Decker considers witchcraft in a European perspective from the eighth to the nineteenth century. The papal inquisition, well-established by the second half of the thirteenth century, became involved with the persecution of witchcraft beliefs because some of these beliefs, for example the worship and invocation of demons, offended against the doctrine of the Church. In Germany, on the other hand, witchcraft was mostly considered a social crime, not a betrayal of the faith. Witches were burned to death in Rome for the last time in 1572: Gregory xiii (1572–85) more than any other pope of his age had reservations about approving death sentences. By the 1590s at the latest the inquisition had formally decided that the denunciation of others brought by ‘admitted’ witches were without any legal force. However, local inquisitors in, for example, south-west Germany, where there was a wave of witchcraft trials between 1560 and 1570, were obviously not equally sceptical. The papal ‘Instruction concerning witchcraft trials’, probably composed by Monterenzi while he was consultant to the Holy Office (1593–1603), perhaps contributed to the extension of Roman scepticism into areas north of the Alps. Its main ideas were that no credibility should be given to the testimony of the demonically possessed or of witches who claimed to have seen other persons at the witches' Sabbath, and that the physical evidence (the corpora delicti) of any supposed maleficia should be carefully examined. Where there was doubt, expert opinion should be consulted. It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of this papal ‘Instruction’ in curbing the excesses of witch hunts outside Italy, which were usually in response to local demand. Decker considers at some length a most interesting case of large-scale demonic possession, in Paderborn between 1656 and 1659, which, since the possessed attributed their affliction to witches, unleashed a witch hunt in spite of the fact that the sceptical prince-bishop of Paderborn maintained that denunciations coming from the possessed were not to be believed. By the late sixteenth century, however, attention in Rome was being deflected away from witchcraft. In 1585 Sixtus v extended the inquisition's jurisdiction to all forms of magic, while Cardinal Santori, head of the inquisition, preferred to pursue actually practised magic rather than fictitious witchcraft. Of special interest are the cases of astrological predictions concerning the fate of reigning popes, and more particularly the execution in 1635 of criminals who had attempted to assassinate the pope by magical means. But various other kinds of magic were also practised including love magic, fortune telling, healing magic, necromancy and magic involving the theft and desecration of a consecrated host. Decker's discussion very strongly suggests that the fanatic zeal for persecutions that was so often evident in the early modern period came not from popes and inquisitors but from simple people, the lower clergy and secular judges. The Church in Italy ‘dealt with superstition, demonic possession and witchcraft, not by denying their existence, but by setting very high standards of proof for legal conviction’.