Review of: Jan Machielsen, ed. The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil. Routledge Studies in the History of Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic. London: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 324. $155.00 (cloth).

Abstract

Scholars tend to approach early modern European witchcraft first and foremost through trial records. For many decades, this has led to a strong social/cultural slant to the study of witchcraft. The intellectual history behind the witch hunts and the work of early modern demonologists can sometimes seem a bit passé. Of course, cutting-edge studies have been done in this area. The Science of Demons takes as its inspiration two profoundly important examples of such work: Sydney Anglo’s The Damned Art (1977) and Stuart Clark’s magisterial Thinking with Demons (1997). That those books appeared twenty years apart, however, and that the younger of them is now itself more than twenty years old, is telling.