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Another source, the pictorial record, is also important, but it has only recently begun to be
studied.19 Like court records, pictorial representations
require highly specialized techniques of assessment. The third kind of record, however, the
extremely large literature of demonology and witchcraft, is indeed worth considering, whether in
conjunction with the other two kinds of sources or not.

From the work of Eymeric and Nider, and largely because of the interest of different kinds of
readers and the impact of printing and the circulation of books, the literature of demonology and
witchcraft was generally Europe-wide. Eymeric's encyclopedic handbook for inquisitors was the
most widely used text of its kind until the early seventeenth century. Nider's Formicarius,
which dealt with many things besides witchcraft, was written at the Council of Basel in 1435,
and its ideas circulated back and forth across Europe during the next century. The work of Spina,
too, was often reprinted through the sixteenth century. The Malleus Maleficarum did not
exert its greatest influence until after the mid-sixteenth century, but it, too, became an essential
part of the basic literature.
 
Thus, the first relatively abundant literature of demonology and witchcraft preceded the age of
persecutions in the late sixteenth century. Its ideas remained active, however, not only in
reprintings and new editions of individual works of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and
in the circulation of printed editions of classical literature, including the work of Apuleius,
Lucan, and Horace, but in the specialized works written for confessors and preachers, in dramatic
representations that used the themes of magic and witchcraft from Bale to Shakespeare and
Jonson, in the lively and revolutionary scriptural exegesis that was part of the great Reformation
debate of the sixteenth century, especially in commentaries on the Ten Commandments, and in
manuals for episcopal visitations.20 But from the
mid-sixteenth century, a second period of theorizing--either asserting or attacking the theory or
actual prosecutions themselves--also appeared. The new edition of Eymeric in 1578 is one such
example. The work of Bernard of Como was reprinted in 1584. The most dramatic and
controversial work, Jean Bodin's De la démonomanie des sorciers, appeared in 1580,
partly in response to sceptical approaches to particular instances of prosecution for witchcraft,
notably that written by Johann Weyer in
1563, the De praestigiis daemonum.21  Weyer
had worked with Agrippa von Nettesheim at Bonn in the 1530s and seems to have
absorbed some of his master's scepticism in the process.  Serving as court physician to the Duke
of Jülich-Berg and Cleves in the 1550s and 60s, Weyer explained away confessions of witchcraft
to the pathology of female senility, denied the existence of pact, and argued that there was no
such thing as bewitchment. Wicked magicians, however, were quite another matter for Weyer,
and he condemned them as roundly as any writer on witchcraft had condemned witches. Both
Weyer's exoneration of accused witches--and the entire theory of witchcraft as it had developed
since the early fifteenth century--and his curious and inconsistent condemnation of magicians
attracted the attention of the defenders of the doctrine, such as Jean Bodin.22

The work of Bodin was followed by the "classics" of demonological and witchcraft theory, the
works of the Lorraine judge Nicholas Remy in 1595, and those of Henri Boguet (1602),
Martin Del Rio (1608), and Pierre de Lancre (1612) in the two decades following. The
authors of the classic demonological literature were usually either secular or ecclesiastical jurists
and theologians, but physicians and natural philosophers also contributed substantially to it. An
awareness of the professional interests of the authors of these works, as well as the relation of
particular works to particular instances of prosecution, is necessary for an assessment of their
importance.
 
The case of England is an interesting example. One of the earliest specific treatises is that of
Francis Coxe, A short treatise declaringe the detestable wickednesse of magicall sciences, as
necromancie, conjurations of spirites, curiouse astrologie and such lyke, of 1561. The next
major works were that of the sceptic Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of
Witchcraft, in 1584 and that of Henry Holland in 1590.23 In the wake of the first group of trials at the end of the
sixteenth century, George Gifford published two works in 1587 and 1593.24 Gifford's work was followed by those of King James VI
of Scotland in 1597, William Perkins in 1608, John Cotta in 1616, and Richard Bernard in 1627.
After a relatively late start, one Scottish king who later became king of England and a number of
Scottish and English clerics had come to make a substantial contribution to the literature of
witchcraft by the early seventeenth century. Some, like Scot, used continental literature heavily,
but from the work of Gifford, evidence from English trials was used as well.25
 
-notes-

19There is a brief bibliography in Muchembled,
Magie et sorcellerie en Europe, 322, a richly illustrated book, but one in which the
illustrations are rather decorations than constituent elements of the intellectual presentation,
perhaps the most common failing of the use of illustrations in books on this topic, as in
Hans-Jürgen Wolf, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse.  Holocaust und Massenpsychose
vom 16.-18. Jahrhundert (Erlensee, 1995). See the astute remarks of Clark, Thinking
with Demons, 11-30, and the fine study of Dale Hoak, "Art, Culture, and Mentality in
Renaissance Society: The Meaning of Hans Baldung Grien's Bewitched Groom (1544),"
Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985), 488-510, and Jane P. Davidson, The Witch in
Northern European Art, 1470-1750 (Freven, 1987). Brian P. Levack, Articles on
Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, Vol. XII, Witchcraft and Demonology in Art and
Literature (New York-London, 1992), reprints Hoak's essay and a number of other useful
studies. Exhibition catalogues can also be very helpful. See, e.g., Hexen und
Hexenverfolgung im deutschen Südwesten, Sönke Lorenz, ed., 2 vols. (Karlsruhe,
1994).

20A particularly important essay is the study by John
Bossy, "Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments," in Conscience and
Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Edmund Leites, ed. (Cambridge, 1988), 214-234. See
also Dieter Harmening, "Magiciennes et sorcières: la mutation du concept de magie à la fin du
Moyen Age," Heresis 13/14 (1989), 421-445. See Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils,
and Doctors in the Renaissance: "De praetiis daemonum," J. Shea, trans., George Mora, ed.
(Binghamton, 1991).
 
21See Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors
in the Renaissance: "De praetiis daemonum," J. Shea, trans., George Mora, ed. (Binghamton,
1991).

22There are important essays in Vom Unfug des
Hexen-Prozess. Gegner der Hexenverfolgungen von Johann Weyer bis Friedrich Spee,
Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Ulbricht, eds. (Wiesbaden, 1992).
 
23Scot, ed. B. Nicholson (London, 1886; rept. 1973).
See Sidney Anglo, "Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft," The Damned Art,
106-139, and Robert H. West, Reginald Scot and Renaissance Writings on Witchcraft,
Twayne's English Authors Series, Arthur F. Kinney, ed. (Boston, 1984).
 
24Alan Macfarlane, "A Tudor Anthropologist: George
Gifford's Discourse and Dialogue," The Damned Art, 140-155.

25Besides the general discussion in Clark, Thinking
with Demons, Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness contains the best discussion of the
English tracts and pamphlets.