S. Jerome, S. Bernard, S. Peter Damian, Dionysius the Carthusian, and many other a mighty name are easily familiar to him. With equal facility will he cite Cedrenus and Pontano; Pliny and the Dominican Silvester; Lucian and Luitprand; Hippocrates and Francesco Mattioli; the Catholic champion, Bishop Dubravsky of Olmütz and the Protestant Philip Camerarius, the son of Melancthon’s partner in the Augsburg Confession.
Although the “Compendium Malficarum” was at once accepted as supremely authoritative by all contemporaries, and later demonologists have not been slow to commend, apprize, and make final appeal to this most salutary and excellent treatise—the learned and judicious Sinistrari manifestly and formally not merely follows but actually paraphrases entire more than one chapter when discussing dark problems of witchcraft—it is surprising indeed that Francesco-Maria Guazzo has never generally achieved the wide renown and high reputation of a Bodin, a Remy, a Boguet, or a De Lancre. The reason for this no doubt lies in the fact that these writers were also men of action, each of whom perforce from his very office and estate stood largely in the public eye, and wrought zealously for the public weal. Jean Bodin won fame as a politician, a deputy of the Third Estate to the States-General of Blois, Attorney-General at Laon; Nicolas Remy for fifteen years held the helm as Privy-Councillor and chief Judge in the Duchy of Lorraine; Boguet was “Grand Juge de St. Claude au Comte de Bourgogne”; Pierre De Lancre, the wealthy magistrate of Bordeaux, served as Commissioner Extraordinary in the witch trials of Labourd. Francesco-Maria Guazzo remained but a humble friar, the subject of an obscure and solitary Congregation.
And yet the “Compendium Maleficarum”[1] is a treatise of no less value and importance than the famous “Démonomanie des sorciers” and the “Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons.” Guazzo analyses and describes as perhaps no other demonologist has set out with equal conciseness and clarity the whole practice and profession of witchcraft. Although never sparing of illustration and detail he does not indeed draw examples from the trials of those whom he had examined and judged as do Boguet and De Lancre, a feature which lends their work an especial and personal value, but the “Compendium Maleficarum” may be taken to be in some sort a complementary volume, an essential text-book of the subject, as it were, a tractate which probes and proves every circumstance of Satanism and sorcery.
- ↑ Curiously enough there is no mention of the book either in Graese or Brunet.