Antipalus Maleficiorum (Trithemius’s Catalogue of Magic Books)

The Antipalus Maleficiorum (roughly “The Adversary of Sorcery”) is a treatise against harmful magic that the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius composed in 1508. Its larger purpose was pastoral and polemical: to explain how witches and sorcerers work harm and how Christians can defend themselves through prayer, sacraments and lawful remedies. For historians of magic, however, its most valuable section is the bibliographical chapter in Book I, in which Trithemius lists the necromantic and image-magic books he claims to have seen. The online edition presents that chapter with Latin text, English translation and notes identifying surviving copies. The list is divided into books of outright magic, which Trithemius condemns, and books he regards as suspect, chiefly works on astrological images and talismans. Many titles can be matched to manuscripts that still exist: the Clavicula Salomonis, Picatrix, Sepher Raziel, the Almadel, the Liber Iuratus, Berengar Ganell’s Summa sacre magice, the Lucidarium attributed to Peter of Abano and numerous Hermetic image treatises. Others are known only from his description. Because Trithemius was writing just before printing transformed the circulation of these texts, his catalogue is a snapshot of the late-medieval magical library and is routinely cited in modern studies of the grimoire tradition. The work was not printed until 1605, nearly a century after the author’s death, when it appeared among his collected minor writings.

What it contains

• A polemical treatise on the causes of sorcery and defences against it
• Book I, chapter 3: an annotated list of magical books Trithemius had seen
• A section of explicitly magical (largely Solomonic and necromantic) books, about forty-three titles
• A section of ‘suspect’ works on astrological images, rings and talismans
• Incipits and brief judgements that allow many titles to be matched to surviving manuscripts
• Remedies against bewitchment drawn from Church practice