitable that many readers will simply cherry-pick their way through the text, focusing only on those entries that pertain immediately to their interests. Readers should resist this urge, for the book is more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, unlike so many multi-authored essay collections, the pieces in this volume have been written and edited to be in dialogue with each other. This allows readers who do engage with the book as a whole to follow the evolution of demonology over the course of the period, along with the various attempts of different demonologists to reconcile the tensions and contradictions within the discourse as the intellectual context in which they wrote changed, and as they responded to new arguments and evidence about the devil's machinations that emerged.The focus of this collection is squarely on the early modern. Coverage ranges from a study of Nicolau Eymeric's diabolization of heresy and magic towards the end of the fourteenth century to one of the anonymous Czarownica powołana (Denounced Witch) with its denunciation of Polish witch trials in the first half of the seventeenth century. While Machielsen admits that ending the work at the high-water mark of the witch mania may be contentious, he justifies his decision by stressing that with the possible exception of Joseph Glanville and Henry More, the works of later witchcraft theorists are marked by a “dreary repetition” (12) of earlier arguments. He has a point. But given that the book is intended at least in part to offer an accessible introduction to many of the main figures who thought about demons across the period, a chapter devoted to at least one of these men would have been helpful for his intended audience—particularly those new to the field.While it would be churlish to complain that not all of my favorite demonographers are represented here, I do see two important omissions. First, many of the authors discussed here draw upon or are reacting to arguments about the power of the devil and his relationship to nature and humanity formulated during the central Middle Ages. Indeed, the conception of the natural philosophical boundaries within which the devil was constrained and his relationship to divine omnipotence that underlie these later authors' treatments of the subject were largely fixed by the scholastics. In this respect, an article dealing with the devil's treatment by an influential scholastic such as Thomas Aquinas would have been a useful starting point for the collection and would have helped contextualize, in particular, some of the earlier essays.Certainly, as Alain Boureau and others have rightly pointed out, there was a marked shift in the tone and application of demonism from the fourteenth century. But this did not result in a complete reworking of demonology. Rather, it had the effect of giving precedence to a single, especially pernicious discursive strand that had developed within medieval demonism in the context of the demonization of Jews, idolaters, and heretics, particularly from the twelfth century. In some respects, what many demonologists and inquisitors presented as a new and imminent demonic threat to the fabric of society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the redeployment of tropes and figures from the earlier period to new ends and against new targets. It is possible to draw a straight line from the atrocities described in Vox in Rama (1233) to those of the Errores gazariorum (ca. 1435) and then onwards to Pierre de Lancre's Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612). Indeed, it might be argued that what was new about early modern demonism was the extent to which its discursive boundaries actually narrowed. To be sure, picking a starting point for a collection like this was always going to be difficult, but without some examination of the medieval legacy, this element of continuity is lost.My second point concerns the sources of devil knowledge more generally. As Machielsen notes in his introduction, alongside the various textual sources—scripture, the writings of the fathers, saints' lives, and the treatises of the university theoreticians—demonology as a field was also grounded in experience. Whether through the encounter of inquisitors with folklore or the confessions of accused witches about the powers of the devil they personally reported witnessing at the sabbat, demonology always had an empirical dimension to it.Yet as the subtitle of the book makes clear, this collection is not so much about the science of demons per se as it is about the knowledge of demons as it was deduced from texts or known through the encounter with witchcraft. Certainly, the apparent evidence of the devil's power derived from accused witches caught up in legal processes was an important source for devil knowledge through this period. But it was not the only one. The flood of travel reports describing the customs, rites, and rituals of new or otherwise only vaguely known peoples beyond Europe's boundaries not only added to the catalog of demonic schemes and tricks but raised difficult questions about his place within the economy of salvation. While Machielsen addresses this in passing in the introduction and in the context of his discussion of Martin Delrio (chapter 11)—as does Virginia Krause in her piece on Bodin (chapter 7)—the place of travel literature in demonology could usefully have been better developed. The sacrificial rituals of South America described by José de Acosta in his 1590 Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, for instance, with their apparent analogue in sati—something of a sine qua non of European travelogues describing South Asia—were indisputable examples of the devil's cruelty and the rewards he offered his devotees. Indeed, as evidence attesting to the geographical scope of the devil's dominion mounted through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries, the fact that the devil had been given or had somehow acquired free reign across such a large portion of creation complicated conceptions of his purpose within sacred history. Taken together with witch testimony, these two sources of evidence could often operate in a mutually authenticating circle: the outrages the devil apparently perpetrated through witches within Europe confirmed the plausibility of those described by travelers abroad, while those described by travelers gave credence to the accounts of witches. The continent seemed under threat from without and within.One of Machielsen's goals in compiling this collection is to offer a summary of the current state of the field and in this he succeeds admirably. While many of these intellectual biographies tell stories that will be familiar to experts in the field, they do so in a uniformly top-notch fashion. They are engaging, well written, and often highly entertaining. As such, this book will doubtlessly serve as a resource of the first instance for both scholars and students looking to make forays into the field for at least a generation to come. I highly recommend it.

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