Peter Goldschmidt

Title page of "Infernal Morpheus" (1698)

Frontispiece of the "Infernal Morpheus"

Peter Goldschmidt (born April 4, 1662 in Husum ; † 1713 near Hamburg ) was a German Protestant theologian and, as an author, a staunch defender of the belief in witches .

Life

Goldschmidt was the son of goldsmith Matthias Petersen, who died when Goldschmidt was 14 years old. The boy was taken in by the archdeacon Simon Rechelius, who presumably enabled him to attend the Husum school of scholars and then study theology in Kiel , which Goldschmidt accepted in 1680 or 1681. In 1690 he found a job as vice-principal in Hadersleben , then from 1691 he was pastor in Sterup , which was then Danish .

During his time in Sterup, Goldschmidt wrote two pamphlets directed against Balthasar Bekker . In it he countered Bekker's view that the devil could not cause any direct effects in the material world with sharp polemics and tried to prove the existence of ghosts , ghosts and phenomena such as the second face , which he attributed to the work of the devil. "Infernal Morpheus", the title of the first pamphlet, refers to "The Infernal Proteus, or Thousand Artificial Adversaries", a work by the Nuremberg polymath Erasmus Francisci that was very well received at the time . The second pamphlet was directed specifically against Christian Thomasius , a defender of Bekker, and his work "De Crimine Magiae", published in 1701.

After the pastor's office in Sterup, Goldschmidt was cathedral preacher in Güstrow from 1707 and superintendent in Parchim from 1709 . A doctorate in Frankfurt an der Oder did not materialize because Goldschmidt was charged with irregularities in his office in 1711 and subsequently suspended . The family, impoverished by the confiscation of their property, was taken in near Hamburg, where Goldschmidt ran a pub and died around Easter 1713.

Works

• Petri Goldschmids Pastoris Sterupensis Höllischer Morpheus, which is made known through the apparitions that have happened, whose ghosts and rumble-ghosts So bithero have in part not been mentioned and noticed by any single scribes ... Liebernickel, Hamburg 1698, digitized . 2nd ed. 1704 Google .
• Petri Goldschmidts… Rejected witch and magician advocate, that is, Wolg-based destruction of the foolish project of Hn. Christiani Thomasii ... and all those who want to speak the word to the devilish witchcraft through their super-clever fantasy crickets ... Liebernickel, Hamburg 1705

literature

• Jan Ulbe Terpstra: Petrus Goldschmidt from Husum. A North Frisian opponent Balthasar Bekkers and Thomasius. In: Euphorion. 59, 1965, pp. 361-383.
• Erich Kuhlmann: Goldschmidt, Peter . In: Olaf Klose (Ed.): Schleswig-Holsteinisches Biographisches Lexikon. Volume 3. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1974, pp. 128f.
• Balthasar Bekker : The enchanted world. von Dahlen, Amsterdam 1693. New edition with an introduction ed. by Wiep van Bunge. Volume 1. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1997, pp. 43-49 ( Freethinkers of the European Enlightenment. 7.1).
• Annemarie Nooijen: “A monument to our great Bekker”? Balthasar Bekkers Betoverde Weereld in the German lands between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment (= studies on the history and culture of Northwest Europe. Volume 20). Münster 2009, p. 240f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Goldschmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Markus Meumann: Peter Goldschmidt. In: Gudrun Gersmann, Katrin Moeller, Jürgen-Michael Schmidt (eds.): Lexicon on the history of witch persecution (historicum.net)