The Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–65) is best known for his exorcistic and spiritual collaboration with Mother Jeanne des Anges, the Ursuline prioress at Loudun in the 1630s. Surin worked to exorcise Jeanne in the years following the execution for witchcraft of Father Urbain Grandier in 1634. Surin had not been in Loudun during the period of Grandier's persecution, but the discourse of demonic possession provided him with the foundation for a lifelong spiritual practice, which both mined and expanded traditional ideas of the role of the demon in religious life. Surin gained a new Francophone readership in the late twentieth century through the work of the influential Jesuit historian and theorist Michel de Certeau. In this well-chosen selection of Surin's writings, Moshe Sluhovsky and translator Patricia Ranum provide an authoritative and fascinating English-language entrée into the world of the notable French mystic. The collection's centrepieces are two major works: The triumph of divine love over the powers of hell, a lengthy account of Surin's role at Loudun and its impact on him (begun in 1636 but finished only in 1663, after he emerged from a period of physical and mental malaise) and The experimental science of the things of the other life (1663). The experimental science installs demonic possession as both a foundation for Catholic belief and a means to enhance the inner life. Sluhovsky provides a selection of Surin's spiritual poems, introduced instructively by Ranum, and two other smaller pieces, before ending the collection with a rich sample from Surin's extensive correspondence with friends and colleagues, male and (often) female. All the emotionally absorbing challenges of the inner life, well known to scholars of French mysticism, are on display in this collection. Readers of texts such as these soon learn that the author's goal was neither reportage nor even always spiritual instruction. Rather, defying questions of factuality, the inner journey of the writer emerges as a kind of spiritual maceration, through which the inner and outer worlds fuse indistinguishably. Through narratives in which it is often impossible to discern real events from fantasy, along with the use of ‘trigger’ terms intended principally to resonate with adepts, modern readers can enter the airless and disorienting world of the spirit in the French ‘century of saints’. A famous account of a chance meeting with a young unlettered lay mystic, for example, seems to convey as much about what Surin might have liked to see in such a person as it tells us about the man himself. Patricia Ranum's sensitive translation is accompanied by an important glossary in a field that is littered with ‘false friends’, even for French speakers. These new English-language texts and their extensive annotation provide a steady, guiding hand on the path to apprehending Surin's and his era's often intractable mystical discourse.