Scholars tend to approach early modern European witchcraft first and foremost through trial records. For many decades, this has led to a strong social/cultural slant to the study of witchcraft. The intellectual history behind the witch hunts and the work of early modern demonologists can sometimes seem a bit passé. Of course, cutting-edge studies have been done in this area. Edited by Jan Machielsen, The Science of Demons takes as its inspiration two profoundly important examples of such work: Sydney Anglo's The Damned Art (1977) and Stuart Clark's magisterial Thinking with Demons (1997). That those books appeared twenty years apart, however, and that the younger of them is now itself more than twenty years old, is telling.

Machielsen has taken a straightforward approach to structuring this collection. Seventeen of its nineteen chapters focus on individual demonologists and their major works. The two other chapters focus on two authors apiece, selecting closely related demonological pairings. The goal is to present up to date introductions to these authors and their works, and so cumulatively to offer an overview of the field. It is not, however, intended for absolute beginners. While chapters set authors in their particular historical contexts, Machielsen uses his introduction to provide intellectual background and highlight some major themes, rather than to provide a canned summary of the age of European demonology.

Many chapters are written by the absolute leading experts on the figures they cover. We get, for example, Tamar Herzig on Heinrich Kramer, Rita Voltmer on Binsfeld and Loos, Machielsen himself on Delrio, Lu Ann Homza on Salazar. Although the essays are by no means uniform in approach, all aim to complicate our understanding of these (mostly) famous figures and to add nuance to their work. While Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum is of course a misogynist monstrosity, Herzig highlights how he was also extremely supportive of pious holy women. Michaela Valente stresses how the famous skeptic Johann Wier was motivated as much by his religious convictions as by his medical or scientific expertise.

Across the chapters, a dynamic picture of early modern demonology emerges. Even though most essays focus on individual authors, collectively we can see the range of different approaches they took. Beyond the obvious division between proponents of witch-hunting and skeptics, which this volume shows is far too simplistic a framework in which to fit most authors, we see how different demonologists worked in different genres: scholastic and humanist, literary and legalistic, highly theoretical and more straightforwardly experiential. Most wrote in Latin but many in the vernacular, and they could target quite different audiences.

Coverage starts in the late medieval period, with the inquisitors Nicolau Eymeric in the fourteenth century and Nicolas Jacquier and Heinrich Kramer in the fifteenth. Then most of the major names of early modern demonology are covered: Bodin, Delrio, Remy, James VI, and among the skeptics Wier and Scot. There are a few lesser known figures and works. Fabián Alejandro Campagne seeks to redress Juan Maldonado's “unjust exclusion” from the demonological “pantheon” (211). Michael Ostling admits that Poland's “contribution to the ‘science of demons’ was modest” (252) before presenting the anonymous Czarownica powołana (denounced witch) as an important skeptical text. As an overview of the field, The Science of Demons is probably right to present mainly canonical authors and works, but these few efforts to expand the canon are notable and valuable.

Exclusions from The Science of Demons are notable as well. There is no essay on Henri Bouget, Lambert Daneau, or Friedrich Spee, among others. Machielsen addresses this briefly in his introduction, stating that the volume was never intended to be “all-encompassing,” and that he wanted to expand upon rather than merely “reproduce an existing canon” (12). He also explains his decision to include the medieval roots of early modern demonology, but not its late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century denouement. There is no essay, for example, on Balthasar Bekker, whom Machielsen sees as operating outside the system of early modern demonology (as opposed to earlier skeptics like Wier or Scot, who operated inside it).

I do not entirely agree with that decision. It tends to reinforce the idea that demonology was some distinct and separate corner of early modern thought, rather than a topic that many early modern thinkers had to engage with to various degrees. That notion has been ably undermined by Stuart Clark and by Machielsen himself in other works. Even if several more essays covering individual Enlightenment authors would have produced too much sprawl, a short concluding essay addressing multiple figures could have marked out where the “science of demons” would eventually lead.

Other consequences stem from the strict author-by-author approach. Comparisons are possible but inevitably somewhat attenuated. For example, several essays note how various authors responded especially to Wier's influential brand of skepticism, and the reader can pick out those threads, but this is less direct than, say, a chapter tracing articulations of and responses to skepticism overall. Similarly, the issue of gender appears in various chapters, but there is no sustained analysis of how gender did or did not manifest within demonology as a whole. Also, although all the authors treated here are scrupulously placed in time, overall chronological developments can be somewhat obscured. As I have already noted, it is clear that this volume is not meant as a textbook for absolute novices. Still, something as simple as a timeline of major demonologists could have helped open it up to more readers.

No single volume can do everything, of course, nor should it be expected to. This is an extremely effective, expert, and wide-ranging introduction to the early modern “science of demons.” It will be a standard reference for scholars working in this area for many years to come.