ExLatinis
ExLatinis aims to translate every Latin work printed between 1450 and 1750, putting the intellectual world of early modern Europe within reach of anyone
62 articles · page 6 of 6
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Sign of the Olive: Leonardo Vairo's Three Books on Fascination: On the Evil Eye, its Species and Causes
In the winter of 1583 a Benedictine bishop-to-be published a three-book Latin treatise arguing that the evil eye is real but that nothing in nature — not the imagination, not the radiating eye, not touch, voice, or the stars — can cause it, so that its true efficient cause must be a demon operating through a pact. Leonardo Vairo's De fascino libri tres accepts the folkloric and medical lore of the fascinum only to reassign its causation to the demonic, folding a topic of medical curiosity into the post-Tridentine theological program against superstition. It matters because it is one of the earliest systematic Latin treatments of the demonic pact in the Counter-Reformation, a work in which philology, faculty psychology, philosophy of language, medicine, and theology are marshalled toward a single demonstrative end.
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ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Waldsassen Compounder and the Diseased Brain: Johann Weyer's On the Tricks of Demons and on Enchantments and Poisonings, in Five Books
In 1563 a physician to the Duke of Cleves published, in learned Latin, one of the sixteenth century's boldest arguments against burning witches. Johann Weyer's De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficiis libri V holds that the old woman who confesses to night-flight and coupling with demons is not a criminal but a sick and deluded patient — a melancholic whose corrupted imagination Satan has invaded — and that the executioner's proper business is only the poisoner who truly harms the body by material means. It matters because it relocated the accused witch from the courtroom to the clinic, set the terms of the century's fiercest debate over witch prosecution, and drew both Jean Bodin's furious rejoinder and Reginald Scot's sympathetic English extension.
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