The Most Moderate of Radical Demonologists? The Amphibian Nature of Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie des sorciers

Abstract

Abstract: The ‘Démonomanie des sorciers’ by Jean Bodin is, along with the ‘Malleus maleficarum’, not only one of the most famous demonologies ever written but one of the most commercially successful. However, one aspect of its argumentation seems to have been overlooked by scholars so far: the paradoxical coexistence of the providentialist foundations of Bodin’s doctrine, typical of the moderate demonology of the Church Fathers, and the merciless brutality of the suggested judicial procedure for the extermination of witchcraft. In other words, the harsh repressive stance associated with Bodin’s book does not follow logically from the Augustinian basis of his anti-scholastic demonology. The key to understanding this inconsistency lies in Bodin’s non-confessional political theory, for which atheism (one of whose evergreen incarnations is witchcraft) should be seen as the most dreadful enemy of any state, regardless of its Christian or non-Christian origins.