ABSTRACT
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was the ruler of Mirandola, a tiny principality near Ferrara in Northeast Italy. A lively contributor to the intellectual life of his time as author of respected literary and philosophical works, he nonetheless participated in and defended a witch-hunt that tried dozens of people between 1522 and 1523, executing at least ten of them. In attacking demonolatry, Gianfrancesco argued vehemently against a second target, much older than his uncle. With other early proponents of witch-hunting, he identified a passage in the Church’s own laws as the source of the ‘erroneous’ belief that witchcraft was an imaginary crime. Witchcraft theorists consistently opposed Episcopi’s declaration that night-traveling women were asleep and dreaming, and argued that some such experiences were undeniably real. One of witches’ most infamous crimes was infanticide, often followed by cannibalism. ‘Dicastes’ portrays Berni as greedy to consume the blood of little children, which demons helped him and other witches acquire.
