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Classical Culture and Witchcraft in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.8.2.0283

2161-2196

Michael D. Bailey,

Medieval Literature and History

The major witch hunts of Western Europe reached their peak just as the forces of Renaissance and Reformation were supposedly inaugurating a new and more modern era. Hugh Trevor-Roper observed as much in his classic essay on “The European Witch-Craze” (1967), a reference that Marina Montesano cites at the outset of the study reviewed here. In the decades since Trevor-Roper wrote, a good deal of sophisticated scholarship has focused on how the energy of religious reformation, both Protestant and Catholic, influenced notions of witchcraft and dynamics of witch-hunting. There has also been much work on “Renaissance” magic: highly elite, learned forms of occultism grounded in Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and so forth. But such studies have rarely dipped into the grubby world of witchcraft, and in general, when “Renaissance” and “witchcraft” have been paired with one another, they have typically been regarded as antitheses. What could broadly skeptical and basically compassionate humanism have to do with the horrors of a witch hunt?Montesano wants to remind us that Renaissance humanism, and above all the humanists' admiration for antiquity, was a multifaceted force. In particular she intends to show “how ancient beliefs and descriptions of magic and witchcraft in Greek and Roman literature had an impact on ideas of witchcraft in modern times and on the witch-hunts” (6). What emerges is a survey of Western conceptions of witchcraft and magic, weighted toward literary descriptions of various sorts, from antiquity to the early modern era. Only in its final chapters does this book delve directly into the connections between humanism and witchcraft.In her first two chapters, Montesano surveys the concept of the witch in antiquity, beginning with such classic literary characters as Circe and Medea. In general, she traces how depictions that began with some nuance degraded into more uniformly dark portrayals of straightforwardly evil figures, especially in Roman literature. She also discusses the condemnation of magic in Roman law, and this necessarily draws her into an examination of the terminology applied to harmful, criminalized magic, such as veneficium and maleficium. Shades of meaning evaporated still further in late antiquity and the early medieval period, as Christianity gained strength. All magic was wicked and demonic for Christian thinkers, so to some extent all magia became maleficia. This is a well-known story, but Montesano keeps her eye firmly fixed on classical roots throughout—though we should note that much of this subject matter, including the degradation of the witch-figure from Greek to Roman literature as well as examinations of terminology, has already been extremely well covered by classical scholars, few of whom Montesano cites.Switching gears, Montesano then turns to the canon Episcopi, with its enormously influential description of a band of women traveling at night in the train of the pagan goddess Diana. Montesano unpacks not just this text but the much broader tradition of night-traveling women, called most generically the “Good Ones,” as well as many other names. Again, this is well-worn territory for the history of witchcraft, but Montesano maintains a sharp focus on ancient roots underlying all these diverse structures of belief. Turning then to the late medieval period, she takes up the topic of one of her earlier books, “Supra acqua et supra ad vento”: Superstizioni, maleficia e incantamenta nei predicatori Francescani Osservanti (1999), in which she explored the connection between reform movements within late medieval religious orders—in particular within the Franciscan order—and growing concerns about witchcraft in the fifteenth century. Here the connections to antiquity grow thin. Mainly they amount to certain friars' continued use of strix/striga for witches. In doing so, these men were drawing on established medieval usages, although some of them may have had direct knowledge of a few ancient texts, above all Apuleius and perhaps Ovid.In her penultimate chapter, Montesano broadens her consideration to the entire “Italian Quattrocento.” Here she discusses a range of preachers, demonologists, and other authorities, and also delves into the witch trials that increased considerably in number in northern Italy at this time. She effectively compares certain particularly Italian stereotypes of witchcraft emerging in this period, based on notions of the vampiric strix and to some extent the night-stalking lamia, to stereotypes of the witches' Sabbath developing at the same time just to the north of the Alps in French- and German-speaking regions. She also includes here that other component of “Renaissance” magical culture: Hermetic and Neoplatonic systems of elite magic. As much as many Renaissance thinkers were drawn to magical subjects, Montesano is careful to include the skepticism of many humanists for at least certain aspects of magical culture, ultimately highlighting the complexity of such figures. Central here is her analysis of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, author of the famed Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). While Pico was skeptical about certain occult arts, especially divination and astrology, he was a great proponent of magical/mystical systems like Kabbalah.In her final chapter, “Ten Thousand Circes,” Montesano turns most directly to the interplay of humanist adoration of ancient literature and contemporary notions of witchcraft. Here a good portion of her analysis focuses on Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, nephew to Giovanni, and his 1523 dialogue Strix, featuring a witch who herself speaks before a judge to convince a skeptical listener that witchcraft is a real and terrible diabolical crime. Following the analysis of Tamar Herzig, Montesano argues that Strix was intended to rehabilitate the Malleus Maleficarum for humanist circles, updating its old-fashioned scholastic logic (and dull scholastic Latin) with the classical tropes and more elegant language that would appeal to humanist readers.In this final chapter, however, Montesano also broadens her focus considerably beyond Italy to consider northern humanists and other writers across Europe who now increasingly drew on the classical tradition to discuss witchcraft. She notes, for example, that the stodgily medieval Malleus Maleficarum itself included a number of classical references and allusions. These were, of course, mainly drawn through medieval intermediaries, not any kind of in-depth exploration of classical texts themselves. Again we see clearly that knowledge of or affection for antiquity need not necessarily dispose an author to one side of the witchcraft debate or the other. While Jean Bodin drew on ancient authorities, for example, to prove the reality and enduring evil of witchcraft, Johann Weyer used the ancients to argue for profound skepticism.Probably the most compelling northern figure for Montesano's argument is the Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio, whose enormous Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600) became an extremely popular and influential statement about the reality of witchcraft. Jan Machielsen has recently and masterfully argued (in Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation, 2015) how Delrio's demonology was powerfully informed by his humanism. Montesano references Machielsen's work, but does not draw as heavily on it as she might, given how well it fits her own argument. She then closes out her book with a very brief consideration of Renaissance literature, from Italy and “Orlando Furioso” to Rabelais, Shakespeare, and various Elizabethan and Jacobean witchcraft plays. Equally curtailed is Montesano's discussion of the witch in Renaissance artwork. Despite the profusion of obviously classical motifs in artwork depicting witches at this time, or perhaps because such motifs are so obvious, she does little more than catalog a few examples.Unfortunately, the book ends without any conclusion that might have drawn together its many threads in some satisfying way. Instead, it peters out in these rather truncated final discussions of early modern literature and art. That is a shame because the central theme Montesano pursues throughout this wide-ranging study is important. Images of the witch that had developed in ancient literature and also to an extent in ancient law reverberated powerfully, although always in complex and continually changing ways, down through the centuries. Later stereotypes referred back to classical models, sometimes through deeply informed readings, and sometimes only by barest allusion. Many of the references cataloged here will be familiar to scholars of different areas and epochs of witchcraft's long history. Classical antiquity provided a constant touchstone for Western European thought on virtually all matters, magic and the occult included, throughout the medieval period as well as more famously during the late-medieval and early-modern Renaissance. But these classical connections have never been explored in such a broad and sustained fashion as in this book; the whole history of witchcraft is encompassed here, resulting in a wide-ranging survey that also has a focused and important core.