Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

«One of them is a seemingly fundamental feature of witchcraft beliefs themselves: they appear to have been radically incorrect about what could happen in the real world.» — el rasgo del que Clark parte y que hace del problema un problema de lenguaje: las creencias en brujería parecen radicalmente incorrectas sobre lo que podía ocurrir en el mundo real

«No doubt there were sometimes people in early modern communities, deemed witches by their neighbours, who actually sought to cause harm by something called witchcraft.» — con la concesión que hace de inmediato: hubo gente tenida por bruja que sí buscó dañar por algo llamado brujería

«But even so, we are inclined to say that their practices were void of real effects and that the harm must, therefore, have been imaginary.» — y el reparo que sigue: aun así se tiende a decir que aquellas prácticas carecían de efectos y que el daño era imaginario

«In this area of the past, above all, it seems that a particular language was matched up with the world rather badly, allowing its users only to make errors about how things were.» — la formulación del asunto en clave de lenguaje: una lengua mal ajustada al mundo, que solo permitía a sus usuarios equivocarse

«a fundamental shift away from the realist assumption that truths are discovered lying around in the world by sufficiently adept observers who then represent them in language, and towards the anti-realist idea that they are made by language-use itself and then commended by members of speech communities who find them good to believe.» — el desplazamiento que Clark registra en la filosofía: del realismo que descubre verdades en el mundo al antirrealismo que las hace con el uso mismo de la lengua y las acredita en comunidades de habla

«The result has been that phrases like ‘the facts of the matter’ have become highly contentious as guides to the status of beliefs.» — y su efecto sobre el vocabulario del historiador: expresiones como los hechos del asunto se vuelven discutibles como guía del estatuto de una creencia

«With assistance from anti-realism it should now be possible to bypass the long-standing assumption (occasionally, accusation) that, because they were making a huge empirical mistake, their animosity towards witches has to be explained by something other than conviction.» — lo que espera ganar con eso: rodear el supuesto de que, por equivocarse empíricamente, la animosidad contra las brujas tenía que explicarse por algo que no fuera la convicción

«The assumption that beliefs in witchcraft were essentially incorrect—in the way I initially characterised them—has prevailed in witchcraft studies for so long because of an overriding, though largely unspoken, commitment to the realist model of knowledge.» — y de dónde deriva ese supuesto: un compromiso dominante y casi nunca dicho con el modelo realista del conocimiento

«In this model, language is seen as a straightforward reflection of a reality outside itself and utterances are judged to be true or false according to how accurately they describe objective things.» — la definición del modelo realista que da: la lengua como reflejo de una realidad exterior, y los enunciados juzgados verdaderos o falsos según describan cosas objetivas

«This kind of neutral reference to the external world is held to be the only reliable source of meaning and, indeed, the most important property of language.» — con su corolario: la referencia neutra al mundo exterior tenida por única fuente fiable de sentido

«The entity ‘witchcraft’ has turned out to be a non-entity, because for the most part it had no referents in the real world.» — el resultado de someter la brujería a verificación empírica: una no entidad, por carecer casi siempre de referentes en el mundo real

«Rationalism in the history of witchcraft has only been a rather pure version of the dismissal as irrational of any belief not warranted by correspondence to objective fact.» — la lectura que hace del racionalismo en la historia de la brujería: una versión pura del descarte por irracional de toda creencia no garantizada por correspondencia con el hecho objetivo

«But from the perspective of theories of language and meaning, these various approaches do not differ at all; they have all been equally committed to the principle of reference.» — y su tesis sobre los tres enfoques —racionalista, romántico y de ciencias sociales—: desde la teoría del lenguaje no se distinguen, porque los tres se comprometen con el principio de referencia

«Here, the belief in witches was not regarded as fundamentally mistaken—only exaggerated.» — la excepción aparente, el enfoque romántico, que tenía la creencia en brujas por exagerada y no por errónea de raíz

«Rather—and this is the crux of the matter—these distinctions would themselves become irrelevant; the idea of making them would no longer itself make historical sense.» — lo que espera del cambio de noción de lenguaje: que las distinciones entre creencia correcta y errónea dejen de tener sentido histórico

«Witchcraft’s apparent lack of reality as an objective fact would simply become a non-issue, and the consequent need to reduce witchcraft beliefs to some more real aspect of experience would go away.» — y su consecuencia para el oficio: la irrealidad de la brujería deja de ser problema y con ella la necesidad de reducir esas creencias a algo más real de la experiencia

«In post-Saussurean linguistics and semiology it has not been thought necessary to give any attention to the problem of reference to a real world, and those who do give it attention have been said to commit the ‘referential fallacy’.» — el término que toma de la lingüística postsaussureana para el vicio contrario, la falacia referencial

«It does not imply the absurdity of the non-existence of objective things in space and time—including things in the past—only their incapacity to present themselves to us as meaningful.» — el límite con que acota la prioridad del signo sobre el objeto: no niega que existan cosas objetivas en el espacio y el tiempo, solo su capacidad de presentarse como significativas

«Nor does it suggest that the external world cannot, ‘once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs’.» — y la segunda acotación: tampoco niega que el mundo exterior cause creencias una vez que uno se programó con una lengua

«All that is insisted upon, to borrow Richard Rorty’s terms, is the contingency of language.» — lo único que sostiene, con término tomado de Richard Rorty, es la contingencia del lenguaje

«What this amounts to is that human beings make truths (as well as errors) by making the sentences to express them, and the sign systems in which to say the sentences.» — la fórmula de esa contingencia: los humanos hacen verdades —y errores— al hacer las oraciones y los sistemas de signos en que decirlas

«No language-as-a-whole can be privileged over any other on these grounds.» — con la conclusión que le sigue: ninguna lengua entera puede privilegiarse sobre otra por esos motivos

«We may continue, then, to use realist notions of truth and, indeed, reference, to connect our own language to the world but, on this account, these notions can relate only to our particular view of it, where they help to celebrate its internal success in making sense of things.» — y la salvedad que deja abierta: se puede seguir usando verdad y referencia, pero solo respecto de la propia visión del mundo

«At this point, it is tempting to re-emphasize what was implied at the outset: that the historian of witchcraft is in particular need of these views of language because witchcraft beliefs are an obvious example of signs that had no referents in the real world.» — por qué el historiador de la brujería necesita estas nociones más que otro: las creencias en brujería son un caso obvio de signos sin referente real

«Naturally, those who believed in witchcraft thought that their beliefs did correspond with reality.» — y el reverso que consigna: quienes creían en la brujería sí pensaban que sus creencias correspondían con la realidad

«Whether witchcraft beliefs did 1 fact correspond with reality becomes, therefore, a question not worth asking—because there is simply no way to arrive at an extra-linguistic answer to it.» — la pregunta que declara no valer la pena, por no haber respuesta extralingüística; el OCR imprime *did 1 fact* donde el texto lleva in fact

«The views about language I have been summarizing have been intended to apply to a// language systems—not merely those systems sustaining beliefs with no apparent referents, or concerned with obviously arbitrary matters like social institutions and culturally constituted behaviour, but those dealing with the ‘hardest’ sciences and the most concrete claims about physical, material things.» — el alcance que reclama para esa noción de lenguaje: no solo los sistemas sin referente aparente sino las ciencias más duras; el OCR imprime *a//* por all

«Nowhere in the book that follows, then, is any attention paid to the referential truth or falsity of witchcraft beliefs, other than as, themselves, subjects of debate in early modern Europe.» — y la abstención que se impone para todo el libro: en ningún lugar se atiende a la verdad o falsedad referencial de las creencias en brujería, salvo en cuanto ellas mismas fueron objeto de debate en la época

«Whether witchcraft was real or unreal is entirely irrelevant to what I have to say about these beliefs, except, again, as one of the questions they were deployed to consider.» — repetida en la misma plana: que la brujería fuera real o irreal es irrelevante para lo que dice de esas creencias

«It seems important, therefore, to devote a preliminary sequence of chapters to those features of early modern language systems—logical relationships of opposition, metaphors of inversion, schemes of classification, taxonomies, rhetorical strategies, and the like—that enabled witchcraft to mean anything at all.» — de ahí la parte primera del libro, dedicada a los rasgos del lenguaje de la época —oposición lógica, metáforas de inversión, esquemas de clasificación, taxonomías, estrategias retóricas— que permitieron a la brujería significar algo

«I shall be concentrating in these early chapters on the aspects of devil-worship in witchcraft, notably the concept of the witches’ sabbat, partly because these lay at the centre of attention in many of the texts under review, but also because of precisely that quality that has made them such a problem to modern interpreters—their apparent failure to refer.» — y el objeto que elige para esos capítulos, el sabbat, por dos razones: estaba en el centro de los textos y es justo lo que más problema da al intérprete moderno, su aparente falta de referencia

«Examining beliefs in such matters, while ignoring altogether the ontological status of their contents, will, I hope, have the effect of forcing attention instead onto the structural conditions for their existence and development.» — lo que espera ganar ignorando el estatuto ontológico del contenido: forzar la atención hacia las condiciones estructurales de existencia y desarrollo de esas creencias

«In fact, what becomes quickly apparent about witchcraft as a category in language are the relations of difference that were everywhere at work when early modern Europeans construed it.» — lo que Clark dice hallar de inmediato al mirar la brujería como categoría de lengua: relaciones de diferencia por todas partes

«Ironically, it turns out to be a classic example of a Saussurean sign, with its meaning located not positively in the actions of witches but negatively and contrastively in relation to the meanings of other actions known at the time.» — y su adjudicación: la brujería resulta un signo saussureano de manual, con el sentido puesto no en los actos de las brujas sino, por contraste, en el de otros actos conocidos entonces

«Witchcraft was construed dialectically in terms of what it was not; what was significant about it was not its substance but the system of oppositions that it established and fulfilled.''» — la tesis en su forma más corta: la brujería se construía dialécticamente por lo que no era, y lo significativo no era su sustancia sino el sistema de oposiciones que establecía

«The witch—like Satan himself—could only be a contingent being, always ‘a function of another, not an independent entity’.'?» — con la consecuencia sobre la figura misma: la bruja, como Satán, solo podía ser un ser contingente, función de otro y no entidad independiente

«The peculiar fascination of the concept of witchcraft, then, is that it displays on its sleeve, so to speak, the very means of its formation.» — por qué le interesa el concepto: exhibe a la vista los medios mismos de su formación

«We could say that to tackle ‘witchcraft’ as if it were an isolable problem would be like someone unfamiliar with the game of chess observing a series of movements and then writing a book on ‘bishops’.» — el símil con que rechaza tratar la brujería como problema aislable: escribir un libro sobre los alfiles tras ver una partida de ajedrez sin conocer el juego

«Presented as a natural and unchanging truth, demonism became so dependent on particular linguistic strategies—particularly, binary oppositions—that it came to be seen as the product, rather than the subject-matter, of its own language.» — lo que sostiene sobre el demonismo: presentado como verdad natural e inmutable, quedó tan pendiente de la oposición binaria que acabó viéndose como producto, y no como materia, de su propio lenguaje

«Similarly witches use these revelries of the devil for their own advantage, and work their spells about the time of the New Year.» — según Clark, el Malleus maleficarum de Kramer y Sprenger empareja el carnaval de los malos cristianos con la brujería: las brujas aprovechan esas fiestas del diablo y obran sus hechizos por el Año Nuevo. Es el segundo epígrafe del capítulo segundo

«But except for a few well-known texts, read largely in isolation, their voluminous writings were neglected by historians, who preferred to focus on the social and institutional configurations of ‘witch-hunting’, together with the patterns of prosecution in the various European regions and the local circumstances that produced them.» — el prefacio describe el estado del campo del que parte: los tratados de demonología estaban leídos sueltos y la investigación miraba la persecución, no los textos

«If anything, there was a reaction against studying the intellectual history of these episodes, reflecting an annoyance with the way earlier generations of scholars, especially in Germany around the turn of this century and in America thereafter, had done little else—and done it in a confessional and wholly rationalistic spirit.» — y nombra la reacción contra la historia intelectual del asunto, atribuida al tono confesional y racionalista de la erudición alemana de fin del siglo XIX y de la estadounidense posterior

«I had no wish to revive this tradition or reclaim some kind of priority for demonology.» — Clark separa su proyecto del de aquella tradición: no reclama primacía para la demonología

«Over a dozen years later, I am still confident that demonology ought to have something to offer those seeking to explain the witch trials.» — lo que sí mantiene doce años después es que la demonología tiene algo que ofrecer a quien busque explicar los juicios

«But the connection cannot any longer be seen as straightforward and it is not one that I explore in any direct way.» — con el límite puesto en la misma página: el nexo ya no puede darse por directo y el libro no lo explora por esa vía

«But several important studies—notably Robin Briggs’s Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witch-craft—have now confirmed that most witchcraft accusations and prosecutions were initiated in ways that precluded the immediate impact of intellectuals, even if the subsequent proceedings could be affected by consultations with academic jurists and theologians.» — y el apoyo que cita para ese límite es Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: las acusaciones arrancaban por caminos que dejaban fuera a los intelectuales, aunque el proceso posterior sí pudiera consultarlos

«In offering this survey of beliefs I am, therefore, under no illusions about their possible lack of correlation with events (as usually understood; the enunciation ofa belief is, of course, an event, while events are unintelligible without reference to beliefs).» — la reserva sobre la correlación entre creencias y sucesos incluye su propio paréntesis: enunciar una creencia también es un suceso

«The best way to do this seemed to be to read all the published texts in question, beginning in the fifteenth century when the learned debate about witchcraft really began and ending in the early eighteenth century when it finally lost momentum.» — el criterio de corpus que declara: leer todos los textos publicados del siglo XV al XVIII temprano, del arranque del debate culto a su pérdida de impulso

«But I prefer not to think in terms of such correlations at all, hoping thereby to break the dominance that the study of witchcraft prosecutions has had for so long over the interpretation of witchcraft texts.» — y el motivo por el que renuncia a las correlaciones: romper el dominio que el estudio de los procesos ejerció sobre la lectura de los textos

«If it is unwise to treat demonology as a key to the history of the trials, it is also a distortion to make it simply their reflection.» — la simetría con que acota las dos tentaciones, la demonología como llave de los juicios y la demonología como su reflejo

«Witchcraft theory was not, however, written in isolation and ought not to be read in that way.» — la premisa de lectura: la teoría de la brujería no se escribió aislada

«I was influenced, in particular, by a remark of Alasdair MacIntyre’s (also put to use by Robert Bartlett in his book on medieval ordeals): “To say that a belief is rational is to talk about how it stands in relation to other beliefs.’'» — la fuente de esa premisa, que el prefacio adjudica a Alasdair MacIntyre y señala usada antes por Robert Bartlett en su libro sobre las ordalías medievales; el OCR corrompe los signos de cita del pasaje

«It soon became apparent that demonology was a case in point, and that witchcraft beliefs at this level were sustained by a whole range of other intellectual commitments.» — de ahí la tesis de trabajo: las creencias en brujería de ese nivel se sostenían sobre otros compromisos intelectuales

«In effect, demonology was a composite subject consisting of discussions about the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity, and the nature of political authority and order.» — y la composición del asunto que da al libro sus cuatro partes: naturaleza, historia, pureza religiosa y autoridad política

«Equally, by theorizing about witches, they made important contributions to these same debates; the relationships I shall be exploring were very much complementary ones.» — con la relación planteada en dos sentidos: teorizar sobre brujas también aportaba a esos mismos debates

«So seamlessly does demonology merge with these other debates—so much do they cease to be other debates—that I would like to propose, not the death of the author, but the dissolution of the ‘demonologist’.» — la propuesta de nomenclatura, dicha con el guiño a Barthes: no la muerte del autor sino la disolución del demonólogo

«More seriously, the inference seemed to be that those who wrote about witchcraft were somehow interested in it to the exclusion of anything else; this was their speciality, and an aberrant one at that.» — la objeción de fondo a la etiqueta: hace de la brujería una especialidad, y además aberrante

«If we go on calling them ‘demonologists’, we run the risk of setting them apart from these more general pursuits—indeed, from precisely the things that help us understand why they were interested in witchcraft at all and how they could believe in its reality.» — y el costo que le atribuye: separa a esos autores de las ocupaciones que explican por qué se interesaron en la brujería

«What follows, then, is not a book about ‘witch-hunting’—although it might be said to be about witch-hating—nor one about ‘demonologists’.» — el deslinde de género con que el prefacio dice qué libro no es, con la salvedad del odio a las brujas

«My aim, therefore, is to make them more intelligible in themselves but, in doing this, to shed light on the larger intellectual histories to which they belonged.» — y el objetivo doble: hacer inteligibles esas creencias y, con ello, alumbrar las historias intelectuales mayores a las que pertenecen

«Not to do this was, however, a deliberate policy (defended in a short ‘Postscript to the book), designed to give prominence to demonology as a working system of belief at the height of its powers to persuade, rather than to those responsible (in some moralistic sense) for either its creation or its overthrow.» — el prefacio declara como política deliberada no fichar a los responsables de la demonología, sino la demonología como sistema de creencia en funciones, y remite al Postscript del volumen

«I have certainly tried to rescue demonology from the rationalistic opprobrium once directed at it, but only in the interests of historical symmetry;» — y acota el rescate: sacarla del oprobio racionalista solo por simetría histórica

«I do not think it worth while to adopt any particular moral stance with regard to the beliefs and behaviour of people living in historically remote societies with standards quite unlike our own, preferring to conserve my moral energies for issues closer to home.» — la abstención moral que se impone frente a sociedades históricamente remotas, con la razón que le pone: reservar sus energías morales para asuntos más cercanos

«Two, at least, have had an important influence on my work—Sydney Anglo, who will not approve of some of the things I have said but bears the responsibility for introducing me to my subject and guiding my early efforts» — los agradecimientos nombran a Sydney Anglo como quien lo introdujo al asunto, y de una vez consignan el desacuerdo: no aprobará algunas de las cosas dichas

«Peter Elmer has been a constant and generous source of references and ideas, drawn from his immensely exciting work on witchcraft in England.» — y a Peter Elmer como fuente constante de referencias e ideas sobre la brujería en Inglaterra

«The personal encouragement of Quentin Skinner has been of particular significance to me, and Keith Thomas, who initially encouraged me to write the book and who read the whole of it in draft, has likewise been a great support and inspiration.» — Quentin Skinner y Keith Thomas quedan consignados por su papel en el libro: Thomas lo animó a escribirlo y leyó el borrador entero

«I could not have asked for a more enthusiastic or more forbearing publisher than Tony Morris.» — y Tony Morris como el editor del volumen

«ALMost without exception the sources for this book are themselves printed books.» — la nota bibliográfica declara la naturaleza del corpus: casi sin excepción, libros impresos

«The indispensable bibliographical guide to those concerned directly with demonology is Witchcraft: Catalogue of the Witchcraft Collection in Cornell University Library, intro. R. H: Robbins, ed. Martha J. Crowe (Millwood, NY, 1977).» — y la guía de referencia que dice haber usado, el catálogo de la colección de brujería de la Cornell University Library editado por Martha J. Crowe

«Three older bibliographies on which I also draw are: Eberhard David Hauber, Bibliotheca, acta et scripta magica (3 vols.; Lemgo, 1738-45); Johann Georg Theodor Grasse, Brbliotheca magica et pneumatica (Leipzig, 1843); and Robert Yve-Plessis, Essai d'une bibliographie frangaise méthodique et raisonnée de la sorcellerie et de la possession démoniaque (Paris, 1900).» — las tres bibliografías antiguas de las que también parte, con sus fechas; el OCR imprime *Brbliotheca* y *Grasse* por Graesse

«Additional items for France and Germany respectively can be found in the list of ‘Sources imprimées’ in Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIF siécle (Paris, 1968), 24-70, and in the bibliography compiled by Anneliese Staff of the holdings of witchcraft literature in the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbiittel published in Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Ulbricht (eds.), Vom Unfug des Hexen-Processes: Gegner der Hexenverfolgung von Fohann Weyer bis Friedrich Spee (Wiesbaden, 1992), 341-91.» — y de dónde saca lo francés y lo alemán: Mandrou para Francia y la bibliografía de la Herzog August Bibliothek de Wolfenbüttel, que el OCR rinde *Wolfenbiittel*

«For Part I, I found many references in Lynn Thorndike’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols.; New York, 1923-58), and for general biographical information I resorted to Zedler’s Universallexikon, Ferdinand Hoefer’s Nouvelle Biographie Universelle, and the various standard collections of national biographies.» — para la parte primera declara haberse apoyado en la Historia de Lynn Thorndike, y para lo biográfico en el Universallexikon de Zedler y en la Nouvelle Biographie Universelle de Hoefer

«Every source cited in the notes to each chapter is also listed in the bibliography, which is divided simply into items before and after 1800.» — el criterio con que arma la bibliografía: una sola división, antes y después de 1800

«In the case of early modern publications, the versions of authors’ names and the orthography of their book-titles that I have adopted have been taken, in the first instance, either from the Cornell catalogue or from the catalogues of the libraries in which I read them, with the actual title-pages acting as final arbiters.» — y el criterio de grafía para los impresos antiguos, con las portadas como árbitro final por encima de los catálogos

«This means, for example, that many of the accents and capitalizations that would be found in modern French and German may be missing from my citations.» — con la consecuencia declarada: pueden faltar acentos y mayúsculas del francés y el alemán modernos

«The dates of publication are those of the editions actually used, and not necessarily the dates of their first appearance in print, although I have usually indicated discrepancies of this kind.» — y el aviso sobre las fechas: son las de las ediciones efectivamente usadas, no las de la primera aparición

«All the quotations from early sources in English or in other languages have been given with spellings and punctuation unmodernized, with the exception, again, of the customary alterations to letters and expansions.» — la nota bibliográfica declara además que las citas de fuentes antiguas van sin modernizar ortografía ni puntuación

«Biblical quotations are taken from the English Bible in the ‘authorized version’ of 1611, but, except in the cases of passages from the Apocrypha, are given with modern spellings.» — y que la Biblia se cita por la versión autorizada de 1611, con ortografía moderna salvo en los pasajes de los apócrifos

«Saussure’s originality was to have insisted on the fact that language as a total system is complete at every moment, no matter what happens to have been altered in ita moment before.» — el epígrafe del capítulo primero, tomado de The Prison-House of Language de Fredric Jameson, atribuye a Saussure la idea del sistema completo en cada instante

«language is for him a perpetual present, with all the possibilities of meaning implicit in its every moment.» — continuación del mismo epígrafe: para Saussure la lengua es un presente perpetuo con todas sus posibilidades de sentido implícitas