Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology. .

Armando Maggi. Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. x + 260 pp. index. illus. bibl. $37.50. ISBN: 0-226-50132-9.

This study in the history of linguistic and rhetorical theory addresses the dialogue between devils and humanity as theorized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy--a more accurate subtitle would be "a study of counter-Reformation demonology." The author explicitly undertakes the investigation as an exercise in Husserlian phenomenology. Bracketing out skepticism at supernatural solicitation, he attempts to convey the intellectual system and psychological experience specific to demonology; rather than ferret out its ideological functionality or diagnose it as a hysterical symptom. Maggi thus turns from the usual sources--sensationally lurid, canonical texts--which for all their morbid attractions tend to be conceptually half-baked, to scrutinize instead relatively forgotten works that address demonic speech acts with philosophical, specifically late scholastic, rigor. There are eyes that will not widen to learn that postmodern theorists hold much in common with theorists of the inquisition.

Chapter 1 is devoted to De Strigimagis (1521) by Sylvester Priero, theologian, inquisitor, and opponent of Luther. De Strigimagis derives a grammatological theory of demonic semiology from Augustinian premises, particularly the account of speech as an act of remembrance expressive of desire, and from Aristotelian syllogistic logic.

According to medieval church orthodoxy, angels do not possess memory or feel desire. Intellectual substances subsisting wholly in the present, angels' psyches are not diffused in retrospect and anticipation but instead, wholly in the present, are able to perceive effects in causes and conclusions in major premises. Good angels--messengers--utter God's tidings merely and otherwise lack linguistic awareness or anything to say; fallen angels are media without a content provider--wind charms hung in a vacuum. Exiles, they are left with the created world as their text and perversely mime signatures of the divine as away of wreaking destruction--for that is their virulent and virus-like instrumentality. Any wind that blows their way becomes an ill wind indeed.

Specific rhetorical strategies of fallen angels and their disciples are scrutinized in De incantantibus seu ensalmis by Manuel do Valle de Moura, a Portuguese bishop, general inquisitor, scourge of the Jews, and the subject of Maggi's second chapter. For de Moura, any communicative act has an indeterminate impact on the imagination, and that undetermined potency allows Satan access. The incantations spoken by those who invoke the devil generally mix psalms, prayer, and formulas taken from popular magic. But because any random set of syllables may render an imagination vulnerable, even by accident, de Moura concentrates on identifying the rituals of purposeful, depraved practitioners--witches, sodomites, and Jews--rather than on the linguistic formulas they deploy. As Maggi observes, De ensalmis "offers a linguistic clarification for the church's hatred of women, homosexuals, and Jews. More than for what they do, women, homosexuals, and Jews deserve to die for how they speak" (95).

Ordinarily, the spoken word indicates something in the world around us, but the inaudible utterances of demons, in opposition to the constituting word of the creator, undo what they signify. Exorcism is a ritual specifically conceived to defeat the linguistic nihilism of the devil. To comprehend the theory behind the ritual, Maggi in his third chapter examines Girolamo Menghi and Valerio Polidor's Thesaurus exorcismorum (1608). Chapter 4 then turns to a specific instance of demonic possession recorded in the Probation of Saint Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, a mystic on whom Maggi has previously published a hook-length study. The Probation describes her endurance of a prolonged demonic assault, including melancholic oppression. The psychologically acute devil accomplishes the assault by activating Saint Maria's guilty memory of her sinful shortcomings, specifically linguistic ones, rendering the inadequacies of her past more present than reality itself. Maggi's final chapter concerns the Met op oscopia of Girolamo Cardano (150 1-76), a physician and philosopher from Pavia whose work on facial divination, like the Probation, suggests the salvific potential of demonic possession.

Maggi's argument often involves readers with scholastic metaphysics, logic, and faculty psychology as a way of, for example, distinguishing among good angels, human beings, and fallen angels. Such recondite philosophy is scarcely more intelligible than postmodern theoretical writing, and Maggi, with both of these philosophies in play, sometimes fails to convey his meaning clearly. As a student of Renaissance English literature, I nevertheless found the book thought-provoking, especially in its contemplation of early modern melancholy and mnemonics, and anticipate returning to it when next I read Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, or Paradise Lost.