Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural

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 demo-nographer within the historical and intellectual context in which he operated. [End Page 293] 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...