In Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1989), Richard Kieckhefer described magic ‘as a crossroads’ where ‘different pathways in medieval culture converge’ and called for a more holistic approach to the study of the West's ecclesiastical past. This past was an obvious and shared interest of scholars of magic and scholars of religion, yet rarely did their works inform one another and, in his 1994 article, ‘The holy and the unholy’, Kieckhefer demonstrated that opposition between the holy and the unholy should not be taken as self-evident or necessary. The distinction between them was important in the Middle Ages, but it was not unambiguous, and orthodox observers often struggled to determine what was holy and what was unholy. Taking its lead from Kieckhefer, to whom the present volume is dedicated, the ten essays included here collectively examine the ‘flirtations between Heaven and Hell’, with the aim of advancing our understanding of the mutability and ambiguity of the dividing lines between sacred and sinister, holy and unholy, orthodox and unorthodox.

The volume is helpfully divided into four thematic parts on this broad subject: traditional holiness; conflicts over the holy; identifying and grappling with the unholy; and magic and the cosmos. These sections also work well as prompts for possible future directions in which scholars might develop some of the ideas presented here. Section i has two chapters, by Claire Fanger and Sean L. Field, both of which focus on hagiography and on the ways in which sanctity was imagined and constructed in the thirteenth century. Fanger does this by looking at how the hagiographical traditions of Christina Mirabilis and Francis of Assisi demonstrate the close proximity between heaven and earth in their accounts of the sometimes radical bodily transformations caused by the sanctity of each. Field does so through a close reading of the textual borrowings and manipulations evident in the account of another thirteenth-century saint, Margherita of Colonna.

Many of the themes addressed in these first two chapters are also present in part ii. This is most clearly observed perhaps in Elizabeth Casteen's compelling examination of the relationship between mystical rapture, often described in high and late medieval hagiographies of female saints, and contemporary treatments of rape in canon and civil law. In one particular case, Douceline of Digne is compelled to rapture by love of God, but is shown to actively resist the spirit that overpowered her. While experiencing rapture she is unaware of anything else around her, even while onlookers inflict harm on her body. She feels the physical pain of these injuries when her rapture ends and thus the story reads as one of ‘communal violation’. As with Fanger's study of Christina, the fear that such strange behaviour in the saint might be a sign of demonic possession also serves to demonstrate just how ambiguous the dividing line between the sacred and the sinister could be.

The two other chapters that make up the second section of the volume are by Kristi Woodward Bain and Maeve B. Callan, in which we see different manifestations of conflicts over the holy within the context of relationships both between different members of the religious community and between that community and the laity. Woodward Bain offers an interesting and thoughtful look at how the parish community of Wymondham in Norfolk has drawn upon the medieval conflict between parishioners and the local monastery for control over access to the parish church and its bells. Callan's chapter meanwhile offers a fresh perspective on syneisaktism, broadly understood as a special working and sometimes cohabiting relationship between vowed religious men and women, viewed by many as scandalous. Callan suggests that the practice's spiritual power lay partly in the suspicion and scandal that it caused among others.

The third part, with chapters by Michael D. Bailey, Katelyn Mesler and Anne M. Koenig, shifts the focus to examples in which we can see an attempt by both contemporaries and modern historians to both identify the unholy and grapple with how best to approach or deal with it. Bailey engages with debates about the usefulness of magic, religion and science as categories when talking about the medieval period by considering the extent to which we can understand magic as a religious movement. In doing so Bailey communicates directly with Kieckhefer's point about the problematic assumption of an opposition between the holy and the unholy, but also suggests a new way of looking at religious history beyond the model suggested by Herbert Grundmann (1995). Mesler's chapter provides a very useful commentary on and partial edition of Nicholas Eymeric's often overlooked Contra infideles (c. 1370), which sought to explain under what circumstances inquisitors had jurisdiction over non-Christians; while Koenig looks at how the fifteenth-century city councilmen of Nuremberg responded to reports of madness in men and women, paying particular attention to the ways in which magical etiologies complemented rather than competed with naturalistic or medical ones.

The final part has two chapters focused on the relationship between magic and the cosmos by Sophie Page and the volume's editor David J. Collins. Page's study shows that the authors of medieval cosmologies, including author magicians, explained evil and suffering by suggesting that either the heavens were more corrupt than traditionally imagined, or demons were less evil than previously assumed. Collins's chapter ends the volume with a consideration of Albert the Great's attempts to make sense of the implications of the astronomical movements of the Star of Bethlehem, the knowledge of the magi observing it and the significance of the star as a mode of divine revelation. As Collins points out, the goodness of the star's revelation presented Albert with the opportunity to revisit the quandary of who practised magic and how related practices should be distinguished and evaluated.

The collection of essays presented here represents a valuable contribution to recent and ongoing efforts to complicate assumptions about religion, science and magic as operating within distinct environments with distinct ideological underpinnings. This fascinating range of essays is suggestive of the multiplicity of environments and contexts in which the sacred and the sinister became sometimes disturbingly entangled. Equally, the essays presented here suggest that not all confrontations between the two were as problematic for contemporaries as they appear to be for us. Even in examples of traditional holiness, the flirtation between heaven and hell, between the holy and the unholy, was quite often the tangible, visible proof of sanctity.