Through a lucid analysis of European, indigenous and African concepts of spirit, Andrew Redden elaborates how the devil's existence was narrated and transformed during the vice-regal period of colonial Peru. Taking as his starting point the notion of Christian body as community, Redden traces how this concept was incorporated into the military and spiritual conquest of Peru, paying particular attention to how post-Tridentine reforms helped to shape concepts of good and evil among Andean populations. Each of the subsequent chapters addresses these questions from the perspective of a different segment of Peruvian colonial society. The first examples involve women religious from the Creole elite: the alleged demonic possession of María Pizarro in late sixteenth-century Lima, and the nuns of the convent of Santa Clara in the Trujillo a century later. The next portion of the book, principally based on Jesuit accounts, captures perspectives from indigenous populations, demonstrating how in some cases the demonisation of local deities empowered these forces as a form of resistance. While the physical destruction of Andean religious symbols and other didactic forms of intimidation had a significant impact on indigenous populations, by associating indigenous gods with Satan and resisting the more syncretic practices deployed elsewhere, Redden maintains, missionaries ensured his place in the Andean cosmology. The final part of the text examines how the devil was used by marginalised working-class individuals as a source of subversive power. Given his sensitivity to these voices it may seem surprising that Redden does not examine why the devil was so frequently imagined as black or indigenous. This omission is perhaps necessary to the author's meticulously faithful rendering of the narrations in their own context, and on their own terms. Careful at all times to distinguish how the mediation of other worldviews and the narrators' own agendas shade such testimonies, Redden reconstructs a rich and engaging tapestry of voices without falling into simplistic dichotomies or anachronistic categorisations. By examining theological and political debates from the perspective of individual experience, Redden's study provides invaluable insights into vice-regal Peruvian society and the process of evangelisation in the Americas in general.