ABSTRACT

The closest that Martin Delrio ever came to being threatened by witchcraft was in the spring. As a young magistrate, he had taken part in the capture of Leuven, a small university town in the Low Countries, by forces loyal to the Catholic King Philip II of Spain. The idea that demonology was a field in which a scholarly reputation could be made may feel distasteful to us today and this may explain why this aspect of demonology has long been ignored. Historians have spent much ink debating the origins of the Revolt, which ultimately fractured the Low Countries into two Protestant and Catholic entities but for Delrio, the conflict was only ever a religious one. The work cannot only be placed within a corpus of demonological texts, as the present volume seeks to do, but also as a contribution to a particular type of Catholic scholarship which emerged a generation after the closing of the Council of Trent.