De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficijs, libri V, recogniti, authore Ioanne Wiero medico. Totius operis argumentum in praefatione comperies.

FIRST EDITION, 479pp., early ownership note to title head, Nádasdy family library stamp to title, floriated woodcut initials, numerous annotations to margins in a 17th century hand, bookplate on pastedown, early full calf, spine gilt, corners worn, speckled edges, 8vo, Basilae, Ioan Oporin, 1563.

“Those who err should be brought gently home, not incarcerated with punitive ferocity.”

Johann Weyer, a respected Lutheran physician at the court of William III, was one of the first to protest against the persecution of witches. He is considered “the founder of medical psychiatry” (Garrison-Morton), and a human rights defender avant la lettre. He published on rare diseases and sexual abuse. Weyer influenced contemporaries such as Michel de Montaigne and later thinkers such as Victor Hugo, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. After studying at the University of Paris, Weyer apprenticed under Agrippa of Nettesheim from 1530 to 1534. The poetic, mysterious and liberal-minded Agrippa was also an outspoken critic of witch persecution.

Weyer sought to derogate the law concerning witchcraft prosecution, using two forms of thinking. He argued that those accused of practising witchcraft were mentally ill – suffering from “melancholia” – and the confessions they made were actually delusions of the mind. By arguing that the moral weakness in women made them easy prey to Satan’s temptations, Weyer started one of the most vigorous and enduring controversies surrounding demonology and the witch in the early modern period. Weyer powerfully argues the case for leniency to the repentant and eloquently rejects the assimilation of witchcraft to heresy. He insisted that women were neither helped nor healed by torture or burning, but that they rather needed the healing power of prayer, religious instruction, medical intervention, and meditative isolation. He bolstered this attack on realist demonology with medical authorities as well as his own clinical experience as a practising physician. Whilst he is right to insist on the relevance of medical diagnosis in many cases of witchcraft, medicine was then too primitive to suggest convincing explanations. Weyer’s most important contribution in the field of medical diagnosis may be the understanding that undernourishment was the cause of much witchcraft melancholia.

Medical and juridical objections often went hand in hand. Weyer challenged demonologists on a legal terrain, attacking the prosecution’s reliance on a confession, the point where demonology’s theoretical and practical endeavours converged. Weyer attempts to demolish various witch confessions, notably he publicly attacked the trials of the Wurttemberg preachers, attesting they were illegal, since the death penalties could be imposed only in cases of maleficent magic, not for mere fantasies. Weyer was careful to specify that he did not doubt the reality of witchcraft, but only its relevance to the majority of prosecutions.

Weyer has become a symbol of courage and lucidity in the face of intolerance and ignorance, but he was not quite as radical as it would seem. Despite Weyer’s appeal for a greater tolerance towards alleged witches, he also wants greater severity towards male magicians, who Weyer perceived as actual practitioners of natural or demonic magic. It has been suggested that in its very conception, this work is an ideological attack on Catholic idolatry and superstition, rather than a radical stand against the cruel persecution of witches.

The reaction to De Praestigiis Daemonum was formidable. Weyer had chosen to publish his book precisely at the moment when the witch-craze, after a long lull, was beginning again. That, indeed, was what had provoked him to write. But this Erasmian Platonist was no longer heard by a generation that had repudiated Erasmus. A fellow physician might hail him as a prophet of enlightenment, but his other readers thought differently. Weyer was told by his friends that his book must be destroyed or rewritten; by his enemies that he was a lunatic.

Yet Johann Weyer shaped opposition to witch hunting for generations. Demonologists who wrote after him took care to demolish his arguments, and Bodin’s famous Demonomanie de sorciers includes a lengthy rebuttal of De praestigiis. Yet as they engaged with Weyer’s ideas, their own thought was shaped by his.

The printer Johannes Oporinus is best remembered for his publication of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, 1543.

Provenance:

Joannnis Pauli Herwarth(?) 1567;

Johann Conrad Herwarth “Ex Libris Jo. Conradi Herwarth. C. Reg. Consiliari Landishuti A. 1645”.

The House of Nádasdy

The Nadasdy family made a large contribution to the development of Hungarian printing.

Haskell F. Norman: his sale, Christie’s New York, Part 2, June 15, 1998, lot 852).

There are several annotations in the margins, written in a similar hand to Johann Conrad Herwarth (d.1669). Herwarth joined the Regimental Council in 1656 in Landshut, Bavaria, an area that witnessed first hand the horror of the witch trials, following the reign of William V and his ecclesiastical council, the Geistlicher Rat. Non-catholics were forced to leave Bavaria and there were numerous executions following witch hunts in the duchy.

The last witch execution in the Holy Roman Empire took place in Landshut in 1756, when 15 year-old Veronika Zeritschin was beheaded and then burned. As a member of the Regimental Council, Herwarth would have overseen trials for crimes within the military, such as thievery, insubordination and cowardice. It is understandable why Herwarth might take interest in Weyer’s work, as he would have almost certainly witnessed the witch trails, or possibly been directly involved.

It is unclear if these annotations are indicative of support for Weyer or if they are simply paraphrasing: “Propriaeque amentium anicularum confessioni stari, nec inter lamias et veneficas satis discerni. Magos vero sacrilegos veteri lege grauiter mulctatos, iam impune imo cum laude apud plerosque versari.”/ “There is a persistence in a peculiar kind of confession for mad old women, nor is there sufficient distinction between lamiae-witches and veneficae-witches. Sacrilegious wizards, however, who in ancient law were gravely slaughtered, now among many people ply their business with impunity or indeed with praise.”  – (Translation by Nathaniel Hess)

However, the commenter clearly has an interest in the theological debate surrounding demonology, referencing Weyer’s chief critic, Jean Bodin:  “Ioan. Bodinus in tract. suo recenter edito, de daemonomania, acri criminatione authoris, probe Catonis vices agere videtur.”/ “Jean Bodin in his recently edited tract on Demonomania seems, with a sharp recrimination of this author, to act upstandingly in the manner of Cato. [the tone of this is possibly ironic]” – (Translation by Nathaniel Hess)

[ADB XLII, p. 266; Garrison-Morton 4916; Robbins (1972), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft; Thorndike, L. (1941). A History of Magic and Experimental Science, pp. 515-516.; Witchcraze, Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Europe, Roper, 2004; Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, Mora, 1991; The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, 2013; Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany, 2009; The Damned art : essays in the literature of witchcraft, 1977]