Note 5 — Front matter

Only Archbishop Agobard, of Lyons (779-c. 841), a man in many ways before his time, went so far as to write a book—what we should call a pamphlet—upon the absurdity of the popular superstitions: his “Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis.” The essay “De magicis artibus” (perhaps the first Christian monograph on the subject) by his learned contemporary and colleague, Archbishop Hrabanus Maurus, of Mainz, is far more credulous, and, like most of that great teacher’s work, mainly a compilation. Not forgotten by him are the Scripture texts against witchcraft, beginning with the terrible “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” He treats the same theme in similar fashion in his encyclopædic “De universo” and in his “Penitentiale.” It was later in the same century that another great Frankish archbishop, Hincmar of Rheims, found himself brought face to face with the problem of magic, in his legal response on the divorce of King Lothaire (“De divortio Lotharii regis et Tetbergae reginae”), three of the thirty questions asked him involving it. He discussed the subject at much length, and, though credulously enough, in the main sensibly.