The Demonology of William of Auvergne: By Fire and Sword (review)

William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 until 1249, is one of the major figures in the medieval history of learned magic and demonology. In many later writings on these topics from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, one finds his name cited as often as, if not more often than, that of his great slightly later contemporary Thomas Aquinas. Yet while scholarship on Thomas and this thought fills bookshelves, the bibliography on William is dramatically thinner. As de Mayo notes, the standard biography of William remains Noël Valois's Guillaume d'Auvergne, Évêque de Paris (1228–1249): Sa vie et ses ouvrages, published in 1880. He receives thirty-five pages in Lynn Thorndike's encyclopedic History of Magic and Experimental Science (volume two, 1923), but de Mayo's book is the first to provide a monographic study of his magical and demonological thought.

The main argument of this book is that William appeared at a critical moment in the development of elite, learned (primarily university educated) thought on magic and the powers of demons. Ever since the early church fathers, Christian authorities had proclaimed that most magic operated by virtue of demonic power. All pagan religious rites were denounced as demonic ceremonies (since all supposed pagan deities were actually demons in disguise) and were therefore condemned as magical and idolatrous. By the thirteenth century, however, Western European intellectuals confronted a new stream of knowledge, transmitted via Arabic science and grounded in classical authorities. In particular, Arabic sources brought much more highly developed Aristotelian natural philosophical systems into Europe. They also brought extremely controversial systems of learned magic, some of it explicitly demonic but grounded in more Neoplatonic notions of potentially neutral or even benevolent spirits. The question facing Western Christian intellectual authorities was how much of these new systems to accept, and how completely to allow them to override older conceptions and condemnations of magic.

William was the first intellectual to address these questions in a comprehensive and systematic fashion, mainly in his works De legibus and De universo. Analyzing the demonological material in these treatises, de Mayo concludes that William staunchly rejected any quasi-Neoplatonic conception of demonic spirits as something other than fallen Christian angels, fully corrupted and entirely hostile to humankind. He did, however, work to situate demons in a more stringently understood Aristotelian natural universe. That world operated, for the most part, according to natural laws established by God. Most of these operations were apparent, but some were occult, and those who knew how to manipulate occult forces could perform essentially natural magic. Demons too could operate in this way, for they were also strictly bound by natural law, which only God could supersede through miracle. Thus William helped to establish the basic intellectual framework for conceptualizing magic—natural, demonic, and the frustrating overlap between these categories—that endured for the rest of the medieval and early modern era until the basic Aristotelian system of natural philosophy was overturned centuries later. In broad outline, this is not a new story, but it is extremely useful to have fuller and more focused attention paid to William's part in it.

That said, it is a shame that this book could not have been more fully developed than it is. This is a dissertation moved with great haste into print. The imperatives for a young scholar to get a book out, in any form, are obvious, and there is no denying the solid quality of the dissertation that became this book. There is also no denying its obvious shortcomings. Foremost among these is that de Mayo spends an inordinate amount of time proving that he has mastered the background and context of William's thought. Obviously this is necessary to some degree, but here we spend the first three chapters moving through historiographically driven accounts of, first, France and the royal court in Paris at William's time, then a summary of medieval...