Jean de Filesac

First edition of this attack on magic and demonology by a rector of the Sorbonne and influential anti-Jesuit who believed that there were more covens in the world than brothels.

• Jean de Filesac (French).
• Paris: Officina Nivelliana, apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1609.
• Text in Latin.
• Contemporary limp vellum.

Filesac, who later became dean of the Sorbonne's Theological Faculty, was a firm believer in "the reality and danger of demons and witches"; he followed Tertullian in arguing that the practice of magic necessarily entails worship of the devil. De Idololatria Magica, his most important work, holds witches to be not only real and in grave theological error, but astonishingly numerous: "Filesac further affirmed that magicians, sorcerers and witches in his time in the Christian world far surpassed in number all the brothels and houses of ill fame" (Thorndike). Filesac marshalled similar arguments in an opinion offered to the court in the lycanthropy case of Jean Grenier — Bordeaux peasant and youngest convicted French werewolf — arguing that disbelief in werewolfism "has often caused impunity for such people and has marvellously multiplied the number of witches who have spread today to all places."

Though Filesac's beliefs "reflect[ed] the extremist superstition of his time" (Lea), his condemnations had wide-ranging impact on such figures as Parisian Paracelsian physician Joseph Duchesne (Mulsow), as well as other philosophical, political, and scientific schools. Additionally, Filesac was notoriously anti-Jesuit. Laursen's Histories of Heresy numbers him among the order's "declared enemies" (157).

Quite rare on the marketplace, with only one auction record in the 21st century. A curious but influential work by a prominent theologian, speaking to how religious arguments and superstitions intertwined inseparably with political and scientific debates in the early modern period.