and there will be more demoniacs in the world than fools.” Page 43who by this means is establishing the reign of Satan. Even the judges are so blind that they deny that there have ever been warlocks and witches.”49 Henri Boguet, chief justice for the county of Burgundy, conveyed a similar sense of horror and disbelief at the growing number of skeptics. In a treatise from 1603, he remarked: “I marvel at those who ridicule the exorcisms and conjurations that our priests employ against demoniacs: because what reason do they have to do this? Did Jesus Christ not cure an infinite number [of such persons] while he was in this world.”50 Another author, Pierre Node, exhorted the Judges and Lords of France “to avoid being deceived by idle words, such as [those] used by beguilers, Sorcerers, Magicians, and Nostradamists.”51 Node then warned these magistrates of the impending doom if they failed to carry out their responsibility of eradicating this threat to the kingdom. “If either unadvised pity or negligence and scorn, or excessive disbelief softens the hearts of those who hold authority over any province of this kingdom in order to spare the life of these wretched creatures who provoke our God to such a great extent, the end of this poor France will not be unlike that of the Israelite kingdom.”52In the writings of Crespet, Boguet and Node, we can see the major elements of a type of propaganda that was not intended to serve as a vehicle of oppression of ‘popular culture. ‘ On the contrary, this literature seems to have been directed at the skepticism of other members of the elite classes. It is in fact evident that one cannot speak of the ‘elite class’ as a single, coherent entity. As one historian has described the situation, “Protestantism aside, there was no monolithic orthodoxy upon which all Catholics agreed in every detail. The church in France lacked the machinery, even if it had the will, to impose a single set of views on all people.”53Jonathan Pearl has shown that at least some of the French Catholic demonologists were concerned with both the blind credulity of the masses and the skepticism of some of the elites. His views have been particularly influenced by Pierre de Lancre’s L’Incredulite et Mescreance du Sortilege Plainement Convaincue (Paris, 1622), which he cites at some length. He contends that de Lancre represents the middle position between the two extremes of belief, because De Lancre argued thatWe should avoid the extremes. It is not necessary to line up with the Platonists who attribute everything to demons; but one must even less hold the belief of the Pythagoreans who laugh at demons, magicians, and witches . . . One must be a Christian and hold Christian beliefs according to the Holy Scriptures and the doctrines of the Holy Fathers and confirm these apparitions, not from stories gathered from everywhere, but by visions of holy personages, by daily experience, and by the testimony and confessions of witches.54Pearl’s reading of the primary source material led him to conclude that “the opinion, widely maintained in the modern historical literature, that the demonologists represented a unified elite that was reacting violently against peasant folk religion and general religious ignorance, is seriously flawed because it ignores sharp divisions of opinion among the elite class. The demonological works were written to convince the learned classes, especially incredulous or lukewarm clergy and judges, of the centrality of demonology to good Catholic theology.”55 While Pearl is correct to stress this division of opinion among the educated, it seems, on the basis of the evidence, difficult to deny that some members of the social and intellectual elite were in fact attempting to suppress the unorthodox views of the masses, mainly in order to establish a greater degree of uniformity of religious belief within their respective territories. Furthermore, the two positions are not mutually exclusive, as the passage from de Lancre’s work suggests.Although the subject of ‘magic’ as practiced by members of the elite classes has not been dealt with in this essay, it should be recognized that the meanings of such terms as ‘myth’, ‘magic’ and ’superstition’ and just what practices these words encompassed have varied significantly throughout history. William Monter has stated that “throughout much of Protestant and Catholic Europe, governments made defacto compromises with learned magic during the sixteenth century, while condemning popular or ’superstitious’ magic and executing witches for their maleficia.56 Such a comment reminds us that, in dealing with such topics, we inevitably run up against a great deal of subjectivity and biased preconceptions, from those writing in the early modern period as well as from historians of our own day. As demonstrated, however, a widespread belief in ghosts, demons, witches, and other phenomena often associated with occult magic permeated European society in the sixteenth century. Many Catholics regarded the growth of Protestantism as an insidious development that attested to the rapid diffusion of evil forces in the world and provided proof that the final day of judgement was imminent. Most Protestants, on the other hand, as well as an emerging group of Catholic skeptics, regarded various diabolical practices and beliefs as a mortal threat which had to be eradicated at any cost. Thus, we should not dismiss the type of literature that has been examined in this essay as the product of fanciful delusion. As Stuart Clark has correctly pointed out,to attribute the belief in demonic witchcraft to some determining ’social dysfunction’ would not only beg philosophical questionsabout the way language gives such traumas the meaning they have but ignore the extent to which contemporaries found reassurance in demonological (and millenarian) explanations, even of chaos.57These demonological tracts were at once attempts on the part of some contemporaries to suppress certain beliefs and attitudes which they considered superstitious and of others to contend that such views were indeed orthodox. For many, however, they were simply a means by which one could attempt to come to terms with aspects of his experience which he could not explain.
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