In his treatise on witchcraft De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Jean Bodin (1530–1596) tells the story of a friend who, with a group of companions, went looking for buried enchanted treasures in Lyon. Their quest was unsuccessful as the spirits guarding the treasure scared them off with a horrific scream. Such a story might surprise those more used to thinking of Jean Bodin as a precursor of the rational Enlightenment. How can we make sense of this story and of the worldview it bespeaks? The present study will suggest that the work of Bruno Latour can help us answer such a question, and that, in return, Bodin's text can present a fresh perspective on Latour.

The Early Modern Bifurcation of Nature

For those who study the early modern period, the work of Bruno Latour—and that of the many scholars who are building on his insights—is of special interest, as Louisa Mackenzie and others have argued. Latour's works, including We Have Never Been Modern and Pandora's Hope, analyse early modern ‘revolutions’, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution, in order to question the validity of our collective construction of modernity. Conversely, the study of early modern culture can help shape our reading of Latour. According to Latour, the invention of Western modernity is rooted in a representation of nature which itself based on an originary bifurcation, a concept borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead, who explored how early modern philosophers and their followers created a clear and ever-widening separation between ‘what is in the mind, and what is in nature’.