?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
Weyer [or] Wier, Johann (1515-1588) Opera Omnia.
Amsterdam: Petrus Vanden Berge, 1660.
First collected edition, quarto, title page printed in red and black with engraved vignette, fine engraved portrait of the author by Pieter Holsteyn on *4 verso, with seven text woodcuts depicting plants, medical equipment, and other subjects in the text, an engraved portrait of Weyer's patient Barbara at the age of ten on page 760; bound in full contemporary parchment over boards, laced case construction, contents a little dusty, otherwise very good, contemporary inscriptions dated 1674 on ffep and pastedown, 7 3/4 x 6 in.
Weyer, a Dutch demonologist, physician, and follower of Agrippa, was one of the earliest respected scholars to publicly decry the persecution of people accused of practicing witchcraft. He criticized the Malleus Maleficarum, preferring to describe people categorized as witches as melancholic or mentally ill. By his reasoning, practicing witchcraft is literally impossible. Norman describes his work, De Praestigiis Daemonum et Incantationibus ac Venificiis, as "the first major European work to take an empirical, scientific approach to the study of mental illness."
![Weyer [or] Wier, Johann (1515-1588) Opera Omnia.](https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/full//675\787675.jpg)
