Compendium Maleficarum: The Montague Summers Edition

This extraordinary document, considered one of the most important manuals ever compiled on witchcraft, offers striking insights into the early 17th-century mind and society's attempts to cope with the evil it saw manifested in sorcery.

A collection of writings by the Ambrosian monk, Francesco Maria Guazzo, the Compendium comprehensively and penetratingly describes the entire practice and profession of witchcraft. First published in 1608, the commentaries came at an appropriate time. Contemporary accounts noted that witchcraft and sorcery has "spread in all directions," leaving "no country, town, village, or district, no class of society" gree from the practice. This probing work, by a distinguished writer and scholar who percieved the devil as an evil force seeking to destroy men's bodies and souls, was an attempt to help man live piously and devoutly, this guarding against such seductions and manipulations.

Reproduced from a rare limited edition published in 1929 and supplemented with many erudite editorial notes by the Rev. Montague Summers, the Compendium Maleficarium includes profoundly serious discussions of witches' pacts with the devil, finely detailed descriptions of witches' powers, posions and crimes; sleep-inducing spells and methods for removing them, apparitons of demons and spectres, diseases causes by demons, and other topics. Also examined in detail are witches' alleged powers to transport themselves from place to place, create living things, make beasts talk and the dead reappear; witches' use of religion to heal the sick, laws observed by witches to cause and cure illnesses, differences between demoniacs and the bewitched, and other subjects from the realm of the supernatural.

Here is an encyclopedic tract of incalculable worth to the historian and student of the occult and anyone intrigued by necromantic lore, sabbats, sorceries and trafficking with demons.

Format: Paperback, 206 pages
ISBN: 9780486257389
Publisher: Dover Occult
Published: 28 March 2003
Weight: 382 g
Dimensions: 234 x 157 x 15 mm

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