book reviews 429

Jan Machielsen Martin Delrio. Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation. , Oxford/New York 2015, x + 441 pp. isbn 9780197265802. £90; us$150.

In his magisterial book on Martin Delrio ( 1551—Louvain 1608),1 Jan Machielsen professes wanting to save his subject from witchcraft historians and argues “that it is likely that the author of the most popular work of demonology of the early modern period never met, let alone prosecuted a witch” (p. 5). Delrio’s most ubiquitous witch, so Machielsen, was the classical Medea in Seneca’s eponymous play. Delrio was, inter alia, the Jesuit author of the most influential book on witchcraft in the seventeenth century, the three-volume Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex, first printed in Louvain in 1599–1600.2 Machielsen refers to the witchcraft historian Wolfgang Behringer, whose con- clusion about the relationship between demonologies and actual preceding prosecutions can be taken as a general rule. But, according to Machielsen, Delrio was a telling exception. Behringer’s representation of the evidence can sometimes be more accurate, especially when he ventures outside Germany. Behringer’s dates of the witch trials which influenced Johan Wier’s De pres- tigiis daemonum are wrong although this does not deflect from his view of Wier’s reaction to witch trials in general; they just took place a few years earlier, in the . With reference to Delrio Behringer mentions witch tri- als in the Netherlands between 1592 and 1600. He states that the Disquisi- tiones provided “numerous examples from contemporary legal practice, most of them collected during the persecutions in the ”; he does not, however, specify the nature of these examples. He singles out the trial against Jean de Vault, a Benedictine monk in Stavelot, in which Del- rio “took a particular interest.”3 But while the specific case is taken up by Machielsen (p. 248), the general argument is not or at least not sufficiently developed and the reader will search in vain for any other instances of trials

1 This is the modern Flemish rendering of Martín del Río, second name: Antonius. It is in accordance with most of the title pages of his Disquisitiones; most German library catalogues, however, maintain the accents; in Belgium he is listed as Martin Anton del Rio. In Britain he is called Martin Del Rio. Cf. p. viii in the book under review. 2 Cf. the Wikipedia entry on Martin Delrio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Delrio (con- sulted 2 April 2016), written by Machielsen; cf. the bibliographically more balanced German version: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Anton_Delrio. 3 Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts (Cambridge, 2004), table on p. 102. Quotations from pp. 101, 103.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09603024 430 book reviews in the Southern Netherlands, or even the refutation that Delrio left them out of his demonology. As this introductionary paragraph shows, as a witchcraft historian I am very much in the academic camp that Machielsen so evidently distrusts; I am not a student of late sixteenth-century intellectual discourse and the Jesuits, although both may be indispensable for an understanding of witchcraft perse- cution.4 Yet this does not preclude my admiration for Machielsen’s scholarship and my agreement with his position that an author needs to be seen in his own context (and that a biographer does not need to identify with his sub- ject). His presentations excel in carefully situating intellectual discussions and in exhuming contradictions. It is fascinating to read about the first years of the from the perspective of a staunch follower of the Catholic religion and the Spanish king. As Machielsen explains, doing anything else amounted to the Delrio family admitting their own failures. The biography charts the tension between Delrio’s friendship and his public intellectual exchanges with , who in 1590 left the University of Leiden to reconvert as a Catholic in Louvain. The subtle ways the Jesuit rule of obedience was evaded is reveal- ing and so is the way a Christian engaged with classical authors who were after all pagans. A substantial part of the book is taken up with a discussion of the Syntagma tragoediae latinae (1593–1594), Delrio’s edition of the plays of Seneca, in the commentary of which he provided a solution to their author- ship. The Syntagma also featured Delrio’s views on women and torture. These chapters culminate in part iii of the book which unhesitatingly leads to the conclusion that the commentaries to the classical plays, that is to say intel- lectual engagement rather than personal encounters or legal practice, provide the logical background for the Disquisitiones. Medea had been the quintessen- tial witch and the pagan gods substituted for . Delrio’s abhorrence of fortune telling was echoed in the rhetorical trope of , that is to say conjecture. Thus, rather than considering Delrio as a frustrated witch prosecu- tor, or at least one in need of justification, he should be seen in first instance in conjunction with other classical scholars commenting on demons. Or more generally: any discussion of the relationship between the occurrence of witch trials and the publication of demonological comments should be preceded by a precise classification of the authors concerned. Delrio, of course, went on to produce the most elaborate demonology of all.

4 See on Grégorio de Valencia: Franco Motta, “Evidence, Truth, and Sovereignty in Late 16th Century Demonological Literature,”Forum Historiae Iuris 2016: http://www.forhistiur.de/2016 -04-motta/?|=en.

Church History and Religious Culture 96 (2016) 371–485