De morbis veneficis ac veneficijs. Opus... medicis, ac exorcists apprime utile ac necessarium.
Venice: De Franciscis, 1595.
Price: $11,500.00
Octavo: 15.2 x 10 cm. [8], 199, [13] leaves. Collation: †8, A-Z8, Aa-Cc8, Dd4.
FIRST EDITION.
Bound in contemporary vellum (soiled, esp. along the spine, and lightly stained; short split in the upper hinge.) A very good copy, with some early manuscript annotations and a two-page manuscript index at rear. Some -mostly light -damp-staining, a bit heavier on a few leaves where they cause a light tideline, and darker on leaf Ll1. Some marginal tallow stains and other occasional, marginal stains; a couple of leaves foxed. A slim worm-trail interferes with the text, without loss of sense in the gutter of gathering Aa. There is an early inscription of a Capuchin monastery and a small red ink mark on the title page.
Written at the height of the European witch-hunt, “On sorcerous diseases and acts of sorcery” describes the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of illnesses (which the author terms “morbi venefici”) attributed to witchcraft and demonic possession, as well as the sorcerous acts held to cause them.
One of the first books on demonology to be written by a physician and an important contribution to the debate over the roles of physicians and exorcists in treating illnesses attributed to supernatural causes.
The author, the Italian physician Giovan Battista Codronchi, argued that certain diseases are produced by demons acting through witches, and that physicians who fail to recognize such causes might fail to treat those diseases properly. These diabolic diseases ("morbi venefici") were believed to be caused by demons acting through pacts with humans for a wicked purpose and with God’s hidden permission. The acts themselves were referred to as “veneficia.”
The author first establishes the reality of sorcery, sorcerers, and witches, and enumerates the diseases caused by them. While Codronchi does accept scientific explanations and the ordinary effects of contagion, bodily temperament, and celestial influence for certain diseases, he argues that those “natural” forces cannot account for the extraordinary phenomena that he attributes to sorcery.
In the final chapters, Codronchi treats the prevention and cure of “morbi venefici”, rejecting superstitious remedies in favor of medical ones and those effected by God. He discusses the effects of emetics, baths, fumigations, liniments, simple and compound medicines, and the action of natural substances on demons. He then offers remedies for sterility and impotence attributed to witchcraft.
The book is rooted in Codronchi’s experience of the illness of his infant daughter, which he recounts in dramatic fashion. He attributes his child’s illness to witchcraft and demonic possession, and its cure to an exorcist:
“Codronchi’s daughter Francesca was only ten months old when she suddenly began to lose weight . . . her mother began to suspect that someone had put a spell on her child, moved by hatred or envy. Objects often associated with witchcraft were found in the infant’s cradle, including peas, grains of coriander, a chip of apparently human bone, and even some sort of blood lump described as being made of the menstrual blood of a devilish woman. Thoroughly alarmed, the parents . . . entrusted the child to an experienced exorcist. After three days, she showed signs of improvement . . . and the exorcist managed to heal her.” (ibid. p. 3)
Codronchi gives his own definition of “veneficia": harmful alterations of the body effected by demonic power through a pact with a human, for a wicked purpose, though with the permission of God. Codronchi examines the forms such harm may take, including impotence, abortion, demonic possession, incubi and succubi. He lists the signs by which the bewitched and possessed -and those thought most susceptible to sorcery- can be recognized.
The book appeared at a point when medicine, demonic possession, popular healing, and ecclesiastical authority increasingly overlapped: “Two years after the publication of the ‘De morbis veneficis’, Codronchi sent a letter to the Head of the Inquisition in his diocese; the letter contained some extracts of ‘magical and superstitious remedies to be expurgated from the works of physicians’, i.e. the expurgation of forbidden books (ibid. p. 7)
Codronchi’s intended to emancipate medicine from theology. “The book simultaneously emphasizes the metaphysical and theological reality of demons and their power within the physical space, as well as the fundamental role of the physician in fighting them. Therefore, the aim is to establish an autonomous space for medicine, even if, for Codronchi, this happens within the field of theology and not outside it.” (ibid. p. 13).
Hirsch II, p. 47; Waller 2034; De Renzi III, p. 401. Cf. about the printer F. de Franceschi; Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani XXVI, p. 604; Ambrosi, Fabiana. “Giovan Battista Codronchi’s ‘De morbis Veneficis ac Veneficiis’ (1595): Medicine, Exorcism and Inquisition in Counter-Reformation Italy” (2019); Ascarelli, Fernanda and Marco Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia (Florence: Olschki, 1989), pp. 450–52. Not in Adams.