Project MUSE - Under the Devil’s Spell: Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy</i (original) (raw)

This is a useful, although ultimately curious, book. The early modern heartland of witchcraft and witch-hunting lay, of course, north of the Alps, and studies of northern Europe tend to dominate the historiography. Experts typically know that southern Europe presents something of a different magical world. While many general beliefs about magic and witchcraft held sway in the south as well as in the north, southern Europe offers notable variations: less outright witchcraft, for example, and more love magic. Institutionally, the highly bureaucratic Roman, Spanish, and Venetian Inquisitions all worked to restrict the sort of major witch hunts that were possible (although far from universal) in the north. Yet northern Europe, and particularly the German heartland of witch-hunting, is still too often presented as the early modern norm; other regions then assume the role of more or less interesting variants. All this is to say that a monograph focusing exclusively on magic [End Page 104] and witchcraft in Italy, and available in English (into which far too little Italian language scholarship has been translated), is very welcome indeed.

Beyond the fact that it fills a notable need, this book offers both broad coverage and a well-chosen archival base of sources. As a further service to Anglophone readers, extensive portions of these records are translated in a long appendix. There are even twenty pages of illustrations. The problem, however, is precisely that the book tries to do so many things, and to do them all in under two hundred pages. In fact, excluding the illustrations and appendix of source translations, the book is comprised of only an introduction and two chapters totaling a mere seventy-five pages. In this, Duni undertakes to survey all magical practices, from learned necromancy to witchcraft to common healing and love magic, for the entire period from the mid-fourteenth century through the end of the sixteenth. Drawing mainly on inquisitorial sources, he also feels the need to provide background on the ideology and operations of inquisitions throughout late medieval and early modern Europe. This means tremendous ground has to be covered in what amounts to a long essay.

In his introduction, Duni sketches his goals for the book. The most basic is to examine magic and witchcraft in northern Italy throughout the Renaissance, which he defines as the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. In this period, he notes, magical practices were implicated in many areas of life—they were in no way marginal (although some magical practitioners could be social marginal persons). He also makes a bit of a case for Italian exceptionalism, stating that northern Italy was the most “economically, politically, and especially culturally” advanced region in Europe at this time (p. 5). While this assertion might draw certain objections from experts in other regions, the line seems mainly intended to startle general readers: “my goodness, even in the advanced and enlightened Renaissance Florentines and Venetians believed in witches.” Experts, of course, have long understood this basic fact, and the tone here is a good indication of Duni’s intended audience. He follows this line with a more problematic generalization, stating that another reason for focusing on magic in Italy is that “atypical[ly] when compared to the majority of other European countries, the Italian states also provide a case in point to show how repressive institutions and their policies could be far from monolithic” (p. 5). Again, no expert would be shocked that the Roman Inquisition approached witchcraft with “unexpected caution and restraint, which prevented the outbreak of large-scale witch-hunts on the northern European model” (p. 6). Experts might well object, however, to the implication that the Parlement of Paris, for example, or English circuit courts were not equally restrained, or even that there was some “monolithic” character [End Page 105] to the myriad of courts that handled witchcraft cases—some with great restraint and some...