From Black Magic to Heresy: A Doctrinal Leap in the Pontificate of John XXII

Abstract

In 1320, Pope John XXII launched a doctrinal enterprise of some import: the assimilation of practices of black magic into the crime of heresy. As was his custom, John sought the opinion of experts before taking a final decision that would entail, among other consequences, extending the jurisdiction of the inquisition to cover cases of black magic. In his recent study on medieval demonology, Alain Boureau has suggested that the question that truly concerned the pope was not witchcraft or ritual magic per se, but the role of the devil in these practices. Boureau based his thesis on a wide-ranging theory of late medieval representations of individual subjectivity and society, on the principle of “pact” or covenant between two free-willing parties. Away from old, static forms of social hierarchization, the fourteenth century favors a contractual structure that places the emphasis on the voluntary nature of the relation between individuals in society and between humans and God. Boureau develops his argument on the basis of the response offered by one of the members of the 1320 commission, the Franciscan Enrico del Carretto. Bishop of Lucca, Enrico had been among the experts in charge of judging the orthodoxy of the Franciscan Spirituals in 1318, and had also participated in the discussion towards the preparation of the bullCum inter nonnullos. We are thus in the presence of one of John XXII's curial cohort. Boureau accords particular value to Enrico's response because he is the only member of the commission who seems to draw attention to the real efficacity of demonic causality in black magic, thus offering the first explicit evidence of thetournant demonologiquetaking place in the medieval Church between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.

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