Almond has written an excellent, easy to read, reasonably sophisticated introduction to Reginald Scot's Discoverie of witchcraft. He reads Scot in context, exploring his sources and his relationship to the major ideas on witchcraft and to his own knowledge of witch trials in England. The book is divided into five sections – the first deals with the book, the second with witchcraft, the third with demonology and the fourth with magic. The fifth, which has the catch-all title ‘Philosophy and religion’ seems to me the least satisfactory, for Almond is no better than any of his predecessors at giving a satisfactory account of Scot's fundamental theological and intellectual commitments. Where the book begins by emphasising Scot's Protestantism, even Calvinism, it ends by acknowledging ‘a decidedly unorthodox “perfectionist” strain in Scot's theology’ and by stressing Scot's metaphorical reading of key biblical events, such as the Fall and Christ's miracles (a reading scarcely compatible with Scot's supposed ‘adherence, as a Protestant, to the authority of Scripture’). Yet, nevertheless, Almond tries to rescue an account of Scot as at least an orthodox Trinitarian, in the mistaken belief that Scot needs the Holy Spirit ‘to sustain his argument for the reality of the realm of the non-corporeal spirit’ – the key question here being whether there is a role for Christ in Scot's theology distinct from that of the Holy Spirit, or of the Holy Spirit distinct from that of Christ. It is a puzzling feature of the book that it merely mentions, but never discusses, Scot's long essay on the rebuilding of Dover harbour (printed in Holinshed's Chronicles) and that it makes no attempt to interpret Scot's views on demonology in the light of his practical experiences as an engineer. Still, this is a welcome book which provides a valuable introduction to one of the most puzzling texts of the early modern period.