Witchcraft, Demonology and the Inquisition
The Rare Book
Library, University of Sydney, contains a significant collection of works
on witchcraft, demonology, exorcism and the occult. Here also may be found
related works on canon and civil law, reports of trials, the Inquisition,
torture, prophecy and alchemy, and more modern texts on occult practices
by writers such as A. E. Waite and Aleister Crowley.
The collection
focuses on European, British and American witchcraft, looking at its theological
and heretical aspects rather than at the level of folklore or anthropology.
Here may be found many early texts from the 16th and 17th centuries, the
period when the theories of the heretical aspects of witchcraft were being
formulated. Among these are four editions of one of the more sinister works
on demonology, the Malleus Maleficarum, a book that codified church dogma
on heresy for centuries.
The Rare Book
Library also contains many of the other defining texts of the early discussions
on demonology and the occult. These include such works as Jean Bodin's De
La Demonmanie des sorciers (1586), Peter Binsfeld’s Tractatus de confessoribus
maleficorum, (1605), Martin Del Rio’s Disquisitionarum magicarum (1679),
and Johannes Nider’s Formicarius.
Equally significant
are the works of theologians who opposed the Inquisition and the witch trials,
such as those of Balthasar Bekker and Laurent Bordelon. In England this
point of view was to be supported and developed by men such as Reginald
Scot, John Wagstaffe and John Webster.
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