Investigations into Magic. .(Book Review)

Martin del Rio. Investigations into Magic.

Ed. and trans. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. (Social and Cultural Values in Early Modern Europe.) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martin's Press, 2000. xi + 290 pp. index. bibl. $74.95. ISBN: 0-7190-4976-8.

A translation of the Jesuit Martin Del Rio's encyclopedic Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (1608) has long been a desideratum for scholars of witchcraft and magic. The thousand-page tome was the dominant late Catholic synthetic statement, its influence extending throughout the seventeenth century, across denominational lines. The text is not merely an encyclopedia, however, "no simple omnium gatherum of much-repeated cliche and frequently-cited texts" …