Heresy, Sorcery and the Boundaries of the Preternatural in the Early Modern Kingdom of Naples

The article examines the legal and intellectual efforts implemented in the
Kingdom of Naples between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries
to defend one’s competences in the crimes of sorcery and to define the limits
of the devil’s agency. The analysis pertains to two distinct yet interconnected
contexts. The first context includes secular as well as ecclesiastical courts of law
that oversaw trials for sorcery, while the second context concerns a philosophical
debate on magic. The first part of this article will focus on the legal consequences
of the Church’s attempt to expand the definition of what was considered heretical
in a fight against heresy that increasingly became a fight against superstition. The
second part of this article will analyze the attempt on the part of the Neapolitan
jurist Costantino Grimaldi to develop a method to better distinguish the natural
from the preternatural agencies, in order to limit the coercive authority of the
church on matters of sorcery.