Brian Levack, author of a magisterial survey of the witch-hunt in early modern Europe, turns in this book to the related topic of demonic possession, which he traces from ancient times to the twentieth century. The literature on demoniacs is far less extensive than that devoted to witchcraft, leaving Levack sparser material with which to work, but he compensates by giving more attention to individual cases. With remarkable determination, he tackles the most thorny of all issues connected with possession, that is, how to explain the physical convulsions and contortions, coughing up of sharp objects, speaking in strange voices and other symptoms that indicated the presence of a devil within the body of a sufferer. Understandably enough, Levack is reluctant simply to accept that the devil was making such things happen. He is also highly critical of every psychological and physiological theory that has been proposed over the past 125 years. Admittedly, psycho-historical explanations are rarely convincing – nobody today can interview sufferers from the distant past, so how can they be reliably diagnosed? Still, one wonders at times whether psychology or neurology may have more to offer than Levack is willing to allow, especially in light of the sexual overtones of so many of these cases. Instead, he proposes that demoniacs were acting out a fundamentally religious drama, in which their roles and actions were assigned to them by the expectations of the confessional communities that comprised their audiences, including the exorcists themselves. While this is a sensible as well as a sensitive approach, Levack might have emphasised that, in most cases, the drama was inherent in accounts kept by interested witnesses, not in situations whose details can be verified by scholars today. The sources in cases of possession tend to be narratives of what contemporaries thought that they were seeing and hearing. Sceptics, who could be found during all periods in the history of demonic possession, saw pretence and fabrication; believers saw convincing signs of the devil's presence. The demoniacs themselves, most of them women, many of them young, seem hardly to have left any personal testimony. Levack's wide-ranging treatment is particularly good in drawing out the theological differences between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of possession, and he even gives attention to the Jewish tradition of dybbuks. One could ask for more clarification at some points, but overall this is the best introduction to the subject that is available, and it should bring to the attention of scholars yet another troubling aspect of the history of medieval and early modern Europe.