DANEAU, Lambert

by Lambert Daneau

£4,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

First collective edition of these works together in their first French translation; seperately published by Jacques Bourgeois in 1574 and 1575. Daneau s major work on witchcraft, Dialogus de veneficiis. was translated, first into French and then, in 1575, into English by Thomas Twyne as A Dialogue of Witches. Lambert Daneau, a French Calvanist theologian and Minister, published a treatise on witches in 1574. The book took the form of a dialogue in which one speaker, Theophilus, responded to the occasionally skeptical questions presented to the other speaker, Anthony. The treatise establishes some of the main themes of the late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Protestant demonology. One of the most salient of those features was a heavy reliance on scripture. This biblicism is evident in Daneau s argument .. that to claim that witches were victims of melancholy was tantamount to the blasphemous denial of the biblical statement that the demoniacs whom Christ cured were also only melancholics and not possessed by demons. A second Protestant theme ..was that the increase in the number of witches was related to the prevalence of superstition and false religion that the Reformation was endeavouring to dispel. ..Calvinists claimed that the age of miracles had ended in biblical times and that magic performed by witches through the power of the devil consisted of nothing more than wonders. Daneau makes this point in his treatise and he also presents the argument .. that the Devil, des

• Binding: Hardcover

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