Daimonologia: or, a treatise of spirits. Wherein several places of Scripture are expounded, ... By Comte du Lude

FIRST EDITION, [2], v-vii, [1], x, 9-182, [1]pp, floriated woodcut initial, woodcut head-and-tail pieces, London, printed for the author, 1723

[BOUND WITH]

The Ax Laid to the Root of Popery: Or, A Strong Preservative Against the Romish Missionaries…

FIRST EDITION, [2], xi, [1], 13-72pp., floriated woodcut initials, woodcut head-and-tail pieces, occasional foxing, ink splatter to final leaf, 4to (190 x115mm), London, printed for T. Bickerton, at the Crown in Pater-Noster-Row,1721

Written by Anglican cleric Jacques de Daillon, Daimonologia was written in response to the witchcraft debate between Francis Hutchinson and Richard Boulton. Boulton’s Complete History of Magick (1715-16) was one of the last treatises to be published in England in favour of the persecution of witches. This ignited a powerful refutation by Francis Hutchinson in his 1718 Historical Essay. Hutchinson attacked the witchcraft trials for their acceptance of evidence from small children, people suffering from delusions, and how these trials typically turned into a political circus. Boulton “returned to the charge in 1722, in The Possibility and Reality of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft” (Kittredge, Notes on Witchcraft, 207).

In Daimonologia, Daillon responded to Boulton and defended Hutchinson, viewing Boulton’s efforts as reprehensible. He also provides commentary on the state of the witchcraft debate in the early eighteenth century, stating “the dispute concerning Witches and Apparitions seems not to be at an End.” It is both ironic and significant that the last texts in English devoted to disproving witchcraft, Hutchinson’s Historical Essay and Daillon’s Daimonologia, were published only a few years before 1736 when the last of the Witchcraft Acts was repealed. By the 1730s, educated opinion was firmly set against the concept of supernatural powers and there was a gap in serious writing on the subject from then until the turn of the century.

[ESTC T71987; Bennett, Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural, 1987]