Johann Wier: Agli albori della critica razionale dell'occulto e del demoniaco nell'Europa del Cinquecento (review)

For some historians, Johann Wier (or Weyer) (1515–88) seems an enigma; his thought appears contradictory. This physician, whose claim that witch beliefs were simply the mental projections of deluded, sick, elderly women, has the reputation of being a rationalist. Yet in the same widely circulated book, De praestigiis daemonum (1563; last Latin edition 1583), where he presents this view, Wier's belief in a powerful devil, who does not require such agents as witches, is also clear.

Michaela Valente takes on and accounts for the two sides of Wier by placing him firmly in the intellectual, political, and spiritual context which formed him and of which he and his works were representative. She shows how his pleas against hunting witches were a function of his belief in demons, and thus how the two stances necessarily coexisted. Valente makes a statement in her premessa that provides the foundation for her book: the position of Wier was not confusing to his contemporaries. Valente's book recreates the world in which Wier lived and worked, a world that was consistent with his seeming inconsistency.

Valente makes frequent use of Stuart Clark's Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (1999), which treated witch beliefs as an integral part of the intellectual world that nurtured them. A sentence from Clark's book could be adduced to describe the orientation of Valente's work: "But the more important purpose will be to show that here, as elsewhere, their view of witchcraft was bound up with the wider intellectual interests of Europeans" (316). Her previous book, on Bodin in Italy, published the same year as Clark's (Bodin in Italia: la monomanie des sorciers e le vicende della sua traduzione, 1999), indi-cates that Valente was on the same track and was herself already thinking with demonologies.

After an introductory historiographical study, Valente's second chapter treats the importance of Wier's stay in France for his developing ideas. Particularly interesting here is Wier's medical/scientific education, an indication of the book's significance for the history of early modern science and medicine. Turning to the construction of De praestigiis through its various editions, Valente identifies and interweaves the medical, theological, and humanistic strains of Wier's thought. Chapter 4, "Tra magia e scienza: Galenismo e Paracelsismo," is an important essay on early modern science and humanism. Local political-confessional struggles are likewise a formative feature of Wier's environment; a dense description in this chapter of the circumstances and people he met in Clèves describes these influences upon him. Chapter 5 continues this intellectual biography, describing Wier's declining years and continuing opposition to witch trials.

In chapter 6, Valente analyzes the specific sources of Wier's ideas on demons, magic, and, therefore, witches. The latter first appeared only in the fourth edition of the De praestigiis (1568). Wier's ideas on demons and magicians (maghi) must be understood first because his attitude toward witches was a function of them. What creates Wier's distinctive view of witches and magicians, Valente here demonstrates, was not the obvious — his medical background — but rather his use of the philological tools of humanism.

Having established the subtlety and complexity of Wier's ideas on witches, Valente deals in chapter 7 with Erasmus's influence on his countryman. Unlike Wier's, Erasmus's views on magic and witchcraft were not developed systematically. Rather, they seemed to evolve from his general ironic attitude toward and aristocratic disdain for the subject. More relevant, then, were his attitudes on tolerance. It is here that Valente addresses the broader issue of toleration in the age of the Reformation.

The fate of Wier and De praestigiis at the hands of friends and foes forms the concluding chapter. Here Valente...