FROMMANN, Johannes.

First edition of Frommann’s Tractatus de fascinatione (1675), an extensive treatise on the topic of ‘fascination’, or the enchantment of people. Johann Christian Frommann (1623 – 1695) was a German physician born in Saxe-Coburg. The Tractatus is divided into three parts on the ‘vulgar’, ‘natural’, and ‘magical’ (or demoniacal) types of fascination. The title-page alludes to the work’s intended audience: theologians, lawyers, doctors, and those provincial priests ‘who must often contend with superstition not just regarding fascination but also regarding the verbal cure of diseases’ (‘curatio morborum verbalis’).

A belief in the power of ‘fascination’ – the practice of charming or enchanting another individual through the power of the gaze – is present in most ages and cultures, from the ‘evil eye’ which Virgil’s Menalcas believes has fascinated his lambs (Third Eclogue) to Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism. The topic clearly interested early modern thinkers and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw many treatises on ‘fascination’ published, examples of which include Leonardo Vairo’s De fascino (1589) and Juan Lázaro Gutiérrez Opusculum de fascino (1653). Among these works, Frommann’s Tractatus de fascinatione (1675) stands out as perhaps the most sweeping and inclusive. Frommann believed that fascination affected not just humans and animals, as the ancients held, but also vegetables, minerals, and other inanimate objects. His compilation is remarkable both because of its thoroughness and because of the eccentricity of some of its claims (in Appendix IV, for instance, Frommann sets out to prove that the devil is God’s monkey).

Frommann’s treatise is also notable for its mixture of rational and supernatural discourse. Though fascination was typically considered as effected by the gaze of the person casting the spell, Frommann ‘denies the possibility either of visual or vocal fascination … and holds that magicians and witches of themselves cannot injure by sight or voice or touch’ (Thorndike, 574). On the other hand, he also maintains that ‘those who ridicule magic and demons are either magicians themselves or atheists’, and that diabolical fascination can and did occur: ‘the devil frequently fascinated the phantasy’ (ibid, 575).

Valentin Ferdinand Freiherr von Gudenus (1679-1758) was a German jurist and historian. He was born and studied in Mainz; appointed assessor of the Imperial Chamber Court of Charles VI in 1724, he remained in this position until his death. Between 1743 and 1747 von Gudenus published the first four volumes of his Codex diplomaticus, ‘not only one of the most important diplomatic collections of the 18th century, but still indispensable today because of the many now-lost documents it contains’ (NDB).

The ms. inscription above the bookplate reveals that von Gudenus purchased or received the book in 1733, the tenth year of his assessorship of the Imperial Chamber Court. The bookplate itself is dated 1732.