PREFACE.

A decorative headpiece consisting of two rows of stylized floral or leaf-like ornaments. Below the title, a large ornate woodcut initial 'A' entwined with vine and leaf motifs.

Amy Reader, just as I have no doubt that the story of Polydamas A famous Greek athlete from the 5th century BCE, known for his immense strength; he died attempting to hold up the roof of a collapsing cave. is known to you—who, wishing to stop a heavy boulder rolling from the top of a mountain, was crushed beneath it—so too am I quite sure that you will not fail to apply this example to my own purpose, in order to judge the risk and the difficulty of this undertaking of mine. This task might seem even more perilous to you if you had seen, as I have, how deeply these common opinions—which I undertake to combat and overthrow—are rooted in the imagination original: "fantaisie"; in this period, it refers to the faculty of the mind that forms images, often associated with delusion. of certain historians, and obstinately maintained by the majority of our demonographers Demonographers: writers or "experts" who documented the nature and hierarchy of demons and the practice of witchcraft. These men, not being of a sufficiently strong and well-tempered constitution original: "complexion"; the early modern medical theory that a person's physical and mental health was determined by the balance of bodily fluids or "humors."...