Table Of ContentTitle Pages
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Europe
Stuart Clark
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198208082
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208082.001.0001
Title Pages
Thinking with Demons Thinking with Demons
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Title Pages
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Dedication
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Europe
Stuart Clark
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198208082
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208082.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) For Jan (p.vi)
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Preface
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Europe
Stuart Clark
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198208082
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208082.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface
THIS book began as an attempt to fill a gap in historical treatments of witchcraft in early
modern Europe. By the early 1980s modern studies of most aspects of the subject were
fast appearing but no sustained attempt had yet been made to reconsider the views of
the many intellectuals—clergymen, theologians, lawyers, physicians, natural philosophers,
and the like—who published books about it at the time. Many of these so-called
demonologists advocated the prosecution of witches and could plausibly be said to have
influenced the trials that took place. But except for a few well-known texts, read largely in
isolation, their voluminous writings were neglected by historians, who preferred to focus
on the social and institutional configurations of ‘witch-hunting’, together with the patterns
of prosecution in the various European regions and the local circumstances that
produced them. If anything, there was a reaction against studying the intellectual history
of these episodes, reflecting an annoyance with the way earlier generations of scholars,
especially in Germany around the turn of this century and in America thereafter, had
done little else—and done it in a confessional and wholly rationalistic spirit. I had no wish
to revive this tradition or reclaim some kind of priority for demonology. I simply wanted
to reinsert the beliefs of early modern intellectuals into the history of witchcraft as one,
but only one, of its necessary ingredients. The best way to do this seemed to be to read
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Preface
all the published texts in question, beginning in the fifteenth century when the learned
debate about witchcraft really began and ending in the early eighteenth century when it
finally lost momentum.
Over a dozen years later, I am still confident that demonology ought to have something
to offer those seeking to explain the witch trials. But the connection cannot any longer be
seen as straightforward and it is not one that I explore in any direct way. Some of the
things I trace in the pages of books—apocalyptic expectations, evangelical campaigns, and
political roles, for example—no doubt bear witness to the more general cultural
conditions that made witchcraft seem a real and pressing danger and its eradication a
desirable action. But several important studies—notably Robin Briggs's Witches and
Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft—have now
confirmed that most witchcraft accusations and prosecutions were initiated in ways that
precluded the immediate impact of intellectuals, even if the subsequent proceedings
could be affected by consultations with academic jurists and theologians. It is simply not
the case that witchcraft theory caused ‘witch hunts’ or that its incidence influenced
theirs; indeed, the reverse is much more likely to have been true. In offering this survey
of beliefs I am, therefore, under no illusions about their possible lack of correlation with
events (as usually understood; the enunciation of a belief is, of course, an event, while
events are unintelligible without reference to beliefs). This possibility might be worth
investigating further, if only to underline the theory-bound nature of demonology and the
textual constraints on its authors. (p.viii) But I prefer not to think in terms of such
correlations at all, hoping thereby to break the dominance that the study of witchcraft
prosecutions has had for so long over the interpretation of witchcraft texts. If it is unwise
to treat demonology as a key to the history of the trials, it is also a distortion to make it
simply their reflection. What I have attempted, then, is only an account of what writers on
witchcraft said about the subject and the (largely) intellectual reasons they had for saying
it. For this purpose I have thought it best to assume the self-referential character of their
texts.
Witchcraft theory was not, however, written in isolation and ought not to be read in that
way. Another of the features of research that it seemed worth while to challenge was the
tendency to regard the topic as somehow peculiar and historically unassimilable. I made
the further assumption, therefore, that a body of ideas that survived for nearly 300
years must have made some kind of sense and that this probably lay in its coherence with
ideas about other things. I was influenced, in particular, by a remark of Alasdair
MacIntyre's (also put to use by Robert Bartlett in his book on medieval ordeals): ‘To say
that a belief is rational is to talk about how it stands in relation to other beliefs.’1 It soon
became apparent that demonology was a case in point, and that witchcraft beliefs at this
level were sustained by a whole range of other intellectual commitments. This is because
the theoretical arguments clustered around particular issues: whether it was possible or
not for witchcraft to happen as a real phenomenon in the natural world, why it was
afflicting Europe at a particular time, what kinds of sins it involved and how clergymen
should counteract them, and why rulers and magistrates should act to rid the world of
the threat. In effect, demonology was a composite subject consisting of discussions about
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Preface
the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity, and
the nature of political authority and order. Inevitably, its authors took up particular
intellectual positions in relation to these four major topics of early modern thought. Quite
simply, their views about witchcraft depended on concepts and arguments drawn from
the scientific, historical, religious, and political debates of their time. Equally, by theorizing
about witches, they made important contributions to these same debates; the
relationships I shall be exploring were very much complementary ones. In many cases,
indeed, the subject of witchcraft seems to have been used as a means for thinking
through problems that originated elsewhere and that had little or nothing to do with the
legal prosecution of witches; hence my adoption of the somewhat Lévi-Straussian title
Thinking with Demons to convey this sense of demonology as an intellectual resource.
So seamlessly does demonology merge with these other debates—so much do they
cease to be other debates—that I would like to propose, not the death of the author, but
the dissolution of the ‘demonologist’. Although I started out by adopting this traditional
label, I was soon forced to recognize that it had misleading implications. I rapidly
discovered that there was too much demonology embedded in early modern (p.ix)
books—books of all kinds and on many subjects—for it to be attributed to one kind of
writer. More seriously, the inference seemed to be that those who wrote about
witchcraft were somehow interested in it to the exclusion of anything else; this was their
speciality, and an aberrant one at that. But for the vast majority it was not. They had many
of the other typical—one might even say ordinary—intellectual interests and affiliations of
their age. They were primarily theologians, jurists, philosophers, or whatever, who, in the
course of some intellectual or moral project, felt it necessary to turn to the subject to see
how it related to their wider concerns. If we go on calling them ‘demonologists’, we run
the risk of setting them apart from these more general pursuits—indeed, from precisely
the things that help us understand why they were interested in witchcraft at all and how
they could believe in its reality. Of course, as a subject, ‘demonology’ too was not just
concerned with witchcraft; it embraced discussions of magic, of superstition, and, not
unnaturally, of demons themselves. But a label that allows for thematic interrelationships
does not seem to me to create the same difficulties as a label that hides them.
What follows, then, is not a book about ‘witch-hunting’—although it might be said to be
about witch-hating—nor one about ‘demonologists’. It is a book about demonology,
certainly, but set in a series of contexts drawn from early modern intellectual life as a
whole. I have taken seriously the suggestion that the best places to gain historical access
to a strange culture are those where its meanings seem most opaque. Such meanings
may be intrinsically significant but concentrating on them serves a more ambitious
historical purpose. The witchcraft beliefs of early modern intellectuals seem to be in this
category. My aim, therefore, is to make them more intelligible in themselves but, in doing
this, to shed light on the larger intellectual histories to which they belonged. If this
interests the historians of such histories, as well as those working on witchcraft matters in
particular, the aim will have been achieved.
I have divided most of the book between the four subject-categories already mentioned:
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Preface
Science, History, Religion, Politics. Each of these sections looks at broadly the same body
of demonological texts from a particular idiomatic perspective, although different texts
(and different aspects of the same text) achieve prominence at different moments. The
four sequences of chapters are each introduced by a preliminary discussion of the issues
to be raised, after which they move between analysis of discussions within demonology,
surveys of the more general debates that animated European intellectuals in the subject-
area in question, and attempts to relate the two. What I have tried to show, in particular,
is that the belief in witchcraft was congruent with particular kinds of scientific, historical,
religious, and political views and, by implication at least, incongruent with others. Of
course, to carve up thought into categories in this way is, if not entirely arbitrary, at least
artificial, but this seemed the best way of dealing with a very large number of texts over
a very long span of time. The reader will easily detect the overlapping and mutually
reinforcing elements that linked the four ‘modes’ of thinking that I have distinguished.
The book starts with a further sequence of chapters, also with its own introduction,
where the focus is not only on the substance of witchcraft theory but on its form; (p.x)
to be precise, on both simultaneously. Here, I concentrate on the way the logical and
rhetorical choices made by witchcraft authors were themselves constitutive of what they
discussed, a well as being typical, again, of those made elsewhere in early modern
writing. These are features of demonology best conveyed by the title ‘Language’. In bare
essence, my argument at this point is much the same as that sketched in a Past and
Present essay of 1980, which one or two people at the time kindly suggested I should
develop. I feel a little uneasy about drawing on it again, but, in compensation, I have
greatly amplified its scope, extended it to cover the gendering of witchcraft, and made it
flexible enough to deal with the instabilities as well as the stabilities internal to
demonology. The result, I hope, is a degree of subtlety that evaded me in the original
essay.
The reader will not be amused by the idea that this book could have been even longer
than it is. The fact remains that, although the four chosen subject-categories seem to be
the most important ones, others might have been added—in particular, that of law and
jurisprudence (how witches should be legally apprehended, examined, and punished). I
also regret not spending more time on individual authors and individual texts, instead of
so often submerging them in general descriptions. It is probably true, in addition, that my
approach is too ‘internalist’, concentrating on patterns of thought at the expense of the
interests they served and the concrete situations that influenced their expression. Let
me say at the outset, therefore, what it would be tedious to repeat throughout: that this
is a study of notions of demonic deviance held by those who, in one way or another, were
anxious to preserve orthodoxy, and who constructed the difference between the normal
world and the world of witchcraft in such a way as to legitimize the institutions to which
they belonged or otherwise supported. Most serious of all, I have paid relatively little
attention to either the genesis or the decline of the ideas whose character I describe. My
reading could (and perhaps should) have been extended back into medieval scholarship
and forward into eighteenth-century modernism. Not to do this was, however, a
deliberate policy (defended in a short ‘Postscript’ to the book), designed to give
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Preface
prominence to demonology as a working system of belief at the height of its powers to
persuade, rather than to those responsible (in some moralistic sense) for either its
creation or its overthrow.
To write as I have done about the rationality and cogency of texts previously condemned
for barbarism and inhumanity may invite the charge of excusing the inexcusable. I have
certainly tried to rescue demonology from the rationalistic opprobrium once directed at
it, but only in the interests of historical symmetry; that is to say, the paying of equal
attention to past beliefs that we ourselves would reject and to those we might accept. I
do not think it worth while to adopt any particular moral stance with regard to the beliefs
and behaviour of people living in historically remote societies with standards quite unlike
our own, preferring to conserve my moral energies for issues closer to home. If some
general lesson is to be gleaned from what follows, it is only that the purportedly most
essential, objective, and timeless truths have nothing to commend them but the
descriptions of those who happen to call them true.
Notes:
(1) Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Rationality and the Explanation of Action’, in id., Against the Self-
images of the Age (London, 1971), 250.
Page 5 of 5
Acknowledgements
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Europe
Stuart Clark
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198208082
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208082.001.0001
(p.xi) Acknowledgements
Like all large books this one has accumulated large debts. Not the least is to those many
scholars I have cited in my footnotes. I could not have tried to embrace so many topics
over such a spread of time, or attempted so many broad characterizations, without
relying heavily on the researches of others. My bibliography of modern references is a
very long one but it reflects the indispensable assistance I have had in this respect. I
have also gained much from being invited to read papers to seminars and conferences in
Britain and abroad, as well as from the large gatherings of witchcraft and magic
researchers in Stockholm (1984), Wolfenbüttel (1987), Budapest (1988), Exeter (1991),
Paris (1992), and Princeton (1995). Contacts with members of both the Dutch study
group for ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery in the Netherlands’ and the Arbeitskreis
Interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung organized from the Academy of the diocese of
Rottenburg-Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen have led to invaluable exchanges of
information and ideas. I am grateful, in particular, to the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton for receiving me as a member of the School of Historical Studies during 1988–
9. Both the Nuffield Foundation and the University of Wales, Swansea, made that visit
possible, the one by awarding me a Social Science Research Fellowship, and the other by
allowing me leave of absence. Other grants of financial assistance have come from the
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