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. Martin Delrio (1551–1608) was a Spanish Jesuit, born in Antwerp, whose career spanned the worlds of diplomacy, priesthood, and academia in several universities. He was deeply affected by his early unhappy experiences of the Dutch Wars, and once he had entered the Society of Jesus, he was ready to fight the forces of Protestantism with a pen well dipped, indeed almost clogged, in erudition. Famously known as a friend of Justus Lipsius and an opponent of Joseph Scaliger, his several forays into the disciplines of textual analysis, dramatic criticism, demonology, and religious polemic soon earned him both praise and condemnation from Catholics and Protestants alike. His role as university teacher opened his eyes to Seneca, whose tragedies in particular were part of the Jesuit educational curriculum, and it seems to have been his close study of these, along with lectures on witchcraft and heresy by his own teacher, Juan de Maldonado, that stimulated his interest in witches, magic, and demonology. It is for his massive work on these that he is known today: his Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex was published in 1599–1600, with subsequent additions, some of them extensive, from his pen until 1608. Machielsen puts this work in context and helps us to see three things in particular: first, that Delrio was not writing from personal experience of witches, but from the depth of a scholar’s armchair, largely isolated from the realities he was discussing; second, that the Disquisitiones is not, and was not meant to be, a manual of legal practice in the manner of the earlier Malleus Maleficarum; and third, that an integral part of Delrio’s whole corpus was, far from concentrating on magic, much more concerned with larger questions of the scholarly and theological exactitude that lay near the heart of contemporary religious controversy.

Despite his producing a large volume of published work, however, Delrio’s formidable reputation, both in his own day and later, rested to an increasing extent on his being the person who had said the last word on magic, witchcraft, and demonology, and so it is clearly important to know not just what he said, but why he said it and how. What he said has, with one or two scarce exceptions, tended to remain enclosed in “the decent obscurity of a learned language,” so a full modern translation would be welcome. (Machielson’s own versions of quoted passages tend to be stiltedly literal, the only real criticism one might have of his work.) How he said it has not been tackled until now, and one of the most perspicacious sections of Machielsen’s book, chapter 10, discusses how Delrio chose and organized his exempla, and how he employed them to further his basic message. This was not a new message, but one to which his erudition gave added weight and importance: that witchcraft and heresy were inextricably interlinked. This did not, of course, create a prosecutory climate — that was already well in place — but it did offer what appeared to be overwhelming evidence supporting the prevailing official theory; so unlike other near-contemporary works and their authors, such as those of Pierre de Lancre and Henri Boguet, “the scholarship of the Disquisitiones . . . could not be dismissed along with its author” (293). Delrio’s relentless piling of exempla upon exempla that we see throughout his work was, we learn, made possible by his habit of commonplacing, and this aperçu immediately clarifies the structure of the Disquisitiones for us. It is typical of the way Machielsen illuminates not only Delrio himself, but also the scholarship of his period, as in his observation, fully developed in this book, that the whole of Delrio’s corpus, including his later Marian and exegetical works, was driven in part by a desire and need for self-fashioning that Machielsen argues was a feature of much contemporary scholarship. 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.