Two treatises against astrologers, nigromancers and alchemists

Appointed Inquisitor General of the Crown of Aragon in 1357, famous for his huge Directorium Inquisitorum (1376), which was to become the procedural handbook for the Spanish Inquisition until the seventeenth century, the Dominican friar Nicholas Eymerich (ca. 1317-1399) stood out for his diligence, his severity and his inflexibility in the exercise of his office. But his eagerness and relentlessness to hunt down all those he deemed heretical, especially the Fraticelli, Beguards and Lullists, so angered King John I of Aragon that in April 1393 he was sentenced to exile. Yet this did not dampen his zeal, which he directed towards writing. Indeed, having found refuge at the papal court in Avignon, he wrote there in 1395 and 1396 Against Ignorant Astrologers and Against Nigromancers Who Wrongly Judge of Hidden Things and Against Alchemists, two treatises which are his ultima verba on the subject, and in which he endeavours to demonstrate that both astrology and divinatory arts as well as alchemy savour of heresy because they are grounded or fatally end in a covenant with the devil, and therefore fall under the inquisitorial jurisdiction.