Francis Timbers's book makes a useful contribution to understanding the gendered meanings to be found in the practices and materials of early modern ritual magic. Chapters explore a range of magical lives, including the famed partnership of John Dee and Edward Kelley, the Civil War astrologer-occultist William Lilly, the seventeenth-century Christian mystic clergyman John Pordage, and the eccentric treasure-hunter Goodwin Wharton and his enigmatic partner in magical escapades, Mary Parish. These lives are used to explore issues such as manhood, honour, passivity, sex, gender subversion and metaphor. There is a lot of familiar material, and at one level the book serves as a lively, general introduction to ritual magic and English magicians in the period. The book is rather too brief, though, when it comes to wrestling with some major issues regarding the gender politics of the period. Some big generalisations are made in the two-page conclusion, such as that ‘female magicians tended to blur the boundaries associated with magic, just as they blurred the boundaries of their own bodies’ (p. 155). Not enough material is presented to support such assertions, but the value of Timbers's book is in signposting issues and in illustrating in what ways there is much more work to be done. As such it is a welcome addition to recent historiography.