For a variety of reasons, reading the present volume brought to mind Pliny the Younger's description of the working practices of his uncle, the famous naturalist. The Elder Pliny firmly believed that ‘no book is so bad as to not have something of use in some part of it’. The author of the volume under review evidently adopted the same approach, roaming widely across two millennia of literature, from Homer to Machiavelli, and from Apuleius to Rabelais. The present volume also shares something of Pliny's method of excerpting from each author as he encountered them – it often really does feel like a collection of notes on authors, old and new. (The author also has a curious habit of providing hefty block quotations from contemporary historians.) Applying Pliny's dictum to this book would be too harsh – it easily meets that low bar – but it is a book in search of structure, and even at times in search of an argument.

At the heart of this volume – both figuratively and literally – is a study that is genuinely valuable and that should be of interest to all historians interested in the origins of the European witch-hunt. While the role of Dominican friars in promoting witch-hunting (as yet another form of heresy that needed to be rooted out) is well-known, the author provides a very valuable analysis of the parallel role played by Franciscan Observants in early fifteenth-century Italy in promoting witchcraft beliefs and persecutions, paradoxically as part of a campaign against popular beliefs and superstitions. While these Franciscans technically remained committed to the official scepticism exemplified by the Canon episcopi (that is, none of it is real, witchcraft is the product of demonic illusions), those fine distinctions often got lost in their sermons. Although their impact on both populace and magistrates can be hard to measure, a number of persecutions can be linked to the sermons of Bernardino da Siena in particular. Strikingly, the victims are often popular healers who were accused of harming infants so that their services would be called upon. These accusations offer a fascinating blend of popular ideas about magical healing and other – perhaps classically inspired – ideas about the strix or witch as a blood-sucking creature.

The section on Franciscan preaching starts at the beginning of what is, by my count, chapter v (‘Let's send up some incense to the Lord!’) and continues until the middle part of the next chapter (‘The Italian Quattrocento’). The absence of chapter numbers further highlights this book's fundamentally essayistic and thus fragmentary mode of writing. The fact that this discussion of a single topic can stray into another chapter, which changes course mid-way to survey Quattrocento humanism, also indicates that where this volume is concerned, the parts are definitely more valuable than the whole. The chapter headings, such as they are, are usually puzzling quotations, often explained or referenced in passing much later. At times, they appear to be chapter headings almost by accident, as the chapter could have started or ended one subsection earlier. Chapters often end suddenly, lacking a summing up.

There is a place and a time for such free-flowing writing, but the value of a study that seeks to explore the continuities in magical beliefs from the classical world to the Seicento has to lie in its structure, and in the identification of strands of argument which are followed and signposted throughout. The opening two chapters, on witchcraft in ancient Greek and Latin literature, are valuable. They bring together a heap of material, even if their analysis does not dig very deep and seems simplistic at times. The contrast between Greek and Latin sorceresses seems too strongly drawn (note the figure of Medea). The claim that where the former ‘emerge from myth and the oral tradition’, the latter ‘were a product of literary creativity’ (p. 37) seems dubious and is contradicted elsewhere in the study (see the reference on p. 246 to Ovid ‘transposing into poetic language stories that were currently circulating in his time’). Admittedly, the subject matter does not really aid the cross-connections either. Although the classical strix may have filtered down into popular folklore (or she may have just remained there), we are mostly dealing with a revival of classical stories and archetypes, both in the Renaissance and in the final pages of the present study. Francesco Peña's sixteenth-century commentary on some of the late medieval witchcraft treatises, which picks up on classical tropes that the original authors had overlooked, is inadvertently a very good case in point (pp. 198–9).

Ultimately, the fact remains that on many of the subjects upon which this volume touches in passing, much better and sustained analysis is available. The literature on Gianfrancesco Pico's Strix is extensive, for instance. Brief glances at a wide range of sources are only valuable if they lead to an overarching argument which this volume does not provide, beyond a brief concluding paragraph noting the ever-present circulation of knowledge between folklore and elite culture, a comment that is true but also banal. The need for more careful editing should also be extended to the writing itself, which is idiosyncratic (the regular use of ‘laic’ as a noun), especially where names are concerned (‘Gregorius i Magnus’ for Gregory the Great, ‘Caracal’ for the Emperor Caracalla). In sum, this book contains some interesting and important material, but one cannot help but think that a sustained study of the role played by Franciscan preaching in the development of the early modern witchcraft stereotype would have been a genuinely fascinating read. At least, Pliny would still have made good use of it.