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Based on the title, I'd say you're probably right: the "book" I recommended is the core of a collection of essays, and the copy I have (a Penguin reissue from the 1980s) just includes the core. If you get around to reading the other essays, let me know what you think. I'd be interested to read more by Trevor-Roper.

And incidentally, I like those old Harper Torchlight books. Great graphic design on the covers, although, I imagine people thought them pretty dated in the 80s and early 90s.

Interesting so far and not overly "on the religious side" so far...

No; and actually, in the concluding section he's a lot more critical of the Church as a whole than I would say is really necessitated by the preceding discussion. But we can talk about that when you've finished, if you feel like it.

although, if I am reading right, he kind of implicates Aquinas in setting a portion of the stage for the witch craze.

Hmm, I may be wrong on this point, but I think Aquinas' ruling applied only to incubi and succubi, which were admitted by the Church as fitting into the dual cosmology provided by Aristotelian physics and scripture. Incubi and succubi were only laterally related to witch belief -- and that only centuries later when the writers of the Malleus Maleficarum explicitly associated witch-belief with the Devil -- so I'm not sure how much impact Aquinas could have had on the matter. I feel like I should know the position Trevor-Roper takes on the matter, having just re-read the book, but I didn't pay as much attention to the references to Aquinas as I probably should have.

I do recall him saying that Augustine was an exception in the early church, credulous of witch-belief where few were. Trevor-Roper passingly attributes that to Augustine's place outside the European Christian tradition -- Augustine was part of the African chuch and may have therefore been more comfortable with pagan superstitions than authorities in the Roman region. Augustine's comments on witchcraft in "The City of God" presumably lay dormant until the late 15th century when the Church itself relaxed its prohibition against witch-belief, at which point Augustine's authority in other doctrinal matters contributed to the dignity of the new inquisition.

And this topic at least interests me...so I don't mind reading up on it...I have been meaning to anyway!

Yeah, it's an interesting topic. In fact, I've started reading another related book from the pile -- Julio Caro Baroja's "The World of the Witches". It deals with a broader span of history, and doesn't seem as rigorously researched as Trevor-Roper's book, but so far it's interesting all the same.

Edit - Just posted a response and realized that I had inadvertently turned it into MegaPost, the Conversation Destroyer. I've been thinking a lot about this subject lately, and all my thoughts just pour out when I postt. I'm editing the post to pare it down to a manageable size. PS -- Hey, Chris! If you're reading this, maybe you ought to move this thread to the "Additional Book Discussions" thread.


I like it so much I bought one off EBAY. Nice book for a collection, aesthetically as well as the content quality.

Do you have a link to the auction page? If it has a picture, I'd like to see the cover.

I only saw one reference to this so far...but the jist was, as I read it, that Aquinas' work helped build a foundation for demonology, which the latter 'craze' incorporated into itself.

I think we're talking about essentially the same paragraph. Trevor-Roper credits Aquinas as being "after St. Augustine,... the second founder of demonological science." Does that sound about right?

A couple of things should be said in Aquinas' defence. One is that he lived several hundred years before the witch-hunters would associate the Devil with witchcraft, and he probably had no idea that his demonological principles would be presented as precedence in trials and purges of that sort.

Even so, it seems, to the modern mind, grotesque that a man admired in the Middle Ages for his learning would contribute so much to what we consider superstition. The second thing that should be borne in mind (and this is a point that Trevor-Roper makes in his conclusions) is that Aquinas was working out the details of a cosmology established by Aristotelian science. I don't have time to give a full summary of the details, but suffice it to say that the view of the universe inherited by the Middle Ages from Aristotle damn near necessitated the existence of demons. Aquinas was essentially speculating in the same way that chemists speculated about the gaps in the periodic table, or in the way that astronomers speculated about the existence of certain kinds of astronomical bodies.

Of course, we feel pretty confident in saying that those premises were all wrong, that any conclusions drawn from them are highly suspect to say the least, and that it was a serious mistake to ground entire sciences on the authority of a philosopher who died 1500 years prior. But no one in Aquinas' day could be expected to pull Cartesian method out of thin air.

Before anyone accuses me of trying to altogether exonerate Aquinas and the Church, let me make my judgment explicit:
1. I see no reason to think that Aquinas elaborated demonological theory in order to facilitate persecution, and I think it very likely that he, like most people in his time, had cultural reasons for thinking that his arguments were as much a scientific contribution as they were a religious one.
2. In adopting Aquinas' arguments, I think it likely that the Church believed itself to be adopting the most rational and well-grounded arguments presented; if they failed to settle on a better doctrine, it is in part because there were, at the time, no better competitors and in part because the intellectual environment of the time made it unlikely that anyone within the Church, no matter how intelligent, would see fit to criticize the premises from which Aquinas drew his conclusions.
3. The third -- and in terms of our conversation -- most important judgment regards how Aquinas' demonology was applied by the Church. This is also, I think, were the problem gets most complex, because the way that demonology was applied changes according to time, place, and the temperment of individuals acting on behalf of the Church. The problem isn't necessarily that the Church was directly responsible for the use to which Aquinas' demonology was put, but rather that the upper levels of the Church did so little to curb that use. That the Church failed to do so -- or even if its power had waned so much as to make action impractical, at least failed to really try -- is worthy of blame.

In the section I left off at currently, T-R is making a case for the return of judicial torture as the main enabler in the witch craze. I have not gone to far ahead into this section, but on the surface, this seems a bit odd to me. It would seem more plausible that the return to judicial torture would be a symptom rather than a cause.

The process would have to be rather dynamic, I suppose. In order for torture to establish a particular mythos, it would have to be applied by inquisitors who already suspected the existence of witch-craft. But without the confessions procured by judicial torture, it's not so certain that those suspicions would have spread to the population at large. And the highest pitch of frenzy was attained only when accused witches started implicating everyone around them, which was usually the result of torture. So judicial torture may not have provided the initial spark of the witch-crazes, but it seems reasonable to say that it was a fuel necessary to kindle that spark into a blaze.

All in all though, in the early part of the book, I do not see how the original assertion that brought this book up in the first place, that the witch hunts were borne of religious thought, is being discredited.

One of the problems in assessing the period is that the divisions between religious institutions and secular institutions are so difficult to distinguish from one another. There was no clear and final demarcation between a secular institution and a religious institution, a secular motive and a religious motivation.

For that reason, I think it's too simplistic to take events from this period as evidence that religion is solely responsible for certain medieval events. You can still look at these events and try to sort out the role of religion, but it's important to be aware that the relationship between religious and secular action and thought were much more complex and intertwined than they ostensibly are today.

My contention regarding the witch-crazes isn't that the Church was ultimately not responsible, but that religion itself doesn't account for the event. No doubt religion plays a part, but to leave it at that, to take that as the "moral" of the witch-crazes, so minimizes the complexities as to be almost irresponsible. And that's usually how the witch-crazes are invoked in this forum: as a very simple, supposedly unanswerable condemnation of religion.

That's one advantage, I'd say, to drawing a social and cultural distinction between secular and religious institutions - in practice, not just in theory. In a theodicy, it's very difficult to decide which policies are genuinely religious in nature, and which are political in nature. One of the things that we've seen in the meantime is that secular institutions are just as capable of persecuting on a large scale, and by methods that are substantially the same.

So I think that religion probably did play a substantive role in the witch-crazes, but I don't agree that religion was prima facie instrumental in the event. And I think that drawing a relatively sharp distinction between religious and secular institutions is beneficial, but not for the same reasons, and not necessarily to the same degree that you guys would posit. Nor do I think that separation is any guarantor against the sort of popular persecutions emblemized by the witch-crazes.

Whether or not the church of the middle ages dismissed witchcraft has no bearing (and I did find and print out the Canon Episcopi and do not see much in the three paragraphs to convince me that it was anything other than an attempt to replace pagan myth with Catholic myth).

It bears on our estimation of what forces contributed to the outbreak of witch hysteria. Why did the Church discourage witch-belief and persecution in one period, and encourage (or at least not discourage) it in another? If changes within the Church aren't sufficient to account for that change, then perhaps social and political pressures are.

One way to gain perspective on the Canon is to compare two strategies employed by the Church of the time. The strategy used by the Canon Episcopi is potentially alienating. It says, don't subscribe to these popular beliefs, and that forces a choice between Christianity and paganism, at a time when Christianity could just as easily have dwindled away to nothing. The other strategy is assimilation -- take a popular belief and show how it can be conformable, or at least not in flagrant contradiction, to Christian orthodoxy, thereby making it easier for people to join the Christian faith. So the Church could have written the Canon Episcopi to say, you can continue to believe in witches and witchcraft, and we have no problem with that so long as you reconcile that belief to Christian orthodoxy, like so.

The witch-crazes of the 16th and 17th centuries demonstrate what sort of situation assimilation might have facilitated. That they took the hard line against witch-belief may indicate a more humanitarian impulse.

The last thought I have without referring back to the book is in one passage, T-R seems to say something like: The basis of the witch texts (Malleus and other works) were simple crafted on the back of whatever confessions were obtained by the Inquisitors, but that true scripture and canon were 'revealed'. But I have to go back to my position that 'revealed' = 'made up' and say...well what is the difference really?

I don't think Trevor-Roper is trying to salvage the good name of scripture, if that's your concern. Rather, I think he's pointing to a distinction made by sixteenth century Europeans, and if that distinction really did figure into their decision-making, then it probably does make a significant difference.

One major difference is that the authority carried by the confessions was more on the level of judicial evidence than religious doctrine. The imperative to kill a witch may have been cited from "revealed" scripture, but the belief that there were witches in contemporary Europe, that they were in league with the Devil, and that they could be identified in this way or that -- those are all derived from what appeared to be facts available to judicial and scientific tests. One of the major arguments brought against witch-belief throughout the medieval period: the Bible does say that we should execute witches, but we've never seen a person we really believed to be a witch, and we don't expect to.