In this absorbing new study of occult affairs in Devon and Somerset during the century and a half which followed the Civil War, Jonathan Barry presents his readers with a succession of micro-histories, which focus, in turn, on the Somerset justice of the peace Robert Hunt and the ‘witches’ whom he encountered during the 1660s; on the trial of the ‘Bideford Witches’ in 1682; on the Bovet family of the Devon-Somerset border and the multi-layered text entitled Pandaemonium, or the devil's cloyster which it produced in 1684; on the Somerset gentleman scholar John Beaumont and his ‘Treatise on spirits’ published in 1705; on the ‘extraordinary things’ which were reported to have ‘happened to Mr Richard Giles's children’ at the Lamb Inn in Bristol in 1761–2; and on the north Somerset tailor, George Lukins – the so-called ‘Yatton demoniac’ – who, during the late eighteenth century, claimed to have been possessed by the Devil. Barry explores each of these subjects with forensic care, and identifies a whole series of over-simplifications, slips and errors which have marred previous scholarly attempts to elucidate them. A chapter is devoted to each separate case, while a helpful introduction sets the historiographical scene and a very substantial conclusion traces the connections and disjunctions which exist between the various episodes, stressing that ‘one of the most important conclusions [of this study] is the need to treat each case as a unique conjuncture of circumstances, interests and ideas which need to be re-created in their full complexity, not simply reduced to a series of common features and factors’. This statement may fairly be said to encapsulate the book's central theme. All of the cases which Barry examines are intriguing, but, for this reviewer, at least, the stand-out chapter is the one which deals with Robert Hunt. As Barry rightly observes, ‘there has been no detailed historical account of Hunt or the cases he uncovered’ and the conscientious, moderate and essentially rather likeable country magistrate who emerges from Barry's pages is a very different figure from the ‘witch-hunting’ justice with the potential to be ‘a second Hopkins’ who flits briefly across the stage in many previous surveys of English witchcraft. Barry suggests that, far from regarding witches as ‘uniquely dangerous or satanic opponents’, Hunt saw them as just another ‘part of the general criminal underworld he was seeking to defeat’, and he well describes Hunt – who grumbled to a correspondent on one occasion that ‘this unhappy business of witches hath given me very much trouble’ – as ‘a perplexed man trying to make sense of strange events, rather than as a zealot imposing his own vision’. Few who have read Barry's scrupulous reconstruction of Hunt and his dealings with the supposed witches of post-Restoration Somerset are likely to dissent from that judgement. This is a work of great scholarship, full of vivid detail.