MOLITOR, Ulricus.

by Ulricus Molitor

£97,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

An uncommon edition of this exceptionally important text, very rarely in contemporary colouring, which has established the iconography of witchcraft in Europe until the present day. First printed about 10 years earlier with a very similar series of cuts, it is one of the earliest printed works on witchcraft and contains the first ever illustrations of witches. These vigorous iconic representations, here even more forceful for being rendered in high colour, of the hags around the cooking pot, flight by broomstick, transmuting into animals, sexual relations with men and demons, are now part of the historic memory , adopted by Hollywood, of the greater part of the western-world. Even the more sedate cut of the three witches eating beneath a tree is immediately recognisable. It was used and referred to again and again and its most celebrated verbal depiction of course is in Shakespeare s Macbeth. Divided into nine short chapters composed in the form of a conversation between the author, the dedicatee the Archduke Sigmund of Austria and his minister Conrad Schatz, they deal respectively with the nine questions concerning witches and their harmful powers posed at the beginning of the volume. Whether by spells they could harm children, spread disease, bring on tempests, fly through the air, give birth to monsters, etc. and concluded that to a certain extent they could. The first tract on witches to be illustrated, 1489-94, was written by the lawyer Ulrich Molitor from Constance in 1

• Binding: Hardcover

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