Martin Delrio

Reviews / Votes

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 * 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 * the book is undeniably a great achievement, dense with facts and rigorously structured. * Jetze Touber, Low Countries Historical Review * admirably comprehensive, and firmly re-establishes Delrio as a significant figure of the Northern Renaissance. * Robert F. W. Smith, Journal of the Northern Renaissance * this admirable study will be of interest to a wide range of scholars beyond the witchcraft specialists. * Church History and Religious Culture * this is a book every student of the religious and intellectual history of Europe should read and read again. It is a consummate work of illumination. * P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft * 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 *