[Glanvill on Witches] Saducismus Triumphatus – Joseph Glanvill

Saducismus [Sadducismus] Triumphatus: Or, a Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. In Two Parts, the First Treating Their Possibility, and the Second of Their Real Existence. Not commonly available in commerce. An overall Fair to Good Minus copy. A charming and enchanting item, despite its flaws.

Fourth Edition, Octavo. Size: 5 x 7 ½ in. Two parts bound together in one volume, as issued. Full calf 19th century binding, upper joints split but reasonably sound, scarred but functional. Shadows at endpapers from acid in binder’s adhesive. Light foxing and soiling throughout. Partial damp stain at upper edge of block touching preliminaries through page 28. First of two frontispieces lacking, second present at verso second part title page. First title in black and red. Full page plate following text which depicts two stones referenced with the sections on the Swedish witches. Two pages following stone illustration are advertisements of books printed by W. Mears and J. Hooke. Stone illustration and advertisement separated. Occasional marginalia (see recto p. 161).

In Saducismus Triumphatus, Glanvill sought to place the existence of apparitions and sorcery on what he considered an unshakeable foundation of science and philosophy.

Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) was an unlikely but influential champion of belief in witchcraft. He was both a skeptical philosopher as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a staunch defender of the reality of witchcraft. Together with Henry More, he produced Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), an expanded version of his earlier Philosophical Considerations concerning Witchcraft (1666). This book became the most influential English defense of witchcraft and apparitions, going through five editions by 1726, and widely regarded as having placed belief in witches on a firm “scientific and philosophical” footing.

Glanvill’s primary objective was not merely to prove the existence of witches, but to defend the entire spiritual foundation of religion against rising materialist and atheistic thought. In the 17th-century mindset, disbelief in witches and spirits was seen as a direct step towards denying the soul, the afterlife, and God Himself. Glanvill viewed witchcraft as the “outworks of Religion,” or a tangible, contemporary evidence of supernatural activity in an age where Protestantism had largely relegated miracles to the apostolic past, leaving the Devil as the primary supernatural agent in the modern world. Thus, for Glanvill, defending witches was synonymous with defending the reality of the spiritual realm and, by extension, the truth of Christianity.

Glanvill’s work reached far beyond England. His arguments were so robust that they were used by the Rev. John Hale in New England to justify the existence of witches during the period of the Salem witch trials in the U.S., even as Hale began to protest against the use of “spectral evidence.” Glanvill remains a striking figure of his age because he successfully married the “rational” tone of the late 17th century with ancient, pictorial beliefs in demonology.

(Kittredge, George L. Some Notes on Witchcraft, American Antiquarian Society, 1907, at pp. 158-159. Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background, 1949, At pp. 194-204.)