The ten essays of this collection, including an ‘afterword’ by Stuart Clark, offer fascinating analyses from a variety of perspectives on early modern Europeans’ attitudes toward and experiences with the discernment of spirits, the ability to distinguish divine spirits from demons who assumed the form of ‘angels of light’. These studies show that discernment of spirits was of interest to both Protestants and Catholics and could be an important point of contention between confessions. Understood as a gift from God, discernment was experienced by individuals but served an important social role by strengthening ties within a broader religious community. Euan Cameron rightly shows that Reformed Protestantism unintentionally reduced considerably the world of the spirits by embracing the cessation of miracles and by rejecting the veneration of saints and other Catholic traditions that reputedly provided access to the divine. This change, however, also provoked many in Protestant areas to seek empirical evidence of spirits, aptly seen in the hunting of witches. Colin Thompson looks at the importance of the discernment of spirits in two key figures in sixteenth-century Spanish mysticism: Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. While John described a mystic's spiritual journey in a very detached way, Teresa reached a broader audience and ultimately convinced her readers that those who attributed her visions to demons had not achieved the same level of discernment that she had. Clare Copeland persuasively argues that Florentine nuns actively participated in both the divine raptures of their fellow Carmelite, Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (d. 1607); they wrote descriptions of her ecstasies, which became the basis for the acceptance of her visions as divine. Jan Machielsen considers ‘textual discernment’ by looking at the Jesuits Jean Bolland (d. 1665), editor of the Acta Sanctorum, and Heribert Rosweyde (d. 1629), whose polemical Calendar of saints served as a basis for the Acta. Leigh Penman offers a very interesting study of Paul Felgenhauer, a seventeenth-century Lutheran who, when his own millenarian prophecies proved false, expressed anger at his own failings but urged others to emulate him by aspiring to receive the power to discern divine messages from false ones. The essays that will appeal most to intellectual historians are Anthony Ossa-Richardson's study of the theologian Gijsbert Voet's rejection of Descartes's reputed reliance on ‘private reason’ in the matter of discernment and R. J. Scott's comparison of the understanding of prophetic visions among Cambridge Platonists with the pastor John Beale. Laura Sangha convincingly shows that intellectuals in late seventeenth-century England used empirical methods to strengthen rather than to undercut the belief in angels. Taken as a whole, these essays will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of early modern religion; among other things, they make useful, nuanced contributions to the debate on whether the Reformation fostered the disenchantment of the world.