1554 DAMHOUDERE CRIMINAL LAW Practice TORTURE WITCH TRIALS Crime WOODCUTS French

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1554 DAMHOUDERE CRIMINAL LAW Practice TORTURE WITCH TRIALS Crime WOODCUTS French:
$4550.00

[Early Printing - Low Countries - Louvain] [Early Illustrated Books] [Criminal Law and Procedure - Middle Ages and Renaissance - Netherlands and Belgium]
[Occult - Witchcraft Trials] [Torture]

Printed in Louvain by Estienne Wauters and Jean Bathen, 1554. FIRST EDITION IN FRENCH!

EXTREMELY RARE! WorldCat and USTC locate only seven copies in libraries worldwide (of which only 2 are in the US).
Only one other copy currently on the market, offered by a leading French bookseller for €23,000 (i.e. about $28,000). The LA Law Library copy of this edition sold at Bonhams, London (March 2014) for £6,250 (i.e. about $10,000).

FIRST FRENCH EDITION OF THE MOST POPULAR MANUAL OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, AND, PERHAPS, THE MOST SPECTACULARLY ILLUSTRATED LAW BOOK OF THE RENAISSANCE, EMBELLISHED WITH 56 MAGNIFICENT LARGE WOODCUTS. The illustrations depict various crimes discussed in the text, as well as a few scenes of torture and executions.
Among the crimes depicted are murder, various kinds of homicide, patricide and suicide, robbery and burglary, forgery, arson, etc.; also included are scenes illustrating fornication, adultery and incest: these are known to have been censored or removed from some copies, but are all present and intact in the complete example offered here!

The woodcuts are attributed to Gerard de Jode (1509 - 1591), a Flemish Renaissance cartographer, engraver and publisher who lived and worked in Antwerp.

This classic Renaissance treatise on Criminal Law, which was first published the same year (1554) in Latin, was THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURE PUBLISHED IN NORTHERN EUROPE. Its author, Joost de Damhoudere, occupied the highest judicial position in Holland during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II.

\"The first treatise on criminal law published outside of Italy was written by a Belgian practitioner, Jodocus Damhouder. His Praxis rerum criminalium, the most important part of which is devoted to procedure, served as a guide for a long time to the practice of the tribunals in the Netherlands and in Germany.\" (A. Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure, p.612)

Praxis rerum criminalium, Damhoudere\'s principal work, was almost entirely plagiarized from an unpublished text by Filips Wielant and a few other Medieval authors. The book was a great success, partly due to de Damhouder\'s novel approach of illustrating the various crimes and legal procedures with woodcuts. He later published a complementary work on civil law, Praxis rerum civilum (1567), which was also an unattributed translation of a work by Wielant.

\"Filips Wielant (1441 - 1520), an inhabitant of Ghent, was the first in the Belgian region to contribute to the increasingly scientific character of criminal law. In 1510, he wrote the first version of his Corte instructie voor de jonghe practisienen in materie criminele, a text that he edited in 1514-1515 and 1519. Joos de Damhouder, an inhabitant of Bruges, came into possession of one of the many manuscripts of the second version of Wielant\'s work. He translated it into Latin, added a legal reference system and had the result published under his own name in 1554 as Praxis rerum criminalium. It immediately gained him international fame that lasted until the eighteenth century and helped to put Flemish criminal law on the map.\" (Jos Monballyu, Six Centuries of Criminal Law: History of Criminal Law, p.17)

Published almost simultaneously in Latin, French and Dutch, the Praxis rerum criminalium was the standard authority throughout the continent for centuries.
Damhoudere\'s treatise is known to have been \"widely distributed in colonial libraries\" (C. Brosseder, The Power of Huacas, p.280), in 16th-century South and Central America, and extensively used as a legal reference in the North American colonies in 17th-century, particularly in the New Netherlands, and Peter Stuyvesant cited it frequently (see Hans Krabbendam, et al., eds., Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, p.144).

The work is remarkable for its detailed and chillingly dispassionate treatment of torture. The establishment by Charles V of the Inquisition in the Netherlands by in 1550 \"inaugurated a period of atrocities perhaps worse than any other in human history. Philip II of Spain found in the Duke of Alva a spirit of merciless executive in the Netherlands. [...] Out of that fierce time aptly came its strange definitive and callous expression in a contemporary book, the Praxis Rerum Criminalium by Josse de Damhoudere, a councilor under both Charles and Philip in the Netherlands, published in French and Latin in 1554 and repeatedly afterwards, remarkable among other things for its matter-of-course attitude to torture, which makes only too intelligible the excesses of practice under the most illustrious and excellent Alva, whose honour and sagacity a preface in some editions incidentally extols.

\"Woodcuts queerly illustrate the varieties of crime, while seven whole chapters on torture make transparent the vices of a system the radical barbarity of which, despite its antiquity of sanction expounded by generations of civilian glossators and jurists, all its touches of humanity - and there were some - were hopeless to redeem. [...] Leading modes indicated are by the rope (i.e. the rack), by water forced through the mouth, by oil internally administered, by burning pitch or lime, by hunger, cold, or the thumbscrew, by mice or parasites that gnawed the flesh, or by fire intensified by basting the body with oil—these were only a few of at least fourteen species of torments. [...] Two pictures complete the impression, one showing a victim girt and twisted with ropes and swung stretched out with weights at his feet, the other an idyllic group of the doctors, knights, priests, old men, children, and prospective mothers, who were benignly excusable from torture.\" (J. Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol.XII, article on torture)

Damhoudere\'s work dedicates a lengthy section to \'the crime of witchcraft\' (based largely on Paulus Grillandus\'s Tractatus de sortilegiis), and its publication had an immediate impact on the witch trials of the time, in which the Praxis rerum criminalium and its translations were cited regularly as the fundamental authority.

\"Damhouder categorized witchcraft as an offense against the Divine Majesty, and considered it a crime worthy of very severe punishment. He also provides a detailed description of the sabbat.\" (Michael Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, p.50)

\"Joost de Damhouder in his Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1554) considered spells, divinations, incantations, and bewitchments as crimes against the Divine Majesty. [...] This crime, which was unheard of in Roman law, was propounded in canon law in the thirteenth century in order to combat heretics. In the subsequent centuries the string of offenses against the divine majesty had expanded into the list that we find in Wielant-De Damhouder: \'Blasphemy, prevarication, apostasy, heresy, simony, sortilege, divination, incantation and the like. The following observation is made of witchcraft: \'Sortilege, divinations, incantations, witchcraft are punished by fire, whereby the ecclesiastical judge sees to the trial and the secular judge to the execution...\' De Damhouder then identifies four kinds of divination: \'geomancy, hydromancy, pyromancy and aeromancy.\' Then there is necromancy, which is accomplished by \'incantations of evil spirits and invocations of idols.\' He then mentions the various designations of those who practice this black magic, which he drew from the Decretum.\" (M. Gijswijt-Hofstra, Witchcraft in the Netherlands: From the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century, p.57)

According to the Praxis, witchcraft was a heinous crime that went unpunished too often because of the ignorance of magistrates. De Damhouder provides detailed practical advice (backed up by examples from actual witch trials and his own court practice) on how to conduct interrogations of suspected witches under torture. These include, for example, the recommendation to shave off all hair and to inspect all orifices of the suspect, in order to uncover hidden magical amulets that would make the wearer withstand torture. He asserts that a single indication of guilt is sufficient for torture to be applied to achieve a confession, though he does recognize that too much torture can produce false confessions.

Damhoudere also includes a long and detailed chapter on \'sodomy.\' \"Following canon law, Damhouder differentiates three forms of sodomia: First, \'mollicies\' (masturbation), secondly same-sex relations and non-generative heterosexual acts, thirdly \'the most heinous of the unnatural sodomitic atrocities: any human, be it a man or a woman, being unchaste with unreasonable animals\'.

Remarkably enough, Damhouder\'s construction of the sodomite does not only include same-sex relations between women, but mentions women abusing beasts. In his interpretation, the Carolina does not advocate different punishments for the three forms of sodomia, but condemns all sodomitic sinners to the stake. According to common law, Damhouder says, the sodomite can be strangled before being burned. For him, the stake is justified with reference to the Old Testament, as God himself had ordered that the sodomitic sins be punished in this way.

\"If men or women perform the sin with unreasonable animals the death penalty has to be firmly insisted on. Following divine and normal secular law the punishment of the sodomitic vice with unreasonable animals is that the animal has to die at the same time as the wrongdoer and both must be burned.\' Damhouder argues that a beast does not possess reason, and therefore cannot perform an act, a sin or a crime of its own volition. However, having been the instrument of a sodomite, the animal\'s elimination is legitimate and necessary.\" (Karel Enenkel, Paulus J. Smith, eds., Early Modern Zoology, p.391-3).

Joost de Damhoudere (1507 - 1581), also referred to as Jost, Josse or Jodocus (de) Damhouder, was a Flemish jurist whose works had a lasting influence on European criminal law. Born in Bruges, Damhoudere studied law in Leuven and Orléans. After obtaining his doctorate in 1533, he practiced law as an advocate in Bruges. In 1537 he was appointed legal advisor of the city authorities, from which office he retired in 1550 to become clerk of the urban criminal court. In 1552 he was made a member of the Dutch Council of Finance by Mary of Habsburg, governor of the Netherlands, and held that office until 1575. He died 1581 in Antwerp, six years after his wife, with whom he had had three daughters and a son.

Bibliographic references:

Brunet II, 479; Fairfax-Murray, French, 683; Pettegree, Netherlandish Books 9318; Pirenne, Bibliographie de l\'histoire de Belgique, 765.

Physical description:

Quarto, textblock measures 202 mm x 142 mm. In contemporary (mid 16th-century) Flemish or Northern-French gilt-paneled calf with floriated arabesque center tool and four smaller rosette corner tools to both borders; spine (rebacked in early 20th century) with five raised bands and a red gilt-lettered title-label.

Pagination: [8], 365, [11] pp.
Signatures: ¶4 A-Z4 AA-ZZ4 AAA4 (preliminary quire A bound at the end, after AAA4).
Collated and COMPLETE.

Main text printed in italic type; each chapter begins with a short summary printed in small roman type. Title page with a woodcut printer\'s device, with two epigraphs or mottos from Pythagoras and Seneca, and with a statement of imperial privilege (\'Auecq Grace & Priuilege de l\'Empereur\').
Illustrated with fifty-six superb near-full-page woodcuts measuring about 15 cm x 11 cm. (most within architectural borders, some with masks, fruit, and grotesques), attributed to Gerard de Jode. Two historiated woodcut initials.

Preliminaries include: statement of printing privilege granted by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V on verso of title; dedication to Charles Baron de Barlemont (leaves ¶2r-3r), table of contents (leaves ¶3r-4v). The second preliminary quire A containing Index (\"La table des faicts et matieres\") is here bound at the end of the volume).

Condition:

Very Good antiquarian condition. Rebacked in early 20th century, with endpapers renewed; binding rubbed, with edge-wear; tips of corners bumped and worn through. Title-leaf with repairs to top and inner margin near gutter, with no loss to title-page, but causing loss of a few words of the Privilege on verso. Closed tear to bottom margin of the dedication leaf ¶2 (without loss). Leaf Y4 with a marginal paper-flaw with a blank piece of paper missing at bottom outer corner (without any loss to text). Occasional light soiling and spotting, light browning to some leaves. In all, a very nice, clean, bright and solid example with ample margins, and in its original (though rebacked) Flemish Renaissance binding.

Please click on thumbnails below to see larger images.