On the Demon-Mania of Witches.

Jean Bodin. Abridged, trans. and ed. Randy A. Scott and Jonathan L. Pearl. (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, 7.) Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995. 218 pp. $12. ISBN: 0-969-5125-7.

It is one of the enduring perplexities of the European witch hunts that some of the most learned and innovative thinkers of the era were also the most vehement and apparently credulous witchmongers. As this translation of On the Demon-Mania of Witches reveals, Jean Bodin may embody that contradiction more powerfully than any of his contemporaries. First published in French in 1580, the Demon-Mania was actively reissued and widely translated during the following century and clearly ranked as one of Bodin's most popular works. Since that time, however, it has usually been segregated from the rest of his pioneering studies in political and economic theory, relegated to a position of anomaly within the Bodin oeuvre (11).

This translation is, remarkably, the first in English. Although considerably abridged, the full force of Bodin's argument (presented in four subdivided books) is barely diminished by the absence of a handful of chapters and the conducting polemic against German physician Johann Weyer. The complex philosophical and theological content of book 1 immediately establishes Bodin's audience as elite and highly learned, and considerable editorial labor was required to make this portion of the treatise intelligible for a contemporary reader. Certainly the most startling passage here is an anonymous personal narrative describing daily visitations by a protective spirit or guardian angel; Bodin scholars have long assumed this to be an account of the author's own peculiar spiritual odyssey (59-62). This passage deepens the contradictory quality of the Demon-Mania by underscoring the contrast between Bodin's singular spirit of tolerance towards diverse religious beliefs and his adamant intolerance towards accused witches. Moreover, as one element of Bodin's unorthodox system of personal religious beliefs, this narrative asks us to examine more closely those aspects of his background that made the author himself vulnerable to charges of deviance.

Books 2 and 3 address a familiar array of magical practices, witch crimes and mysterious phenomena, as well as licit and illicit means of responding to presumably occult afflictions. More loosely argued than either the first or last books, these chapters are steeped in folk knowledge, local anecdote and personal testimony. One of the most interesting debates in witchcraft studies examines the witch hunts as the convergence of elite forms of knowledge with folk culture and local practices, and the Demon-Mania offers us an especially productive site for investigating the fusion of high and low discourses. Anecdotal material is the most generic component of witchcraft treatises, although Bodin's extraordinary accumulation of these stories (many of which the editors have judiciously omitted) would seem to exceed the demands of rational persuasion and take the reader into the domain of narrative pleasure for its own sake.

The fourth book provides concrete recommendations about legal procedure, including a series of strategies for convicting witches through circumstantial evidence, testimony from suspect witnesses, deceiving and psychologically intimidating the accused, and various forms of torture. This is certainly the most compelling section of the Demon-Mania, in part because it was the most consequential in immediate social terms. Book 4 exhibits a constant strain between scrupulous and erudite legal considerations, and a competing impulse of selective disregard for traditional legal standards: "In a criminal action, and especially in this crime of witchcraft . . . the judge must get the truth by every means that he can imagine" (191). Bodin lays out an apparently precise calculus for weighing proofs, presumptions, testimony and confessions, and yet it is difficult to see how any suspect could have escaped unscathed from his finely-tuned legal machinery. The editor's introduction contexualizes Bodin's position by reviewing the religious and political turmoil in France that shaped his view of authority (10-14), arid by explaining that his recommendations were consistent with judicial procedures employed in witchcraft cases throughout Europe (24-26). Even with such contexualizing frameworks, however, the ingenuity and severity with which Bodin has designed his techniques of judicial intimidation and pursuit remain appalling.

The editorial apparatus provided in this abridged translation is modest, but entirely in keeping with the purpose of the publisher's series, which is to produce scholarly translations suitable for students and non-specialists (an index, descriptions of omitted chapters, and a list of articles which specifically address the Demon-Mania would be welcome). There is an abundance of material here that will be accessible and provocative to any reader, while scholars who bring to this text more particular knowledge of theology, classical or Renaissance philosophy, jurisprudence, folk culture, demonology or the history of the witch hunts, will find it rich and disquieting, manifestly worthy of further scrutiny and debate.

JULIA M. GARRETT University of California, Santa Barbara