Glanvill

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Joseph Glanvill was a seventeenth-century English clergyman and writer known for defending belief in witches and ghosts
2. A surname borne by a 17th-century English cleric and author who wrote on witchcraft and the reality of spirits
3. The name of a 1600s English churchman and philosopher remembered chiefly for his arguments in favour of the supernatural

Etymology: Ranulf de Glanvill, Chief Justiciar of England under Henry II, is the man behind the name. The treatise "Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae," written around 1187 to 1189 and usually cited as "Glanvill," is the earliest systematic book on English common law. Its authorship is traditionally credited to him, and legal historians often still use the name for the work. A second bearer of the name, the English clergyman Joseph Glanvill (1636 to 1680), was a Fellow of the Royal Society who defended belief in witches. His "Saducismus Triumphatus," published posthumously in 1681, argued against skeptics of witchcraft and remains a well-known source on the period's debates about the supernatural. The surname Glanvill and its variant Glanville most likely comes from a place name in Normandy, Glanville, which the family took as a name. In English, the word functions almost entirely as a proper noun, usually for these two men or the works associated with them, rather than as a common noun with its own dictionary sense.