ABSTRACT
Jean Bodin (1529-96) was no admirer of women. He identified the subordination of women to men as the defining feature of political order in his Six livres de la république (1676). In De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), a work designed to update a vast corpus concerned with the identification and punishment of witches, he attacked women’s foibles, particularly their ostensibly insatiable lust. Yet neither Bodin’s political theory nor his demonology is really about women; misogyny was not what drove him to author these works. Rather, women generally serve as means to an end in Bodin’s thought. The wife’s natural inferiority to the husband provides an analogy for a nonreciprocal relation of command and obedience that he establishes between the sovereign and his subjects in De la république. In De la démonomanie, Bodin’s portrayal of women as the possessors of unsavory secrets and his characterization of the confessions of witches as fragments of a grandly devilish design create the need for hermeneutical expertise-expertise that he claimed to have. In using women to “think with,” the author of De la démonomanie had much in common with his opponent, the Lutheran physician Johann Weyer, who protested against the witch trials in De praestigiis daemonum (1563). In the first chapter, I showed that by portraying women as naturally susceptible to the distortion of the senses, Weyer enhanced the physician’s authority in the context of an epistemology in which he identified common sense as the standard of truth. In this chapter, I bring Bodin’s rigid hierarchy of the sexes in De la république together with his gendered hermeneutics in De la démonomanie to show how he attempted to circumvent the skeptical crisis that Weyer had exacerbated when he underscored the vulnerability of sense perception to devilish manipulation and melancholy. Bodin’s struggle against skepticism distinguishes De la démonomanie from late medieval demonology; the gender strategies that he deploys to thwart Skeptics thus constitute a central feature of his modern demonology.
