Hazards of the Dark Arts: Advice for Medieval Princes on Witchcraft and Magic trans. ed. by Richard Kieckhefer (review)

This edition of two treatises from the second half of the fifteenth century, expertly translated by Richard Kieckhefer, is a very welcome addition to the burgeoning primary source literature on early modern witch-belief intended for classroom use. As Kieckhefer stresses in his introduction, at some level witch prosecution always required the cooperation of secular authorities— even if that was only to execute those convicted of the crime in ecclesiastical courts. Yet not all rulers were prepared to help root out the threat that some theologians, inquisitors, and prosecutors argued was ubiquitous. Some viewed the new, diabolized conception of witchcraft sceptically; others tolerated—even courted—the services of magicians and practitioners of occult arts. The two texts Kieckhefer presents here, both written by laymen, were intended to persuade specific rulers of the dangers posed by witchcraft, and to convince them to cooperate in the prosecution of offenders. As such, they shed useful light on the processes through which later medieval discourses around magic, superstition, and witchcraft were reshaped into the insipid and deadly confluence of beliefs that came to underlie the excesses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The earlier of the treatises is Johannes Hartlieb’s 1456 The Book of All Forbidden Arts (Das Buch aller verbotenen Künste), extant in three manuscripts. Written for Margrave Johann of Brandenberg-Kulmback, known as “the Alchemist,” it is an analysis of the seven occult arts—nigramancy, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, and spatulamancy— supplemented by examples of their operation. Hartlieb is fairly conventional in his assessment of the dangers of these “superstitions and phantoms of the Devil” (22). As he argues, while the Devil is always constrained in his power by God, as a created spirit his nature allows him to use his preternatural abilities to deceive practitioners into believing their efforts to discern hidden things were successful, thereby winning adherents and securing ever greater devotion. For Hartlieb, it was this connection between superstition and demonism that rendered these forms of divination offences so abhorrent, causing him to call upon the margrave to campaign against superstition across the Germanic lands and to exterminate sorcery (66).

But while his appraisal of the Devil and his connection to magic is conventional, as Kieckhefer argues, Hartlieb’s attitude towards the occult in general is more tricky, for earlier in his career he seems to have written works on various forms of divination, including lunar astrology, geomancy, and chiromancy—or at least, there are works on these subjects attributed to him. Indeed, despite the warnings to the margrave and members of his court to shun the forbidden arts, it is clear that Hartlieb had not always practiced what he came to counsel. Indeed, he seems to have had more than a passing familiarity with necromantic texts, for instance, for he is able to discuss aspects of the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Liber Raziell, the Book of the Holy Three Kings, and the Picatrix. He also admits that, at various times, he had sought out practitioners, asking them to share the secrets of their art—although when he told a woman arrested for sorcery in Göttsheim in 1446 that he would do everything she taught him, he was careful to point out that he would only do that which did not involve acting against the faith (40). All of this suggests that, as Kieckhefer argues, Hartlieb’s background gave him much in common with the margrave. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Hartlieb encouraged the margrave to share the text widely with his friends so that such superstitions might be renounced, there is no evidence that he heeded the author’s plea.

The second of the treatises in this collection is Ulrich Molitoris’s...