First French Edition[text in Latin], [1], 40, [1]pp., woodcut printers device to title, woodcut initials, occasional contemporary marginal annotations, later vellum, rebound, new endpapers, 8vo, Paris, Ægidium Corrozet, 1561.
“They are play things of dreams or some powerful illusion… which the Devil has impressed on their minds.” – Ulirch Molitor
Ulrich Molitor was one of the earliest writers on witchcraft.
Molitor was a jurist and professor at the University of Constance, where his book was first published in 1489. Tractatus de Lamiis was written to convince the Archduke Sigismund of Austria and “the most illustrious doctors” of the reality of witches and in opposition to the Malleus Maleficarum. The heresy of witchcraft was by no means universally accepted, even after the Dominican inquisitors, and authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, Sprenger and Kramer had come to the Tyrol to hunt out witchcraft.
In the dialogue, Sigismund dismisses evidence extracted by torture, and reasons that if sorcerers could produce tempests, princes like himself could disband their armies and maintain a few witches.
According to Molitor, it was only by permission of God that witches were able to make weather, inflict illness, fly to the sabbath, or procreate with demons, as only God could bestow whatever power Satan falsely claimed as his own. Despite his moderate position, Molitor in practice was hostile to sorcerers “suspected of heresy”, his overriding belief being the Devil’s power to deceive men was derived from God, and those who fell for the Devil’s illusion were guilty of heresy for they had abandoned God. He found nothing wrong with a man charged with bewitching a neighbour being burnt at the stake.
Molitor’s dialogue instantly became popular, with ten reprints in the 1490s, translations into the German vernacular and a number of other languages.
A very scarce edition, only found in one US institution (Yale).
[USTC:153205; The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, Robbins]
