The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) by Anthony Esolen

Author:Anthony Esolen [Esolen, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2008-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Witches were a real preoccupation of the Middle Ages, right? Not really. As I’ve said, probably more people have been shot in American shopping malls and high schools than were executed for witchcraft in all of Europe from 1000–1300. The real hunts for witches began only after the bouts of mass hysteria in the wake of the Black Plague, which struck Europe in 1348 and flared up every twenty years or so until the nineteenth century. As for demons, none of the great medieval theologians were terribly interested in them. Dante gives them a mere supporting role, often burlesque at that, in his Inferno. Thomas dispenses with them in a couple of articles in his Summa Theologica.2 But demons are everywhere in the Renaissance imagination, particularly in the north. The legend of Doctor Faustus, the professor who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magic tricks and voluptuous succubi, is contemporary with Martin Luther. Later in the sixteenth century comes that hotel handbook on “What to Do in Case of Witchcraft,” the Malleus Maleficarum. One of its more delightful chapters describes how a man may bed down with a witch and later discover, to his chagrin, that he’s lost his membrum virile, and doesn’t know where to find it (downright Victorian, one might charge).3 Then comes a book that influenced Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear: the Demonologie of King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England and the commissioner of the famous Bible. That’s not to mention the Salem witch trials, conducted by learned Puritans at the turn of the enlightened 1700s.

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