JONATHAN L. PEARL

This paper questions the influence of the French Humanist Jean Bodin on the witchcraft
crisis in sixteenth-century Western Europe.

Cet article s'interroge sur l'influence de l'humaniste français Jean Bodin sur la crise de
la sorcellerie dans l'Europe occidentale du 16^e siècle.

We are all familiar with the glories of the Renaissance -- the revival of classical arts
and letters which, combined with a dynamic urban culture, produced the art of
Boticelli, Da Vinci and Michelangelo, the essays of Machiavelli, Erasmus and
Montaigne, and the science of Copernicus. What is much less known is that the
Renaissance also included a revival of the occult 'Dark Arts' of antiquity. The
occult interests of many Renaissance intellectuals appeared in a period of recurrent
major epidemics, continual warfare, and bitter religious strife. The result was a
major development of learned fascination with magic, astrology, and witchcraft.
From the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, most educated Europeans
perceived witchcraft as a widespread reality that posed a genuine threat to society.
This threat had to be opposed by the full weight of religious and secular law. By the
early sixteenth century a veritable 'theology of witchcraft' had been developed by
lay and church scholars, and trials and executions for the crime of witchcraft had
become fairly commonplace.

Jean Bodin ( 1530-96 ) was one of the most important intellectuals in sixteenth-
century France, and has often been referred to as the greatest French legal
humanist of his age. He is known today primarily for his major works in politics
and in economic theory. In both these fields he is seen as a truly original thinker
and as one of the originators of modern approaches to their study. For his
contribution to the development of the science of politics and economics, and his
courageous support for a political settlement of the French religious wars that
would unite the nation behind Henry IV, Bodin has been held in high esteem as an
advanced thinker.¹

But the mentality of the late sixteenth century is not the mentality of today.
Bodin was not a twentieth-century man. In 1580, at the height of his career, Bodin
wrote a major study of demons and witches entitled De La Démonamie des
Sorciers, which translates as On the Demonic Madness of Witches.² The
Démonamie was Bodin's second most successful work and was certainly one of the

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