“My brother, he is in Elysium” (Twelfth Night 1.2.1–4). Livonia? No, not at all! “Illyria,” says the play, but let us still ask, “And what should I do in Livonia?” That question beguiles the two authors of the work at hand. The heart of this book is a brilliant dialogue of equals; there is no lone, wise Socrates, fated to best all rivals. Rather, it is an equal wrestling match between two brilliant scholars. It falls to readers to referee, and ponder whether either ever pins the other to method's mat. But first, like Viola, her captain, and his crew, we find ourselves on an alien shore as strange as Shakespeare's Illyria. It is chilly Livonia, a country of Teutonic Knights, of downtrodden Baltic peasants, and, said some, long of werewolves. Unlike shipwrecked Viola, we come by choice to ponder poor Old Thiess, a peasant arrested, tried, and finally not burned but flogged, back in 1691–92, because before a court he insisted that, yes indeed, he was a werewolf, one who ventured to a local hell, battled witches and sorcerers, and fetched back crops to protect the harvest.

Now Thiess, among the historians, has had his history. In the 1930s Otto Höfler, a precocious Nazi, championed him, seeing in his account clues to a misty old world where men thronged to do zestful violence for the common good to build that muscular, earth-bound state readers should long for. Weak evidence, rash assumptions, an evil theme. More sober historians of werewolves have also used this trial and tale. But Thiess is here because he also served Carlo Ginzburg in his Benandanti (1966), for a radically different argument that also used the Thiess tale, among others, to posit a lost peasant world of magical strife against evil, ritual trances, and fertility protection that we now discern but darkly.

The dialogue at the heart of this splendidly documented volume took place on a Saturday and Monday of 2017, as September became October. The central colloquy covers fifty-one pages. Before it are 140 pages to set us up. First is an introduction by Bruce Lincoln, scholar of religions far and near, followed by a postscript by Carlo Ginzburg, placed early. There follows a condensed transcript of Thiess's trial and verdict. Then comes an excerpt from Höfler's turgid Kultische Geheimbünde of 1934. We then shift to our protagonists’ writings. First come excerpts from Ginzburg's several essays, over decades, that touched on Thiess. There follows a new essay, Lincoln's, for this volume, with a Livonia map (fuzzy), followed by Ginzburg's written rejoinder, with photographs of superposed faces of men and horses by the polymath Galton (evoking Wittgensteinian “family resemblance”), a descent tree of Lucretius manuscripts, and a cultural diffusion chart of both werewolves and benandanti. Finally, Lincoln responds at length to Ginzburg in epistolary mode, illustrating his arguments with further diagrams—manuscript affinities and exemplary traits shared or sorted, and a synoptic table of markers of one Russian prince-werewolf. At last, thus prepped by claims and methodically fortified, comes the actual meeting of minds, stripped for clarity of conversation's usual pauses and reversals but charmingly garnished with “Yes's” and “No's,” plus “Mmm's” and “Uh-huh's” that help us calibrate responses.

The fun of it all is the interlocutors’ brilliance and erudition. Their intellectual range and adroitness is dazzling. But where, we ask, does the debate leave us? Are we wiser about Old Thiess? Probably. About historical argument, for certain, we have gained, as both combatants here are skilled close readers, alert to every word and quirk of an utterance's setting and imperatives. Both, in the microhistory mode, scrutinize details. And both swiftly appeal from small to large, from exemplum, via skillful argument and wide citation, to some bigger picture. But what bigger picture? Go back to Viola, shipwrecked on an unfamiliar shore: Lincoln bids us abide long in solitary, distinct Livonia. Meaning is local. Ginzburg, meanwhile, yearns for his wider Elysium, transcontinental, deep, and ancient. Look behind the werewolf, and beyond my Friulian benandanti, for a nearly lost, mostly hidden rustic belief-world of shamanist trances evoking sacred strife for fecund food. No, says Lincoln. Stay right here in Livonia and see this Thiess as dodging behind Baltic werewolf lore, not the peasants’ inborn belief but an overweening myth thrust upon them by their German overlords, and later just evoked by Thiess and others like him to mask their subversive local rustling. Perhaps, but, in rebuttal one might ask, what ever allowed the peasant to think that so strange a story would persuade a court, except a belief well rooted in local lore? The debate feels far from over.