“In the Body”

This chapter illuminates the connection between demonological theory and witchcraft trials. Disagreement between two sixteenth-century humanists provides clues to important aspects of the early modern debate over witchcraft and witch-persecution. Andrea Alciati took the more modern-seeming position of opposing persecution, while Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola argued, in the strongest possible terms, that witchcraft was real and witch-persecution vital to the survival of Christian society. Andrea Alciat and Gianfrancesco Pico aligned themselves on opposite sides of the debate over the Canon Episcopi. Pico explained more systematically than his contemporaries that demonic corporeality was the question that made the Canon Episcopi central to the debate over witchcraft, and that it was an existential problem rather than a typically abstract example of Scholastic argumentation.