Enchanted Europe by Cameron Euan;

Author:Cameron, Euan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2010-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Demonizing the Protestants

Finally, just as Protestants demonized the Catholics, in exactly the same way Catholics accused the Protestants of being playthings of demons and sorcerers, and blamed them for the perceived rise of sorcery in the contemporary world. Polemical theologians claimed that Protestants, while they attacked the true Church (Catholicism) with unrestrained ferocity, showed themselves weak or unreliable in regard to attacking magic and sorcery. The supposed leniency of Protestants against witches and their scepticism about magic formed, in fact, an important accusation for Catholics to use against them. Hector Wegman, the student whose degree promotion provided the occasion for Albrecht Hunger’s theses on magic, threw in the faces of the Protestants the lack of censorship in their publishing houses: ‘the “Evangelicals” edit openly and spread abroad things which not only encourage pestilent dissensions about the holy faith, and also (as it were) heresies summoned back from hell, but… also teach manifest magic and execrable idolatry… From their publishing-houses there have recently appeared many books of magic.’108 Martín Delrio, in the Proloquium to his Disquisitions, presented a demonizing history of the religious strife of his own age. It was so clear that it was perverse to deny the proposition that magic followed heresies ‘as the shadow does the body’. All the leading heretics of the past were also magicians. The Hussites appeared in Bohemia and then the Lutherans in Germany: as the Malleus Maleficarum showed, a great crowd of witches followed them. Witches in Trier admitted that they only learned their craft after a Lutheran prince invaded the territory; the abundance of witches in the Alps was explained by the persistence of the Waldensian heresy there. As Delrio’s fellow Jesuit Juan de Maldonado had explained, demons made their home in heretics; heresy could not sustain its first energy, but must either dissolve into atheism or turn into magic. 109 Witches, like the Protestant ‘beggars’ in the Low Countries, promised never to venerate the Eucharist or the saints, to destroy relics and images, and to despise the consecrated things of the Church.110

Catholic gossip and folklore, as one might term it, contributed to this demonizing legend around the conflict with the Protestants. At Geila in Brabant it was reported that the demons suddenly left all the possessed people, so that they could attend Luther’s funeral. Similarly they were supposed to have left the demoniacs to be present with the Calvinists during the iconoclasm and hedge-preaching of i566. At St Medard’s Church in Paris the Calvinist iconoclasts allegedly broke all the windows except that ‘in gratitude’ they left one which showed a red devil. In several other places, including St Paul’s in London, iconoclastic mobs left only the depictions of devils untouched.111 Friedrich Förner preached Delrio’s apostrophes to the people of Bamberg. He argued that the rise of magic and sorcery in the current age offered an opportunity to prove the truth of Catholicism. ‘Which age has been as calamitous, as rich in heresies as our own century? Did not atheism spread around

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