Walter Stephens. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. xv + 451 pp. + 16 b/w pls. index, illus, bibl. $35. ISBN: 0-226-77261-6.

Unlike the social and political history of western witchcraft persecutions, the intellectual history of European witchcraft has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This book fills an important gap by exploring the often-tangled thought processes of the first generation of "witchcraft theorists," as Stephens prefers to call them, who, roughly between 1430 and 1530, constructed the essentials of the early modern notion of the witch. Focusing on less-studied works by Johannes Nider, Jean Vineti, Pico della Mirandola, Alonso Tostado, Bartolomeo Spina, and others, as well as the Malleus maleficarum, Stephens persuasively argues that the witch figure emerged after 1400 from a mixed bag of ideas about the activities of heretics, necromancers, and exorcists in the context of theological speculation about the possibilities of human contacts with demons. "Expert" testimony by witches about sexual encounters and other instances of corporeal interaction with demons were crucial elements in this process: "sex with demons was only one aspect of a more general European fixation on physical interaction with demons" (14). This compelling interest in the bodily evidence of demonic activity, which also surfaced in discussions of desecration of the Host, demonic infanticide, and witches' familiars, underlay the creation of a systematic and logical theory of witchcraft.

Stephens' primary interest, however, is less in the alleged activities of witches per se than in the metaphysical consequences vested in them by the clerics who made them the lynchpin of demonological theory. The "demon lovers" of the book's title are not ultimately the witches accused of sex with demons, but the witch theorists themselves who craved accounts of demonic copulation in order to prove to themselves and others that demons were demonstrably real. Beneath the seeming certainty of the witch theorist's accusations lurked a reluctant, "involuntary" skeptic seeking endless reassurance of the truth of spiritual realities.

In this larger thesis Stephens frames the relentless emphasis on demonic copulation in both witch treatises and trial records as a byproduct of a still more relentless repressed doubt about whether demons, and, by extension, the whole spiritual world in fact existed. Witchcraft theorists were haunted by the possibilities suggested by medieval scholastic philosophy that the supposed effects of demonic actions could be explained either as the result of natural causes or as the delusions of the uneducated. If demons were solely a product of nature or the power of the imagination, then what was the epistemological status of angels, or even of God? Such concerns, Stephens argues, acquired new urgency after 1400 under the pressure of the disasters of the fourteenth century, the rediscovery of classical materialism, and renewed controversy over the efficacy of the sacraments, resulting in an unacknowledged "crisis of faith." Stephens marvelously teases out the double-bind witchcraft theorists found themselves in: aware that contact with demons was morally wrong, they nevertheless craved contact in order to reassure themselves that demons were real; insisting on the reality of demons, they also had to rigorously repress their own doubts. More straightforwardly, he also suggests that witches served a useful answer to the perennial question of how to explain the presence of evil and suffering in a world governed by an all-powerful and good God.

This book is not without some unresolved tensions. Stephens perhaps sometimes too sharply compartmentalizes the idea of sex from its emotional resonances ("Literate interest in copulation with demons was hardly driven [only] by prurience, misogyny, or puritanical fervor," 19). Even if witch theorists were primarily motivated by a metaphysical crisis of faith, they may not have been completely immune from more fundamental psychological responses to the elaborately salacious images produced by their researches. One wonders also whether witchcraft theorists might have had doubts about the wisdom of attempting to prove admittedly metaphysical truths by defining the "real" in narrowly physical terms. Nevertheless, this provocative, often fascinating, book poses an original and important perspective on the meaning of the witch-figure in the history of late-medieval and Renaissance theology. It is essential reading for those interested in the witch hunts, as well as those with a general interest in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century thought.

ELSPETH WHITNEY

University of Nevada 

Las Vegas