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Armando Maggi. Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 256 pp. $37.50.
Armando Maggi has written an unusual and significant book on Renaissance demonology. Maggi provides a detailed linguistic and rhetorical analysis of five early modern texts on demonology, arguing that these texts are grammar hooks that attempt to delineate how Satan's rhetoric works in and on the human mind. Whereas most historians have focused on the social history of demonology and witchcraft, Maggi wants to explore the psychological, philosophical, and literary manifestations of demonic linguistics as those which subvert and disorder the moral and natural order of creation. According to Maggi, devils are semioticians who have lost their linguistic connection with divinity and who create syllogisms about human behavior and try to infect humans with their unspoken language. Building on the theoretical work of Michel de Certeau and Louis Marin, Maggi explores the paradoxical nature of demonic discourse within Renaissance culture. Maggi's study utilizes the traditional texts on demonology such as Nider's Formicarius, the Malleus maleficarum, and Guazzo's Compendium maleficarum, but has them interact with other almost forgotten texts.
In chapter one, Maggi analyzes Sylvester Prierio's De strigimagarum daemonumque mirandis (1521) as a central text exploring the way the devil constructs his own idiom through a process of semiotic interpretation. Devils devour humans in an act of linguistic expression in which the human mind is possessed. Borrowing from...