9. An Inconvenient Bodin: Latour and the Treasure Seekers

Abstract

The admirers of Jean Bodin’s political philosophy might be surprised by his Demonomanie des sorciers and his forceful attempt to prove the reality of witchcraft. This opposition between the enlightened modern and the superstitious premodern makes his thought a prime example to confront to the theory of modernity proposed by Bruno Latour. This essay attempts such an exploration, and focuses on narratives of treasure seeking in Bodin’s text, to understand the notion of nature that they bespeak, a nature entirely worked through by demons. Looking at Bodin as a premodern also allows us to complicate Latour’s account by highlighting what the resurgence of thinking about witchcraft in late sixteenth-century Europe reveals about a larger argument about Nature, and the ways in which humans should deal with it.