The subject of demonology, in all its forms and phases, embracing witchcraft, held a more commanding place throughout Europe, in the literature of the centuries immediately preceding the eighteenth, than any other. Works of the highest pretension, elaborate, learned, voluminous, and exhausting, were published, by the authority of governments and universities, to expound it. It was regarded as occupying the most eminent department of jurisprudence, as well as of science and theology.
Raphael De La Torre and Adam Tanner published treatises establishing the right and duty of ecclesiastical tribunals to punish all who practised or dealt with the arts of demonology. In 1484, Sprenger came out with his famous book, "Malleus Maleficarum;" or, the "Hammer of Witches." Paul Layman, in 1629, issued an elaborate work on "Judicial Processes against Sorcerers and Witches." The following is the title of a bulky volume of some seven hundred pages: "Demonology, or Natural Magic or demoniacal, lawful and unlawful, also open or secret, by the intervention and invocation of a Demon," published in 1612. It consists of four books, treating of the crime of witchcraft, and its punishment in the ordinary tribunals and the Inquisitorial office. Its author was Don Francisco Torreblanca Villalpando, of Cordova, Advocate Royal in the courts of Grenada. It was republished in 1623, by command of Philip III. of Spain, on the recommendation of the Fiscal General, and with the sanction of the Royal Council and the Holy Inquisition. This work may be considered as establishing and defining the doctrines, in reference to witchcraft, prevailing in all Catholic countries. It was indorsed by royal, judicial, academical, and ecclesiastical approval; is replete with extraordinary erudition, arranged in the most scientific form, embracing in a methodical classification all the minutest details of the subject, and codifying it into a complete system of law. There was no particular in all the proceedings and all the doctrines brought out at the trials in Salem, which did not find ample justification and support in this work of Catholic, imperial, and European authority.
But perhaps the writer of the greatest influence on this subject in England and America, during the whole of the seventeenth century, was William Perkins, "the learned, pious, and painful preacher of God's Word, at St. Andrew's, in Cambridge," where he died, in 1602, aged forty-four years. He was quite a voluminous author; and many of his works were translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. Fuller, in "The Holy State," selects him as the impersonation of the qualities requisite to "the Faithful Minister." In his glowing eulogium upon his learning and talents, he says:—
"He would pronounce the word damne with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while after. And, when catechist of Christ's College, in expounding the Commandments, applied them so home,—able almost to make his hearers' hearts fall down, and hairs to stand upright. But, in his older age, he altered his voice, and remitted much of his former rigidness, often professing that to preach mercy was that proper office of the ministers of the gospel."—"Our Perkins brought the schools into the pulpit, and, unshelling their controversies out of their hard school-terms, made thereof plain and wholesome meat for his people; for he had a capacious head, with angles winding, and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies."—"He had a rare felicity in speedy reading of books; so that, as it were, riding post through an author, he took strict notice of all passages. Perusing books so speedily, one would think he read nothing; so accurately, one would think he read all."
An octavo volume, written by this great scholar and divine, was published at Cambridge in England, under the title, "Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft." It went through several editions, and had a wide and permanent circulation.
This work, the character of which is sufficiently indicated in its emphatic title, was the great authority on the subject with our fathers; and Mr. Parris had a copy of it in his possession when the proceedings in reference to witchcraft began at Salem Village.
John Gaule published an octavo volume in London, in 1646, entitled, "Select Cases of Conscience concerning Witches and Witchcraft." He is one of the most exact writers on the subject, and arranges witches in the following classes: "1. The diviner, gypsy, or fortune-telling witch; 2. The astrologian, star-gazing, planetary, prognosticating witch; 3. The chanting, canting, or calculating witch, who works by signs and numbers; 4. The venefical, or poisoning witch; 5. The exorcist, or conjuring witch; 6. The gastronomic witch; 7. The magical, speculative, sciential, or arted witch; 8. The necromancer."
Besides innumerable writers of this class, who spread out the scholastic learning on the subject, and presented it in a logical and theological form, there were others who treated it in a more popular style, and invested it with the charms of elegant literature. Henry Hallywell published an octavo in London, in 1681, in which, while the main doctrines of witchcraft as then almost universally received are enforced, an attempt was made to divest it of some of its most repulsive and terrible features. He gives the following account of the means by which a person may place himself beyond the reach of the power of witchcraft:—
"It is possible for the soul to arise to such a height, and become so divine, that no witchcraft or evil demons can have any power upon the body. When the bodily life is too far invigorated and awakened, and draws the intellect, the flower and summity of the soul, into a conspiration with it, then are we subject and obnoxious to magical assaults. For magic or sorcery, being founded only in this lower or mundane spirit, he that makes it his business to be freed and released from all its blandishments and flattering devocations, and endeavors wholly to withdraw himself from the love of corporeity and too near a sympathy with the frail flesh, he, by it, enkindles such a divine principle as lifts him above the fate of this inferior world, and adorns his mind with such an awful majesty that beats back all enchantments, and makes the infernal fiends tremble at his presence, hating those vigorous beams of light which are so contrary and repugnant to their dark natures."
The mind of this beautiful writer found encouragement and security in the midst of the diabolical spirits, with whom he believed the world to be infested, in the following views and speculations:—