Philosophy and Witchcraft: A Renaissance Dialogue

• In Event: Identifying Renaissance Philosophy

Abstract

The theoretical foundations of early modern European witchcraft and demonology were gradually abandoned as obscurantist and unphilosophical during the 1700s. In Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), Keith Thomas called witchcraft “a topic most historians [still] regard as peripheral, not to say bizarre.” Since then, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have considered witchcraft seriously. Peter Elmer recently traced a similarly expanding interest in relations between witchcraft and natural philosophy, from Frances Yates and Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1960s through Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997). But the characteristic dependence on Scholastic philosophy in early modern defenses of witchcraft, which motivated Enlightenment scorn, is still neglected or superficially analyzed. Yet Ficino, the two Picos, Pomponazzi, Steuco, Cardano, and other philosophers engaged seriously with Scholastic reasoning about witchcraft. I will analyze several passages on Aristotle in Aquinas’s works which became crucial to such philosophers’ dialogue with theorists of witchcraft.

Author

• Walter Stephens, Johns Hopkins University