In the popular imagination of Renaissance Italy there might well have been no greater opposites than the supposedly saintly friars of the Franciscan and Dominican observant movements and the alleged followers of Satan, the putative witches accused of maleficent misdeeds. Yet the reality was probably far more prosaic and even dismal, the opposites being credulous friars resorting to startling sermon material and their prey, impoverished women who, upon becoming too old to live off prostitution, tried to eke out a miserable living by uttering curses, casting spells and concocting philtres. However, at least among the more learned friars, the issue of the reality or otherwise of witchcraft in its newly postulated, radically diabolic version was the subject of robust intellectual debate. The dispute found its pivot in the interpretation of the canon Episcopi and the adjudication of its continuing relevance, and on this the Franciscans and the Dominicans mostly fell into opposed, at times bitterly divided camps.

Fabrizio Conti traces this debate as it unfolded in the duchy of Milan at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and does so by focusing on some representative observant Franciscans associated with the friary of St Angelo in Milan: Bernardino Busti, Michele Carcano, Angelo da Chivasso and others – all personalities hitherto little known other than to specialists in Franciscan history. In the first two parts of his work Conti takes the innovative approach of eschewing recourse to such usual sources on the phenomena of superstition and witchcraft as transcripts of inquisitorial trials, inquisitorial manuals and demonological tracts. He seeks instead to extract the friars' cast of mind on these phenomena by closely examining their preaching, their output of devotional literature meant for lay consumption and wider pastoral practice, especially the hearing of confessions and the provision of spiritual guidance. Special attention is paid to a work by Bernardino Busti, his Rosarium sermonum (1498) and its moral-theological unpacking of the Decalogue.

In the third part of his book Conti argues that these friars, while not altogether denying the witches' performance of harmful sorcery, manifested a cautiously sceptical attitude when it came to the more sensational elements of the then developing cumulative concept of diabolic witchcraft: animal metamorphosis, anthropophagy, noctural transvection, participation at the sabbat and the existence of a recently-emerged self-conscious sect of the witches. The friars adhered expressly to the traditional interpretation of the canon Episcopi, whereby when belief in the reality of such elements was articulated by lay folk in the context of confession or spiritual direction, they were to be dismissed as being no more than illusions, though possibly demonically provoked. All in all, the friars of St Angelo seem to have held a conservative position that would have been advocated as well by most Dominicans only a few decades earlier and still was by a few of them, such as Giordano da Bergamo.

How, then, is to be explained the reticence of these Franciscans in the face of what most contemporaneous Dominicans would have considered their cutting-edge theorem of diabolic witchcraft? Conti's thrust here seems to be to point to the personal pastoral sensitivity of the Franciscans, indeed their corporate pastoral sensitivity for, as far as we can tell, it appears to have affected the entire friary of St Angelo. But Conti is also aware that there could be more to it than just that. He recognises that when it came to the phenomenon of witchcraft the friars of St Angelo exercised no institutional role (pp. 284–6), for the inquisitorial districts coextensive with the duchy of Milan (Milan, Pavia, Lodi, Piacenza) were all entrusted to the Dominicans. Conti also acknowledges that in the nearby inquisitorial district of Val d'Aosta, entrusted to the Franciscans, the local inquisitors were just as insistent on the phenomenon of diabolic witchcraft, and just as enthusiastic witch-hunters, as any Dominican anywhere (pp. 263–4). Could anyone hazard a guess as to how the Franciscans of St Angelo would have acted if, perchance, they had been entrusted with the running of the Milanese Inquisition? Perhaps the friars of St Angelo handled the phenomena of superstition and witchcraft solely with sensitive pastoral practice and a derivative sceptical rationality, as they did, because it was the only option open to them, given the tacit pragmatic rule whereby the mendicant orders tried their best not to meddle in the doings of each other's inquisitions.

Moreover, there is also the matter of Franciscan-Dominican rivalry, and it is here that the Franciscan friar who is one of the protagonists of the third part of Conti's work comes to the fore. Samuele Cassini is the only Franciscan highlighted in Conti's monograph who is already well known to historians of witchcraft. This is on account of a tract on witchcraft (Quaestiones, 1505) that targeted the Dominicans' inquisitorial practice as well as their witchcraft paradigm and occasioned a literary altercation in 1506–7 with a Dominican at the University of Pavia, Vincenzo Dodo. On the basis of the little we know about him, Cassini seems to have dedicated his entire life to polemicising against Dominicans, not only in continuity with traditional Franciscan-Dominican controversies, such as the Immaculate Conception and the stigmata of Catherine of Siena, but also on the personal level, as shown by the virulent animosity that he displayed toward Girolamo Savonarola at the time of the latter's trial and execution (pp. 34, 379).

Fabrizio Conti's study is a valuable contribution to the continuing research on the complex phenomenon of witchcraft in Renaissance Italy and it is a pleasure to read. It is particularly praiseworthy for its engagement with heretofore little known personalities and milieux and its exploitation of previously neglected sources.