[WITCHCRAFT SAMMELBAND - JOHANN WEYER]

CHRISTIAN WURSTISEN, ABRAHAM SAUR, JOHANNES WIER

A sammelband containing two significant works on witchcraft published by Nicolaus Basse during the height of the witch-hunts. A sammelband containing two significant works on witchcraft published by Nicolaus Basse during the height of the witch-hunts.

[SAUR, ABRAHAM]. Theatrum De Veneficis, Das ist: Von Teuffelsgespenst Zauberern und Gifftbereitern, Schwartzkuenstlern, Hexen und Unholden, vieler fuernemmen Historien und Exempel, bewahrten, glaubwirdigen, Alten und Newen Scribenten, was von solchen… disputiert und gehelten worden, mit sondern fließ… an Tag geben. 

FIRST EDITION, [14] , 396 (406), [10], printed in gothic black, half title, title in red and black, ownership inscription to title head with coat of arms stamp, woodcut vignette and woodcut printer’s device at end, contemporary rich blind embossed pigskin over chamfered wooden boards, slightly stained, slightly scraped, without the clasps, folio, (316 x 200mm), Frankfurt, Nicolaus Basse, 1586.

FIRST EDITION OF AN EXTENSIVE WORK WITH CRITICAL AND DIVERSE EXPLANATIONS ON MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, SUPERSTITION, EXORCISM AND WITCH HUNTS.

The First Edition of the Theatrum de Veneficis (Theatre of the Witches”), edited by Marbung attorney Abraham Saur, is an important compendium of demonological tracts which represented a wide variety of early modern views on witchcraft.

The editor, Abraham Saur, was born in Frankenberg in Hesse on 12 February, 1545. Presumably encouraged by Professor Hermann Lersner, who he was close to, he studied law first in Witternberg in 1565, then in Marbung. Saur was a prolific and skilful writer, producing numerous legal handbooks which he compiled for his own use, to teach others and published on request. These were well received, many being printed several times after Saur’s death.

Saur’s Theatrum de Veneficis was compiled in Frankfurt in 1586 when the witch hunt craze was in full swing. Despite Saur’s own belief that it is the God-given duty of the magistrates to eradicate the practise of witchcraft and to punish its practitioners, Theatrum de Veneficis covered the whole spectrum of reactions to the witch phenomenon. This includes Johann Weyer’s sceptical preface about witchcraft, where he considers the idea of diabolic illusion, and how melancholy women were particularly prone to fall into delusions about the Devil. Later he would conclude that most of those accused of witchcraft were innocent.

Saur also included severe condemnation as championed by the Genevan pastor Lambert Daneau in Dialogus de veneficis, 1564, and pastor Jacob Vallick in Von Zauberern Hexen und Unholden. Even with the important role the Catholic church played in the evolution of demonologies, the onset of the Reformation did not significantly change the witch debate. Martin Luther’s convictions and teachings about the reality of evil in the form of Satan, and his demons, formed the basis of Protestant demonology. In Von Zauberey Teuffelsgespenst Und Hexerey Campsionibus und Wechselkindern he specifically and vigorously condemned the witches’ apostasy as the most serious crime against God and the Christian faith.

Writers who doubted the witches ability to commit the acts with which they had been charged are also represented. This conviction was expressed by Hermann Witekind in Bedencken von Zauberey woher und wie vielfaltig sie sey, 1585. Witekind was sceptical about the reality of flight and was fascinated by how an individual could come to confess things which could not be taken as literally true. Despite his doubt, Witekind’s tract contains a lengthy passage on flight, much of which was later pillaged by Faust. He also doubted whether intercourse with the Devil really happened, while insisting that the pact with the Devil itself could be real.

Ulrich Molitor, a jurist from Constance, wrote a tract in opposition to the Malleus Maleficarum. Molitor argued against the reality of demonic power attributed to women, calling them an illusion. According to Molitor in Von Hexen und Unholden, it was only by permission of God that witches were able to make weather, inflict illness or impotence, fly to the Sabbath, etc., as only God could bestow whatever power Satan falsely claimed as his own.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the ordeal by water was widely discussed among demonologists, specifically jurists and physicians. Both sides of the debate about the efficacy of the trial by water for the purpose of identifying witches are represented. In 1583, Wilhelm Adolph Schreiber (Scribonius) published De examine et purgatione sagarum per aquam frigidam epistola, which certified the procedure as legally and theologically sound. A forceful rejection of Scribonius’ thesis was advanced by Herman Neuwalt, professor of medicine at the University of Helmstedt, in his Exegesispurgationis sive examinis sagarum super aquam frigidam – the first tract devoted exclusively to the question of efficacy of trial by water..

Among the authors are Heinrich Bullinger, Ludwig Lavater, Konrad Lautenbach, Reinhard Lutz, Adrian Rheynmann, Leonhard Thurneysser, Johannes Trithemius and many more.

The tracts collected here are often appended with trial records, as witchcraft raised questions of belief. The tales of witches’ doings were never the creation of the demonologists alone, and information about what witches confessed to constantly fed back into the works of demonology, enlarged and exaggerated by their interrogators. These trials were attached to tracts for two reasons; firstly, to set up the pamphlet as a dialogue between theory and evidence. At the same time the vividness of the confession added greatly to the treatises readability. This was a tried and true formula, long exploited by writers, who peddled their learned works with the stories of the horrors of individual witches.

[VD16S 1938. Coumont T17,1. Hayn-Gotendorf III, 242., Witch Craze Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, Roper, 2004, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, 2013]

[BOUND WITH] 

WIER, JOHANNES [JOHANN WEYER]. De lamiis. Das ist: Von Teuffelgespent Zauberern und Gifftbereytern, kurtzer doch gruendtlicher Bericht, was fuer Unterscheidet unter den Hexen ud Unholden, und den Gifftbereytern, im staffen zuhalten… in unsere gemeine Teutsche Sprach gebracht, Durch Henricum Petrum, Rebenstock, von Giessen.

Third edition, First Basse Edition, [12], 1-90, [8], title in red and black, printed in German Gothic type, wood cut vignette and printers device, old vellum tag pasted to title, ownership inscription to title head, ownership coat of arms stamped to title tail,woodcut initials and headpieces, Frankfurt, Nicklaus Basse, 1586.

Johann Weyer, a respected Lutheran physician at the court of William III, was one of the first to protest against the persecution of witches. After studying at the University of Paris, Weyer apprenticed under Agrippa of Nettesheim from 1530 to 1534. The poetic, mysterious and liberal-minded Agrippa was also an outspoken critic of witch persecution.

Weyer’s De Lamiis, first printed in 1577, reiterated the primary arguments of his most famous work, De praestigis daemonum, (1563). In both these works Weyer mounts an unwavering attack on witch persecution, in a time when witch trials and executions were just beginning to be common. Weyer sought to derogate the law concerning witchcraft prosecution, using two forms of thinking. He argued that those accused of practising witchcraft were mentally ill – suffering from “melancholia” – and the confessions they made were actually delusions of the mind. He bolstered this attack on realist demonology with medical authorities as well as his own clinical experience as a practising physician. Secondly, Weyer challenged demonologists on a legal terrain, attacking the prosecution’s reliance on a confession, the point where demonology’s theoretical and practical endeavours converged.

Weyer has become a symbol of courage and lucidity in the face of intolerance and ignorance, but he was not quite as radical as it would seem. Despite Weyer’s appeal for a greater tolerance towards alleged witches, he also wants greater severity towards male magicians, who Weyer perceived as actual practitioners of natural or demonic magic. It has been suggested that in its very conception, this work is an ideological attack on Catholic idolatry and superstition, rather than a radical stand against the cruel persecution of witches.

Weyer’s appeal for clemency for those accused of the crime of witchcraft was met with disapproving or approving books published all over Europe. De Lamiis was Weyer’s way to double-down on his convictions after evoking the counterblast of two intellectually outstanding writers. Not only was he opposed by his fellow Lutheran Erasmus, but also Jean Bodin, a man who had just acquired a European reputation for his political masterpiece, Republique (1576). The simple astonishment of Erasmus and Bodin that Weyer should actually repeat in his De Lamiis the argument of the De Praestigiis is indicative of a genuine shock. Until an implicitly or explicitly non-Christian stance would be taken up to combat witch burning, the only effective liberal course – apart from practical intervention – was silence.

Yet Johann Weyer shaped opposition to witch hunting for generations. Demonologists who wrote after him took care to demolish his arguments, and Bodin’s famous Demonomanie de sorciers includes a lengthy rebuttal of De praestigiis. Yet as they engaged with Weyer’s ideas, their own thought was shaped by his.

De Lamiis was first printed in 1577 in the Officina Oporiniana in Basel and reprinted in 1582. This edition is the first printed in Frankfurt by Basse, a major publisher of works on witchcraft. In 1580 he had the Malleus Maleficarum republished, and his edition of De praestigiis daemonum was the last German language edition to be published during Weyer’s lifetime.

[VD16 W 2654; The Damned Art, Baxter, 1977; Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France, Krause, 2015;]

[BOUND WITH]

WURSTISEN, CHRISTIAN. Baszler Chronick, Darinn alles, was sich in Oberen Teutschen Landen, nicht in der Statt und Bistumbe Basel, von jhrem Ursprung her, nach Ordnung der Zeiten, in Kirchen und Welt händlen, biß in das gegenwitige M.D.LXXX Jar gedenckwirdigs zugetragen…, 

FIRST EDITION, [18], DCLXV,[1], Printed in German Gothic script, wood cut title in red and black, with wide wood cut border by Tobias Stimmer, coat of arms woodcut on back of title, woodcut printers device at the end, many text woodcuts of portraits, coats of arms, maps and vignettes, the view of Basel and 2 sheets M 4 and BB 5 are missing, title with backed edge tear at the top (minimal into the border), ms. Monogram “EB”, dated “1689” and coat of arms stamp, small marginal repairs to approx 15 leaves, Basel, [Sebastian]Henricpetri, [1580]

First edition of the most famous work of mathematician and historian Christian Wurtisen (1544 – 1588). Compiled over the course of a decade, this is the first truly comprehensive chronicle of Basel. The work also contains the history of the diocese up to 1580. The text illustrations include depictions of historical events, coat of arms and portraits of the city-based nobility, coins, a siege machine and a comet course. Wurstisen named the heraldic tinctures after the initials of the given colours for the first time.

[Adams W-261; BM STC German p.928; Barth 19681; Heckethorn 160, 8; Hieronymus 78c; Lonchamp 3314; Weber 112.]