Thomas Erastus · 1578
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Thomas Erastus (Thomas Lieber, 1524–1583) was professor of medicine at Heidelberg. His Disputatio de lamiis seu strigibus is a dialogue on what witches can and cannot actually do.
Erastus grants the premise that witches exist, have made a pact with the devil and deserve death, and then spends the book dismantling, on medical and physical grounds, nearly every marvel attributed to them. Transformation into wolves, bodily flight to the sabbath, the raising of storms, intercourse with demons in assumed bodies: these he explains as demonic illusion, melancholic delusion, or the ordinary action of poisons on the imagination. His speaker Furnius presses the popular and legal case; Erastus answers as a doctor.
The Disputatio is one of the sharpest sixteenth-century analyses of the difference between what a demon can do and what nature permits.
The translation is made from the composite demonological volume printed at Frankfurt in 1581 by Nikolaus Basse, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There the disputation sits, pointedly, beside the inquisitors it contradicts. Two of them, Nicolas Jacquier’s Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum and Martín de Arles’s Tractatus de superstitionibus, are translated separately in this series.