The Science of Demons

Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil

Jan Machielsen, Jan Machielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351333641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Witches, ghosts, fairies. Premodern Europe was filled with strange creatures, with the devil lurking behind them all. But were his powers real? Did his powers have limits? Or were tales of the demonic all one grand illusion? Physicians, lawyers, and theologians at different times and places answered these questions differently and disagreed bitterly.

The demonic took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe. By examining individual authors from across the continent, this book reveals the many purposes to which the devil could be put, both during the late medieval fight against heresy and during the age of Reformations. It explores what it was like to live with demons, and how careers and identities were constructed out of battles against them – or against those who granted them too much power. Together, contributors chart the history of the devil from his emergence during the 1300s as a threatening figure – who made pacts with human allies and appeared bodily – through to the comprehensive but controversial demonologies of the turn of the seventeenth century, when European witch-hunting entered its deadliest phase.

This book is essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of the supernatural in medieval and early modern Europe.

Part 1

Beginnings

1 The inquisitor’s demons

Nicolau Eymeric’s Directorium inquisitorum

Pau Castell Granados

‘She heard him say that, if he wanted to, he would put the best Christian in the whole world to the flames.’ These unholy words were attributed to the Catalan inquisitor Nicolau Eymeric (c.1320–1399) by a Dominican nun during a 1388 trial in Valencia, following the city’s rejection of the inquisitor over his controversial anti-heretical activities.¹ Other grave accusations were also levelled against the Catalan friar, among them extortion, prevarication, violation of the order of law, requests for sexual favours, confrontations with superiors – in short, serious abuses of power. Eymeric was then acting as Inquisitor General of the Crown of Aragon, with a jurisdiction that included the principality of Catalonia and the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia. He had been recently reinstated to his office at the order of King John I, who reversed the inquisitor’s banishment issued twelve years earlier by his predecessor Peter III. Eymeric’s renewed actions against the so-called Lullists – followers of the late mystic theologian Raymond Llull (1232–1316) – had set off spirited opposition from the secular, episcopal, and inquisitorial authorities of Valencia, causing the populace to rejoice that ‘now the friars’ filth will be revealed, thanks to the great divisions among the inquisitors.’² This string of accusations would lead to Eymeric’s final political demise. He was again suspended from office and ultimately cast into exile in 1393 by King John himself, who went so far as to brand him a ‘public enemy’, commanding his subjects to expel him as one would ‘a pestiferous venom’ and prevent the return of ‘this diabolical and depraved man, friar Nicolau Eymeric.’³ Only the king’s death three years later enabled Eymeric to return to his home-city of Girona, where he passed away soon after, roughly 80 years old.⁴

The troubled end of Nicolau Eymeric’s career is in fact the result of a life marked by constant conflict and confrontation with both royal and ecclesiastical authorities. These frictions extended to other members of his own Dominican order, to the Franciscans, and (inevitably) to the ‘heretical’ Lullists, as well as to the cities of Barcelona, Lleida, and Valencia. During his years as inquisitor, Eymeric devoted his attention to the fields of sorcery, necromancy, errors against the faith, blasphemy, and crypto-Judaism. He also took action against the writings of authors he considered heretical. The fight against Raymond Llull’s doctrines became an overriding feature of Eymeric’s career, even prompting a schism within the Dominican order of his province due to his attacks on fellow Dominican (and archenemy) Bernat Ermengol. The anti-Lullist hostility would also lay at the source of many of Eymeric’s enmities and – after three removals from office and two forced retreats to the papal court of Avignon, first in 1376 and again in 1393 – it turned out to be the ultimate engine of his downfall.

It was during his first exile in Avignon that Eymeric finished his influential inquisitors’ manual Directorium inquisitorum (Guide to Inquisitors, 1376), which would become the definitive handbook on inquisitorial procedure for centuries to come and provide the judicial underpinning for all the early modern Inquisitions, especially after it was republished with a commentary by the Aragonese canonist Francisco Peña in 1578.⁵ Several editions of the treatise appeared during the sixteenth century – first in Barcelona and subsequently in Rome and Venice – and they found a home in the libraries of popes and cardinals, as well as the Inquisitions of Venice and Spain.⁶ Its surviving copies would later scandalize the sensibilities of Enlightenment readers such as Morellet, Voltaire, and Alembert, who saw in them the most explicit account of the horrific practices of the Inquisition and a justified foundation for the Black Legend that surrounded that institution and Spain more widely.⁷

As for Eymeric’s views on demonology, these were systematized in questions 42 and 43 of the second part of the Directorium, in which he stated the heretical nature of ‘sorcerers’, ‘diviners’, and ‘invokers of demons’.⁸ The two chapters were in fact a condensed version of a work Eymeric contributed specifically to the field of demonology early in his career, De iurisdictione inquisitorum in et contra christianos demones invocantes (On the Inquisitors’ Jurisdiction over and against Christian Invokers of Demons, 1359).⁹ The Directorium was also preceded by another short treatise, De iurisdictione Ecclesi[a]e et inquisitorum contra infideles demones invocantes (On the Jurisdiction of the Church and Inquisitors against Infidel Invokers of Demons, 1370), in which Eymeric addressed the demonological practices of non-Christians in an attempt to stretch inquisitorial jurisdiction in that direction.¹⁰ Finally, near the end of his life, he produced the Contra astrologos imperitos atque nigromanticos (Against Unskilled Astrologers and Necromancers, 1396), a treatise intended for King John’s confessor warning secular power against the use of divination and astrology which were likened to diabolism and heresy.¹¹

Eymeric’s contributions to the field of demonology were based mainly on his own experience as an inquisitor, a role that not only deeply marked the friar’s life, as we have already seen, but his perception of the demonic features which tainted the so-called ‘heretical depravity’ of his time. In fact, Eymeric’s birth coincided with the major milestones in the gradual ‘diabolization of heresy’ and the corresponding ‘hereticization of magic’. The 1320 consultations issued by Pope John XXII in Avignon on the heretical nature of sorcery and the invocation of demons, followed by Bernard Gui’s Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (1321) in nearby Toulouse, fuelled the expansion of inquisitorial jurisdiction over the practices of sorcery, divination, and necromancy – which the Practica defined as dangerously close to heresy and diabolism.¹² These texts had a considerable impact on inquisitorial procedure in Catalonia during Eymeric’s formative years. After the final persecutions against Cathars, Fraticelli, Pseudo-Apostles, and Templars in the early fourteenth century, Catalan inquisitors started to set their sights on necromancy and practices linked to sorcery and divination, hitherto the exclusive domain of episcopal courts.¹³

Demonological features are prominent in many of the accusations Eymeric put forth against his victims from the very beginning of his inquisitorial career. In that regard, the friar’s reflections on demonology did not focus so much on its doctrinal definition but rather on the role assigned to church authorities in its repression and the judicial procedure against alleged invokers of demons. Both Eymeric’s writings and his controversial actions against alleged ‘heretical depravity’ in the Crown of Aragon would strongly contribute to this process of hereticization of magic, even anticipating some aspects of the crime of witchcraft that emerged in Europe shortly after his death.

1 Heresy, deception, and pain

Nicolau Eymeric was born around 1320 in the northern Catalan city of Girona, where he entered the Dominican convent at a young age. From there he would be sent to the University of Paris for his doctorate in theology, before being finally appointed Inquisitor General of the Crown of Aragon in 1357.¹⁴ The papal inquisition had been firmly established in Eymeric’s homeland since the early thirteenth century, with a profusion of trials against Waldensians and other spiritual movements.¹⁵ Still, when Eymeric was appointed Inquisitor General the era of the great medieval heresies was already on the wane. Eymeric himself was well aware that earlier successes had left ‘only a few impenitent heretics, not many relapses, and even fewer rich ones.’¹⁶ This constituted a discouraging prospect for an ambitious young friar, who nevertheless started acting aggressively against heretical depravity. Too aggressively in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, who saw the friar as overzealous and devoid of humanity, given his constant mistreatment of the accused and his predisposition to counterfeiting evidence.

This perception derived in part from Eymeric’s own ways of dealing with heresy and from his assumed role as inquisitor. As he would candidly state in his 1389 Dialogus contra lullistas (Dialogue against the Lullists): ‘I am an inquisitor of heretics and therefore the possessor of bad faith.’¹⁷ Acting in bad faith was, Eymeric argued, necessary when confronting heretics who, far from being passive and powerless, were seen as active and powerful agents responding to the inquisitor’s questions with ‘cunning’, ‘guile’, and ‘sophistries’. In other words, they were dangerous and deceitful individuals who threatened to escape the inquisitor’s clutches by hiding the truth, even under torture. Faced with this perceived challenge, Eymeric suggested a new and dangerous approach that consisted of responding to such suspected duplicities by becoming duplicitous himself, as he would explain at length in the third part of his Directorium:

When the inquisitor sees a cavilling, wily, and cunning heretic who does not want to uncover his error but rather circumvents the issue with cavilling responses and equivocations, then, as a nail is dislodged by another nail, the inquisitor must use ruses to catch the heretic in his error.¹⁸

The Directorium provides numerous examples of such deceptions, by advising inquisitors to always use ambiguous and deceptive speech when interrogating suspects. Thus, when the accused party requests a reprieve (gratia), ‘they must be assured that even more will be done for them than they request, and generalities of the sort.’ The inquisitor should convince the suspect that everything about their deeds is already known because others have previously confessed and incriminated them. Whereupon the inquisitor must contend:

You see, I pity you, because you have been deluded by your own simplicity. Certainly, you are somewhat guilty, but he who instructed you in such things is much more so. Do not make the sin of another your own, nor make yourself out to be a master when you were only a disciple. Tell me the truth, since as you see, I already know everything about the matter. … Who is he, who taught you these errors, you who knew nothing of evil?¹⁹

Paperwork could also be used to sustain such inquisitorial theatrics. The inquisitor could ostentatiously leaf through the accused person’s file and exclaim: ‘It is clear that you are not speaking the truth!’ If the (likely illiterate) accused rejected an allegation, the inquisitor should ‘as if astonished’ brandish a document from the file and exclaim: ‘How can you deny it? Is it not clear enough?’ The inquisitor will then ‘read from the document and he will pervert it.’²⁰

This long catalogue of interrogation techniques – most of which are still used in police stations around the globe – is followed by a description of the proper methods for torturing the accused. Eymeric’s Directorium was in ...