The present volume contains multitudes. It is perhaps best described as a series of studies on a single theme: the role that the Jesuits played at the height of the early modern witch-hunt and at its centre of gravity, the Catholic territories in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire. The volume is a monument of erudition, yet the volume's different parts, of different lengths, do stand rather apart, never quite forming a whole. Had the author, Frank Sobiech, chosen to do so, the archival research presented here could have sustained multiple books. The work's origins as a reworked version of the author's German Habilitation thesis must in large part account for the chosen format. Indeed, it culminates in a dissertation-style set of ‘summary, conclusions and perspectives’ that acts as something of an executive summary at the end.

Still, the different parts are well worth studying. The first section offers a biography of perhaps the most famous Jesuit of the seventeenth century: the witchcraft sceptic Friedrich Spee (1591–1635). Sobiech obtained unrivalled access to the materials in the Jesuit archives in Rome, including remarkably a reference file on Spee in the office of the Society's Postulator General (although it does not appear that Spee's cause has proceeded meaningfully). As is well-known, Spee's relationship with his superiors within the Society of Jesus was a fractious one. If he had not been of noble origins and survived an assassination attempt by heretics, he likely would have been dismissed. Sobiech's study shows that Spee's opposition to the witch-hunt, and the role played by Jesuit confessors in it, played almost no part in this tense relationship, which in any case antedated the writing and publication of the 1631 Cautio criminalis by some way. His headstrong character and a strong sense of injustice – supporting the admission of a candidate born out of wedlock, for instance – caused difficulties. But then again, few Jesuits embodied the Ignatian ideal of the ‘lifeless body’ to be moved by superiors at will. Sobiech remains (for me, rather too) determined to trace the origins of Spee's witchcraft scepticism back as early as possible, possibly as early as 1622, providing evidence that is ingenious but far from conclusive. (A superior who made a passing critical comment about witchcraft also praised Spee's critical judgement.)

The same section also illuminates our understanding of the printing history of the Cautio criminalis. Sobiech does a very good job elucidating how a manuscript by a fanatically anti-Protestant author came to be published by a Lutheran printer in Rinteln (even identifying a possible source) and how Spee circumvented Jesuit internal book censorship to print a corrected second edition.

The next part of the book, by far the longest, moves us to the related topic of how other Jesuits saw the witchcraft-industrial-torture complex in which many, as prison visitors, played their part. The author shows how useful the Jesuit litterae annuae – annual reports by colleges compiled for dissemination within the Society – can be for the study of the early modern witch-hunt. When I examined those of the Belgian province for the 1590s I found very little, but Sobiech returned from his study of the Rhenish provinces with a haul that would have sunk many a whaling vessel. This certainly opens up opportunities for historians interested in particular localities, yet they can wear down the reader as the vast majority of the anecdotes are fundamentally the same. Jesuit confessors working in prisons did not question the validity of torture. They saw themselves primarily concerned with saving the soul of the accused, which meant that they wanted witches to repeat what was extorted from them by the judges. The Society's preoccupation with theatre is in evidence too. The litterae relished a good death, turning the accused into actors and Jesuits into stage directors for a particularly grisly morality play, made still worse by the occasional participation of children. While the nature of the litterae – they were meant to be read out loud in the refectory – does not make them into vehicles for sceptical or alternative perspectives, Sobiech's research has uncovered that Spee was not quite a lone voice in the wilderness. Particularly striking is an eloquent 1628 denunciation by an unidentified Jesuit who described attempts to locate the devil's mark in a woman's pubic hair as ‘tyrannical’ and (surely not without irony) ‘diabolical’.

The two subsequent sections, both much shorter, examine how the Jesuits’ role as prison visitors are represented in the Cautio criminalis, and the later reception of that work and its author. Spee's own career as prison visitor had given him a very different perspective on the role – father confessors should investigate guilt, not presuppose it. He therefore lashed out against those who sought to extort confessions, even threatening the accused that they would otherwise ‘die like dogs without the Sacraments’. Whether Spee's attitudes really made him part of the Scientific Revolution, as Sobiech supposes, is another matter. The logic and rhetoric on display in the Cautio are powerful, but Spee also had a mystical side. While Spee has a great many admirers at present – there is even a Friedrich Spee award which this book won – the section on both his and his Cautio's afterlives is rather short, and not it seems for lack of effort.

Jesuit prison ministry is a remarkable scholarly achievement. One can quibble with some of the translations: children aged three and and four years old did not have ‘wooers’ (Bulen) but executioners (p. 270), while nonnemo does not necessarily mean ‘many a one’ and in context probably just means ‘someone’ (for example, p. 178). Yet the mastery of the material is profound. As noted at the outset, the parts of the book do not quite come together to convey a single argument or narrative. Perhaps more sustained analysis of the Cautio as a whole could have provided a further link between the sections, though it would be unfair to ask for an even longer volume. In fact, the work does betray its roots as a German Habilitation rather too much. Does the reader, for instance, need the biographical details of all of Spee's fellow students? Repetitive examples could have been omitted. Sentence structures too – sentences eight or nine lines long are not uncommon – remain rather too Germanic. For those interested in witch-hunting in early modern Germany this book is indispensable reading, but the general advice to German scholars seeking to present their work to an English-speaking audience remains: often less is more.