Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2003: Peter Corbin

Armando Maggi. 2001. Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. 260 pp. ISBN 0-226-50132-9. Ł26.50.

The study of witchcraft and demonology has proved to be a fruitful field for research in recent years, generating a variety of approaches, some of which appear to have been agenda-driven, thus revealing rather more about modern critical presuppositions than early modern beliefs in, and responses to, Satan's intervention in human affairs. For example, researchers have sought to account for witch-hunting and witch-belief in terms of the breakdown of social and religious structures under the pressure of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; as a consequence of changing class structures and social formations; as evidence of general psychological crisis; or as a manifestation of deep and fearful male misogyny. Perhaps the most persuasive work has come from such scholars as Robin Briggs (Witches and Neighbours, 1996) and James Sharpe (Instruments of Darkness, 1996 and The Bewitching of Anne Gunter, 1999) in which demonology and witchcraft are firmly placed and explored within a closely observed and detailed social environment. Even here, however, the 'rationale' and the objectives of those who organized trials and exorcisms remain obscure. We have only limited insight into what the participants thought they were about, whilst the testimony of those accused of consorting with the devil is distorted by the psychological and physical pressures under which they suffered.
Armando Maggi's complex and densely argued study takes the reader beneath the surface of trial and testimony to explore and investigate a group of five Continental Roman Catholic texts which attempt to provide a coherent intellectual theological basis to support and articulate the Church's beliefs about, and strategies to combat, Satan's programme to destroy God's creation. Most readers will be unfamiliar with Maggi's chosen texts and may ask how representative they are of early modern theological discourse on demonology, how widely they were disseminated, and how influential they were on the belief and practice of the time; it is a weakness that such issues are not fully addressed.
The first of Maggi's texts is De strigimagarum daemon daemonumque mirandis published in Rome in 1521 by Sylvester Prierio, a Lombardy inquisitor and a papal champion against Luther. At the centre of Prierio's thesis is an attempt to analyze the linguistic and rhetorical strategies which the devil uses to devour men's bodies and souls. The devil's language, a destructive silence, a language of non-statement and chaos over and against God's language of creation, can infect human beings through the influence of his servants, witches, sodomites and Jews.
A focus on language and a savage anti-semitism also characterizes Manuel do Valle de Moura's De incantantionibus seu ensalmis of 1620. De Moura's obsessive and convoluted linguistic analysis of the ritual language and gesture within which the devil's rhetoric may be hidden demands the dissection of the smallest units of discourse. Since only the Catholic Church embodies the power to authenticate any linguistic expression, the prayers and ceremonies of Jews, witches, Waldenses and sodomites are evidence of their support of Satan's perversion. De Moura chillingly concludes that the only way in which the Church can erase Satan's destructive utterance is to erase those who speak his language; again the Jews are the author's principal target.
Girolamo Menghi and Valerio Polidori's compilation, Thesaurus exorcisimorum of 1608, is a vade mecum for those charged with combating the work of the devil and as such offers an authoritative summary of Catholic exorcism techniques. Once again the emphasis is on language since, as in a witch trial, the aim of the exorcist is to force the devil to reveal himself by divulging both his name and his linguistic strategy, thus laying him open to the exorcist's counter-rhetoric. The theoretical analysis which underpins the practice of exorcism, drawing significantly on scholastic patterns of argument, is arcane and often difficult to follow. More immediately interesting, perhaps, are the details of exorcism. Those who are possessed abhor relics, prayers, and holy water and often cry without knowing why; if the devils are unwilling to express their names the exorcist must order them to descend to the victim's toe nails which can then be cut off and burned; finally, the priest should have some holy paper by him on which the devil's name can be written, or his image drawn, before it is burnt in the flame of a holy candle.
The fourth text, the Probation of St. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, is the manuscript record of her visionary monologues made by her fellow sisters during the course of her demonic oppression, 1585-90, although only published in the 1960s. Convinced that God had asked her to utter his Word through her voice the saint is subsequently attacked by a host of devils and falls into a state of melancholy when she is abandoned by her Bridegroom. Again there is an obsession with orality. The positive value of the Word, which orders the universe, is negated by the silence, oblivion and chaos of Satan's destructive rhetoric, and St. Maria Maddalena suffers a revelation of Purgatory which recalls in many details Dante's vision in the Divina Commedia.
Maggi's final text is Girolamo Cardano's Metoposcopia, published posthumously in 1658. At the centre of Cardano's philosophical system, which is densely argued and highly complex, is the discrimination between 'soul', the faculty which enacts and influences the body, and 'mind', a sudden insight which is arrived at via a process of mental mirroring, contemplation and self-reflection. The most eloquent insight is defined as daemonium (demon), a sort of demonic wisdom, and to receive such a revelation and perceive its message is like looking at oneself in the eye. This concept leads to the significance of the face, for a face 'speaks a "subtle" language in that it manifests its meanings (the subject's character, his past, his future intentions) without revealing it'. Images of faces suggest how Cardano's metoposcopy operates, for lines on the forehead may reveal future criminal activities and the nature of the subject's death. The discussion of Cardano's philosophical system is the most difficult section of the monograph and seems to be only partially integrated into the overall discussion.
The concluding chapter, 'The Epic Triumph of the Church, Its Melancholy and the Persistence of Sodom', provides an extraordinary shift of focus in that it attempts to argue that many of the issues identified as significant in early modern demonological beliefs and practices have a contemporary relevance. The author identifies the Roman Catholic Jubilee of 2000 and the recent revelation and interpretation of the third secret of the Fatima vision as exalting the current Pope to the personification of the Church's triumph over evil, since the Fatima prophecy works as a form of exorcism. Thus, quoting Gary Wills, Papal Sin (2000), the pope has become 'an oracle, replacing scripture and the Spirit', both a human and an angelic being, a semi-god. A final observation is equally surprising. Dismissing the Catholic Church's apology for crimes committed by 'others' as, in Wills's words, 'apology as propaganda', the author goes on to suggest a parallel between the modern Church's attitude to homosexuals and de Moura's vicious portrayal of the Jews as a sick and corrupt group spreading their contagion through society. The flatness of the tone in the conclusion does not allow one entirely to associate the author with these views; is he merely reporting the interpretation of others?
This is a difficult and challenging study which will repay close reading, although some of the exegesis is opaque and the importation of modern linguistic theory into the discussion is not always persuasive. How readers will respond, however, to the concluding chapter's comments on the modern Catholic Church is an open question.

PETER CORBIN
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER