The most unexpected and delightful thing in this book is on the front flyleaf. That’s where an early owner wrote out, in Latin, how to stop a hailstorm. Throw three of the hailstones into the fire while calling on the Trinity. Say the Our Father and the Hail Mary twice or three times, add the opening of the Gospel of St John, and make the sign of the cross before you and behind you and to every quarter. Then say the words: "I adjure you, hailstorms and winds, by the five wounds of Christ and by the three nails that pierced his hands and feet, and by the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." Underneath, he noted where he found the charm. Malleus Malef. tom. 1 pag. 208. He copied the reference along with the charm.
The charm has a history of its own. In the Malleus Maleficarum it appears as the answer a witch gave a judge who asked her whether a storm raised by witchcraft could be stopped. She told him about this charm. The inquisitors wrote it down and printed it. Two hundred years after the Malleus first appeared, an owner of this copy wanted it badly enough to write it out by hand.
The Malleus Maleficarum is among the most notorious books ever written. It first appeared around 1487, written by Heinrich Kramer and traditionally also attributed to Jakob Sprenger, whose role remains disputed. It became an influential reference in the literature of witchcraft prosecution. How to spot a witch, how to question her, what the Devil could and could not do, and what to do with her at the end. It went through edition after edition, and it grew. By the seventeenth century the one book had become a four-tome corpus with a shelf of other people's treatises bound in around it.This is the final seventeenth-century edition. Claude Bourgeat, a bookseller in Lyon who worked at the sign of the Gallic Mercury, issued the whole corpus in four tomes in 1669, with a royal privilege on the title page. Montague Summers, who translated the Malleus into English in 1928 and went through the printing history to do it, called this the latest edition of the book there is. Thirteen years after Bourgeat took out his privilege, the same crown that granted it decriminalized witchcraft in France.
The four tomes divide down the middle. The first two are the witch hunt itself, from the theory down to the sentence. The third and fourth are the exorcism, which is what makes up this volume. Tome three carries its own title, Daemonastix, the demon-scourge, and it collects the working manuals of the trade. Girolamo Menghi's Flagellum Daemonum and Fustis Daemonum are the two big ones. Menghi was a Franciscan from Viadana who exorcised in Bologna and wrote the books that taught Catholic Europe how the job was done. Pietro Antonio Stampa's Fuga Satanae follows. Then two more that the title page advertises as dragged out of the dark for the first time: the Flagellum Maleficorum of Pierre Mamoris, a theology professor at Poitiers, and a treatise on superstitious practices compiled at the University of Cologne by Heinrich von Gorkum. Tome four is Zaccaria Visconti's Complementum Artis Exorcisticae, thirteen numbered exorcisms and a hundred precepts for forcing a demon into obedience.
Anyone who's spent time with any grimoires will recognize a good deal of this. The fifth exorcism in the Flagellum Daemonum is to be spoken over a chain of divine names, with a cross printed between each one: Hel, Heloym, Eheye, Tetragrammaton, Adonay, Sabaoth, Messias, Sother, Emmanuel, Agios, Ischyros, Athanatos, Agla, Iehova. Those are the names the Key of Solomon and the Heptameron write inside their circles, stacked the same way. Both of those were handbooks for summoning spirits, and neither of them was legal.
There are further similarities. When a demon will not say who he is, Stampa tells the exorcist to pick one for him out of Scripture, write it on a slip of paper and throw the slip in the flames. Then make two images, one of the demon and one of the witch he was working through, label them both, and burn those as well. Elsewhere the exorcist sets his patient over a fire so the smoke goes up his nose, bathes him in holy water in case a spell is hiding in the hair of his body, and reads him a page of insults: blackest crow, keeper of pigs, Satan's chamberlain, doorkeeper of Hell, kicking mule. On page 391 there is a cross built out of printer's rules, I.N.R.I. at the head and Fugite partes adversae along the arms, to be made up and hung in the house with wax from an Agnus Dei or a paschal candle sealed into the middle of it. The first two tomes of this same set would have sent a woman to the stake for less. You could argue, and we would, that the difference came down to who had signed the license.
The copy is in its contemporary brown calf with a gilt-tooled spine lettered MALLEVS MALEFIC. TOM. 3. It has been used hard and bears the signs of that usage. Both tomes are complete and each ends with Bourgeat's Mercury device on the final leaf. The rest is below.
MENGHI, Girolamo; Pietro Antonio STAMPA; Pierre MAMORIS; Heinrich von GORKUM; Zaccaria VISCONTI. Daemonastix, seu Adversus Daemones et Maleficos, Universi Operis ad Usum praesertim Exorcistarum concinnati, Tomus Tertius. Complectens varios in eam rem editos tractatus, aliosque nunc primum e tenebris erutos quorum syllabum sequens pagina dabit. Editio novissima innumeris mendis expurgata; cum indicibus copiosissimis et ad fidem restitutis. Lugduni [Lyon], sumptibus Claudii Bourgeat, sub signo Mercurii Galli, 1669. Cum privilegio regis. The third tome of the four-tome Malleus Maleficarum, in its final seventeenth-century edition, with the fourth tome bound in behind it.
Physical Description: Quarto, 24 x 18 cm. Title page printed in red and black with an engraved vignette of Mercury signed by J. P. Auer and I. I. Thourneyser. Tome three: [8], 395 [i.e. 403], [4] pages, the printed pagination jumping back from 136 to 129, as it does in the recorded copies, so that the text closes at a printed page 395, followed by four unnumbered pages of index. Tome four: 259, [11] pages, beginning at page 1 immediately after that index, under a woodcut headpiece and a caption title, with no separate title page of its own. Text in two columns with printed marginal notes, woodcut headpieces and decorative initials throughout, divisional titles to the Flagellum Daemonum, the Fustis Daemonum, the Fuga Satanae, the Flagellum Maleficorum and the Cologne treatise on superstitions, a full-page typographic cross on page 391, and Claude Bourgeat's woodcut Mercury device, with the motto Docta per orbem scripta fero, at the end of each tome.
References: The edition is recorded at the Bibliotheque nationale de France and at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, whose copy of this tome, shelfmark BH FLL 6888, gives the collation followed here.
Binding: Contemporary mottled brown calf over boards, the spine original, with four raised bands forming five compartments. Gilt-tooled MALLEVS MALEFIC. TOM. 3 in the second compartment and a repeating gilt ornament in the other four. Worn and rubbed overall, with scuffing and staining to the covers, wear at the corners, and the leather broken at the head and foot of the spine.
Condition: Heavy worming throughout the text block, in a few passages touching printed letters and on one or two leaves opening into small holes; browning and dampstaining, heaviest at the outer edges of the endleaves; occasional short marginal tears. The text is legible throughout and the volume is complete.
Provenance: Manuscript notes in Latin in an early cursive hand on the front free endpaper: a procedure against tempests with the words of adjuration, cited to Malleus Malef. tom. 1 pag. 208, and a second adjuration of hail and wind by the five wounds, the three nails and the four Evangelists, also cited to the Malleus.
The most unexpected and delightful thing in this book is on the front flyleaf. That’s where an early owner wrote out, in Latin, how to stop a hailstorm. Throw three of the hailstones into the fire while calling on the Trinity. Say the Our Father and the Hail Mary twice or three times, add the opening of the Gospel of St John, and make the sign of the cross before you and behind you and to every quarter. Then say the words: "I adjure you, hailstorms and winds, by the five wounds of Christ and by the three nails that pierced his hands and feet, and by the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." Underneath, he noted where he found the charm. Malleus Malef. tom. 1 pag. 208. He copied the reference along with the charm.
The charm has a history of its own. In the Malleus Maleficarum it appears as the answer a witch gave a judge who asked her whether a storm raised by witchcraft could be stopped. She told him about this charm. The inquisitors wrote it down and printed it. Two hundred years after the Malleus first appeared, an owner of this copy wanted it badly enough to write it out by hand.
The Malleus Maleficarum is among the most notorious books ever written. It first appeared around 1487, written by Heinrich Kramer and traditionally also attributed to Jakob Sprenger, whose role remains disputed. It became an influential reference in the literature of witchcraft prosecution. How to spot a witch, how to question her, what the Devil could and could not do, and what to do with her at the end. It went through edition after edition, and it grew. By the seventeenth century the one book had become a four-tome corpus with a shelf of other people's treatises bound in around it.This is the final seventeenth-century edition. Claude Bourgeat, a bookseller in Lyon who worked at the sign of the Gallic Mercury, issued the whole corpus in four tomes in 1669, with a royal privilege on the title page. Montague Summers, who translated the Malleus into English in 1928 and went through the printing history to do it, called this the latest edition of the book there is. Thirteen years after Bourgeat took out his privilege, the same crown that granted it decriminalized witchcraft in France.
The four tomes divide down the middle. The first two are the witch hunt itself, from the theory down to the sentence. The third and fourth are the exorcism, which is what makes up this volume. Tome three carries its own title, Daemonastix, the demon-scourge, and it collects the working manuals of the trade. Girolamo Menghi's Flagellum Daemonum and Fustis Daemonum are the two big ones. Menghi was a Franciscan from Viadana who exorcised in Bologna and wrote the books that taught Catholic Europe how the job was done. Pietro Antonio Stampa's Fuga Satanae follows. Then two more that the title page advertises as dragged out of the dark for the first time: the Flagellum Maleficorum of Pierre Mamoris, a theology professor at Poitiers, and a treatise on superstitious practices compiled at the University of Cologne by Heinrich von Gorkum. Tome four is Zaccaria Visconti's Complementum Artis Exorcisticae, thirteen numbered exorcisms and a hundred precepts for forcing a demon into obedience.
Anyone who's spent time with any grimoires will recognize a good deal of this. The fifth exorcism in the Flagellum Daemonum is to be spoken over a chain of divine names, with a cross printed between each one: Hel, Heloym, Eheye, Tetragrammaton, Adonay, Sabaoth, Messias, Sother, Emmanuel, Agios, Ischyros, Athanatos, Agla, Iehova. Those are the names the Key of Solomon and the Heptameron write inside their circles, stacked the same way. Both of those were handbooks for summoning spirits, and neither of them was legal.
There are further similarities. When a demon will not say who he is, Stampa tells the exorcist to pick one for him out of Scripture, write it on a slip of paper and throw the slip in the flames. Then make two images, one of the demon and one of the witch he was working through, label them both, and burn those as well. Elsewhere the exorcist sets his patient over a fire so the smoke goes up his nose, bathes him in holy water in case a spell is hiding in the hair of his body, and reads him a page of insults: blackest crow, keeper of pigs, Satan's chamberlain, doorkeeper of Hell, kicking mule. On page 391 there is a cross built out of printer's rules, I.N.R.I. at the head and Fugite partes adversae along the arms, to be made up and hung in the house with wax from an Agnus Dei or a paschal candle sealed into the middle of it. The first two tomes of this same set would have sent a woman to the stake for less. You could argue, and we would, that the difference came down to who had signed the license.
The copy is in its contemporary brown calf with a gilt-tooled spine lettered MALLEVS MALEFIC. TOM. 3. It has been used hard and bears the signs of that usage. Both tomes are complete and each ends with Bourgeat's Mercury device on the final leaf. The rest is below.
MENGHI, Girolamo; Pietro Antonio STAMPA; Pierre MAMORIS; Heinrich von GORKUM; Zaccaria VISCONTI. Daemonastix, seu Adversus Daemones et Maleficos, Universi Operis ad Usum praesertim Exorcistarum concinnati, Tomus Tertius. Complectens varios in eam rem editos tractatus, aliosque nunc primum e tenebris erutos quorum syllabum sequens pagina dabit. Editio novissima innumeris mendis expurgata; cum indicibus copiosissimis et ad fidem restitutis. Lugduni [Lyon], sumptibus Claudii Bourgeat, sub signo Mercurii Galli, 1669. Cum privilegio regis. The third tome of the four-tome Malleus Maleficarum, in its final seventeenth-century edition, with the fourth tome bound in behind it.
Physical Description: Quarto, 24 x 18 cm. Title page printed in red and black with an engraved vignette of Mercury signed by J. P. Auer and I. I. Thourneyser. Tome three: [8], 395 [i.e. 403], [4] pages, the printed pagination jumping back from 136 to 129, as it does in the recorded copies, so that the text closes at a printed page 395, followed by four unnumbered pages of index. Tome four: 259, [11] pages, beginning at page 1 immediately after that index, under a woodcut headpiece and a caption title, with no separate title page of its own. Text in two columns with printed marginal notes, woodcut headpieces and decorative initials throughout, divisional titles to the Flagellum Daemonum, the Fustis Daemonum, the Fuga Satanae, the Flagellum Maleficorum and the Cologne treatise on superstitions, a full-page typographic cross on page 391, and Claude Bourgeat's woodcut Mercury device, with the motto Docta per orbem scripta fero, at the end of each tome.
References: The edition is recorded at the Bibliotheque nationale de France and at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, whose copy of this tome, shelfmark BH FLL 6888, gives the collation followed here.
Binding: Contemporary mottled brown calf over boards, the spine original, with four raised bands forming five compartments. Gilt-tooled MALLEVS MALEFIC. TOM. 3 in the second compartment and a repeating gilt ornament in the other four. Worn and rubbed overall, with scuffing and staining to the covers, wear at the corners, and the leather broken at the head and foot of the spine.
Condition: Heavy worming throughout the text block, in a few passages touching printed letters and on one or two leaves opening into small holes; browning and dampstaining, heaviest at the outer edges of the endleaves; occasional short marginal tears. The text is legible throughout and the volume is complete.
Provenance: Manuscript notes in Latin in an early cursive hand on the front free endpaper: a procedure against tempests with the words of adjuration, cited to Malleus Malef. tom. 1 pag. 208, and a second adjuration of hail and wind by the five wounds, the three nails and the four Evangelists, also cited to the Malleus.
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