Awards

• Shortlisted for Royal Historical Society Gladstone History Book Prize 2016.
• Winner of Shortlisted for the 2016 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize.

Overview

If the Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551-1608) is remembered at all today, it is for his Disquisitiones magicae (1599-1600), a voluminous tome on witchcraft and superstition which was reprinted numerous times until 1755. The present volume recovers the lost world of Delrio's wider scholarship. Delrio emerges here as a figure of considerable interest not only to historians of witchcraft but to the broader fields of early modern cultural, religious and intellectual history as well. As the editor of classical texts, notably Senecan tragedy, Delrio had a number of important philological achievements to his name. A friend of the Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) and an enemy of the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), he played an important part in the Republic of Letters and the confessional polemics of his day. Delrio's publications after his admission to the Society of Jesus (the Disquisitiones included) marked a significant contribution to the intellectual culture of the Counter-Reformation. Catholic contemporaries accordingly rated him highly, but later generations proved less kind.As attitudes towards witchcraft changed, the context in which the Disquisitiones first emerged disappeared from view and its author became a byword for credulity and cruelty. Recovering this background throws important new light on a period in history when the worlds of humanism and Catholic Reform collided. In an important chapter, the book demonstrates that demonology, in Delrio's hands, was a textual science, an insight that sheds new light on the way witchcraft was believed in. At the same time, the book also develops a wider argument about the significance of Delrio's writings, arguing that the Counter-Reformation can also be seen as a textual project and Delrio's contribution to it as the product of a mindset forged in its fragile borderlands.

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9780197265802

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Reviews

Machielsen hasw ritten a clever book, dense and demanding. The rhetorical tricks with which sixteenth-century scholars parried their opponents' thrusts are skilfully illuminated ... as comprehensive and compendious an account of Delrio's world as is ever likely to be undertaken. Andrew Pettegree, The Times Literary Supplement a major scholarly achievement and a book that it is difficult to praise too highly for the scope of its engagement with all aspects of Delrio's work, not just those which are well known amongst scholars of early modern demonology. It is difficult to imagine Machielsen's book ever being surpassed as the definitive biography of Martin Delrio, but beyond this, it is also a book that ought to be read by all scholars of the Counter-Reformation, whether they are interested in demonologists and witchcraft or not ... This is a book that deserves to be on the reading list of every course on the Counter-Reformation. Dr Francis Young, Reviews in History This is an outstanding and important book. Based on a PhD dissertation from the University of Oxford, this monograph explains the important position of demonology within the setting of late Renaissance Humanism, early Jesuit concerns, and the Counter Reformation. Moshe Sluhovsky, Journal of Jesuit Studies.

Machielsen has written a clever book, dense and demanding. The rhetorical tricks with which sixteenth-century scholars parried their opponents' thrusts are skilfully illuminated ... as comprehensive and compendious an account of Delrio's world as is ever likely to be undertaken. Andrew Pettegree, The Times Literary Supplement a major scholarly achievement and a book that it is difficult to praise too highly for the scope of its engagement with all aspects of Delrio's work, not just those which are well known amongst scholars of early modern demonology. It is difficult to imagine Machielsen's book ever being surpassed as the definitive biography of Martin Delrio, but beyond this, it is also a book that ought to be read by all scholars of the Counter-Reformation, whether they are interested in demonologists and witchcraft or not ... This is a book that deserves to be on the reading list of every course on the Counter-Reformation. Dr Francis Young, Reviews in History This is an outstanding and important book. Based on a PhD dissertation from the University of Oxford, this monograph explains the important position of demonology within the setting of late Renaissance Humanism, early Jesuit concerns, and the Counter Reformation. Moshe Sluhovsky, Journal of Jesuit Studies. Some fifteen years ago I suggested that Delrio needed a full biography, and here it is at last, done so well and with such meticulous scholarship, acute insight, and remarkable flair that it is unlikely ever to need replacement ... One cannot, then, praise Machielsen's work too highly, and no one working in any of the fields covered by his book should fail to read and heed what he has to say. Peter Maxwell-Stuart, Renaissance Quartlery Machielsen's book can be recommended, not just as a study of 'demonology', but as a reconstruction of the broader concerns of a scholarly Jesuit. Julian Goodare, Journal of Ecclesiastical History Machielsen's intellectual biography successfully recovers the wider corpus of Delrios scholarship, planting it firmly in the literary milieu of Tridentine humanism and the genealogy of Bollandist hagiography. His groundbreaking textual analysis is trenchant and will attract historians of early modern witchcraft and superstition as well as literary scholars and classicists interested in late humanist scholarship, particularly the reception of Seneca. Jean-Claude Cheynet, American Historical Review

a major scholarly achievement and a book that it is difficult to praise too highly for the scope of its engagement with all aspects of Delrio's work, not just those which are well known amongst scholars of early modern demonology. It is difficult to imagine Machielsen's book ever being surpassed as the definitive biography of Martin Delrio, but beyond this, it is also a book that ought to be read by all scholars of the Counter-Reformation, whether they are interested in demonologists and witchcraft or not ... This is a book that deserves to be on the reading list of every course on the Counter-Reformation. Dr Francis Young, Reviews in History

Author Information

Jan Machielsen (DPhil in History, Oxford, 2011) is Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern European History at New College, Oxford. He is the editor, with Clare Copeland, of Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (2013) and the author of a number of articles exploring the intersection of religious and intellectual history. This is his first monograph.

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