The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France 1560–1620 by Jonathan L. Pearl (review)

346 letters in canada 1999 to serve the ends of reform. While some confraternities did indeed cooperate , local and lay resistance in many places had the effect that the Borromean program itself became absorbed into pre-existing traditions. The essays are bracketed by contributions from Christopher Black and Konrad Eisenbichler. Black, whose influence is evident throughout the volume, reviews the course of confraternity studies from their origin. Eisenbichler concludes the volume with an account of the suppression of Tuscan confraternities in the eighteenth century. He highlights not only the immediate factors leading to the suppression such as Jansenist theology, Enlightenment ideas, and royalist efforts to rationalize society, but the tradition of government closures of Florentine confraternities dating to the early quattrocento as well. Thus, the suppression, while unique in its result, stood in a long tradition of political struggle over the place of confraternities in Early Modern Italian life. This volume will prove a welcome and valuable resource for both professional scholars and students. (PAUL V. MURPHY) Jonathan L. Pearl. The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France 1560B1620 Wilfrid Laurier University Press. viii, 182. $39.95 The goal of Jonathan Pearl's new and interesting book is to place French demonology of the sixteenth century in its political, religious, and intellectual context. Most historians who have dealt with the topic in the past, he argues, have repeated a number of wrong assumptions. Pearl pays his attention to three crucial views that need to be corrected. First, French demonology was not the creation of an intellectual elite of the country imposing its views on the masses as part of an acculturation campaign. This view, familiar mostly from the early writings of French historian Robert Muchembled, has been questioned in recent years by a number of historians, and Pearl joins them in showing its limitations and in demonstrating that the pressure to prosecute came, more often than not, from the people themselves, and was resisted by the high courts (the Parlements). Pearl also reminds us that there was no such a thing as a monolithic elite in early modern France. Judges and theologians belonged to different elites, argued against each other, and often disagreed. And even among the theologians, only a small zealous Catholic group was dedicated to the pursuit of witches. Many of the demonological writings, he shows convincingly, were in fact written against the leniency and scepticism of the courts. Pearl then goes on to argue, based on the research of Alfred Soman and others, that the French judiciary of the sixteenth century was very far from being obsessed with witches and witch hunting. It refused to regard witch- humanities 347 craft as a great danger to France, insisted on traditional legal standards and careful evaluation of evidence, and was extremely cautious in its approach to witchcraft accusations. As a result of the courts' moderation, France did not witness mass persecution and execution of witches. Last but not least, analysing contemporary demonological writings, Pearl argues that demonological French literature should be read within the unique politico-religious contexts of the religious wars that devastated the country in the second half of the sixteenth century. It was written by an identifiable groups of theologians, most of them Jesuits or students of the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Maldonado, or Jean Maldonat, who taught in the Jesuit college in Paris from 1565. Maldonat lectured on demons in 1571B72, and was the first to popularize the crucial association of demons with heresy in general, and Protestantism in particular. Among his students were Martin del Rio, Louis Richeome, Pierre de Linacre, and maybe Florimond de Raemond and Jean Boucher, who were to become, in the following years, the most militant French demonologists and Leaguers. This last connection, namely the affinity between militant demonology and militant anti-Protestant and anti-royalist politics, is at the very core of Pearl's revision. `French demonology,' he states, `was, to a large extent, propaganda in the conflicts of the era, designed to convert or neutralize the enemies of the cause of Tridentine Catholicism. ``Pure demonology,'' so to speak, hardly existed in France.' This characteristic sets French demonology apart from its European parallels. The French discourse of witchcraft...