Paola Zambelli has a high reputation as a historian of philosophies of magic in scholasticism and the Renaissance which, hopefully, will not be damaged by this rather ill-judged and unconvincing selection of her work. As the English version of her Magia bianca, magia nera nel Rinascimento (2004), the collection brings together material originating in that earlier volume and items first published elsewhere from the 1970s onwards but it is difficult to see a rationale for it. Zambelli writes essentially for specialists at a high level of complexity, requiring an expertise comparable to her own and making few concessions to the more general reader of Renaissance history. This is a book for insiders. Linguistic multi-competence also is assumed, such that an appendix containing Trithemius' Latin bibliography for necromancers is left untranslated. It seems difficult, therefore, to envisage any potential reader not already aware either of Zambelli's separate essays or the 2004 collection of them and not capable of reading them in any of several languages. Indeed, the two strongest essays, on Agrippa and the Radical Reformation and on scholastic and humanist views of Hermeticism and witchcraft, have been available (in English) and widely cited since 1976 and 1988 respectively. Nor does the volume have much unity. It is largely concerned with Trithemius, Agrippa and Bruno but Zambelli's many fascinating and penetrating individual insights are usually not brought together by anything as mundane as an overarching argument. Some attempt to provide one is made in the introduction, and it is this: historians of philosophy should reappropriate the history of magic from those who (like the participants in the Frances Yates controversies) treat it mainly as an adjunct to the history of science and they should do this by not taking Ficino's or Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's ‘utopian’ insistence that magic could be purely natural at face value. This insistence owed much to fears aroused by the exactly contemporaneous demonology of the witch-hunters and it served to deflect attention from an equally strong tradition – more religious than natural philosophical in inspiration – in which magic was a ritual and ceremonial activity for invoking powers – astral demons, for example. This is the brand of magic that Zambelli finds interesting in Trithemius, Agrippa and Bruno but, even so, it is hard to find much concentration on it after chapter ii, when these authors become central to the discussions for a range of other, often unstated, reasons. Sadly, too, there are some historiographical items that pad out this collection where the series editor has allowed Zambelli indulgently to score a few personal points. One scholar is chided for not fully acknowledging Zambelli's assistance (p. 187), and another is tarred by association with Silvio Berlusconi (p. 236). This rather lowers the tone of a set of essays conducted otherwise in such a lofty manner.