Martín de Arles · c. 1510
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Martín de Arles y Andosilla (c. 1451–1521) was a professor of theology and archdeacon of the valley of Aibar in the cathedral of Pamplona. His Tractatus de superstitionibus is a field report on the popular religion of his own parishes.
The treatise opens with the rogation processions his cathedral chapter mounted against drought and hail, among them the custom of plunging an image of Saint Peter into the river in the hope of forcing the outcome they prayed for. It then catalogues and judges the observances he had met on visitation: charms and written schedulae worn against illness, lucky and unlucky days, images cast in bronze or wax under particular constellations, divination by pythones and necromancers, herbs gathered with formulas, and saints’ days observed for the wrong reasons. Each practice is stated as a question and answered from Aquinas, Gerson and the Decretum.
Written around 1510, it is one of the earliest attempts to distinguish licit devotion from superstition using evidence the author had gathered himself.
The translation is made from the treatise as printed in the composite demonological volume issued at Frankfurt in 1581, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Two of its companion pieces in that volume, Nicolas Jacquier’s Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum and Thomas Erastus’s De lamiis, are translated separately in this series.