The protagonist of this study, the Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608), is a largely forgotten figure, purposefully elided from many of the scholarly and religious spheres to which he contributed. To the extent that he is remembered today it is for his Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600), a study of witchcraft and superstition that went through numerous editions and was last reprinted in 1755. The present volume recovers the lost world of Delrio’s wider scholarship and shows that the Disquisitiones, removed from this context, has been widely misunderstood. Martin Delrio, as a friend of the Flemish ... More

The protagonist of this study, the Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608), is a largely forgotten figure, purposefully elided from many of the scholarly and religious spheres to which he contributed. To the extent that he is remembered today it is for his Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600), a study of witchcraft and superstition that went through numerous editions and was last reprinted in 1755. The present volume recovers the lost world of Delrio’s wider scholarship and shows that the Disquisitiones, removed from this context, has been widely misunderstood. Martin Delrio, as a friend of the Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius and an enemy of the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger played an important part in the confessional Republic of Letters. As the editor of classical texts, notably Senecan tragedy, he had a number of philological achievements to his name. Delrio’s scholarship after his admission to the Society of Jesus (the Disquisitiones included) marked an important contribution to wider Counter-Reformation scholarship. Catholic contemporaries accordingly rated him highly, as evidenced by a published Vita, but later generations proved less kind. 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 scholarship, arguing that the Counter-Reformation must be seen as a textual project and Delrio’s contribution to it as the product of a mindset forged in its fragile borderlands.