This essay collection is a welcome addition to Penn State University Press's Magic in History series, diversifying the focus of this series from its medieval and early modern focus to stretch into the modern period. The book is framed by an introduction that neatly summarises debates around the relationship between ‘modernity’ and magic. The editors do not claim a new consensus, instead embracing a well-established dialectical model that explores how magic is both repressed by ‘modernity’ and yet continually reinvented to adapt to new situations. The first chapter, by Randall Styers, illustrates this dialectic through a broad survey of the slow process of the delegitimisation of magic from the medieval period into the modern. The remaining chapters are roughly divided in half chronologically, with three case studies from the early modern period – on Descartes's dreams, magic and experimentation, and witchcraft in the early American Republic – followed by another four focusing on the period after 1800 – on Enochian angel magic, the rocket scientist-cum-occultist Jack Parsons, contemporary Norse neopaganisms and the apocryphal grimoire known as the Necronomicon. The collection misses key opportunities to problematise its own grounds. The survey of theoretical work in the introduction does address some of the terminological issues around ‘magic’ and ‘modernity’, and the chapters are particularly strong on historiographies of science and magic, even though ‘science’ is not in the title. But there are other notable thematic absences. Was there no space for a chapter dealing more explicitly with race, colonialism and magic? Omitting this question may leave readers wondering where exactly this ‘modernity’ takes place, and who it includes. Gender features more prominently as an analytical category, although it receives its most in-depth treatment in the chapter by Megan Goodwin, the only woman among the eight contributors. For these reasons, the collection does not have the scope to serve as an introduction to the topic, but the chapters will be useful to specialists working on and teaching topics as diverse as early modern demonology and modern esotericism.