Alec Ryrie's new book provides a unique case study of one man's crooked career in the early stages of the dissolution of medieval Catholicism in England as a rising Protestantism struggled to replace it. The tale begins during 1546 with the strange case of the future fifth earl of Westmoreland, Henry Neville. He tried to improve his luck at gambling and to murder his wife and his father. All of these dubious actions were attempted with the magical assistance of a mysterious figure named Wisdom. Ryrie identifies the magician as Gregory Wisdom (d. 1599) a member of a family of low-level cloth dealers seeking to move up into the medical profession. He was also a conjuror and a confidence man. While such a combination of careers seems incongruous to modern sensibilities, in the fluid era of the Reformation the boundaries between trade, medicine, science, religion and sorcery were nebulous and ever-shifting. Added to this volatile mix was the eternal mingling of high and low life, commerce and fraud, religion and crime that characterised the lives of both Henry Neville and Gregory Wisdom. As this fascinating account shows, the Protestant Reformation was a destabilising force that produced diverse and contradictory social changes including both the rise of Puritanism and the belief in witchcraft. Wisdom, along with Neville, was also a creation of this ferment. In this marketplace of ideas, religion did not bring about a decline of magic.