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Historical Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief by Walter Stephens $20.00 / Univ. Chicago Press / 2002 In response to the heresy running rife in medieval France, the Church created the office of the Inquisition to root out those who denied its authority. In the 16th century, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, the mania for hunting out heretics took a frightening new turn, as thousands of people-primarily women-were accused of being witches. Fascinatingly, one particular crime the Inquisitors accused their victims of was engaging in orgies with the devil. The idea of humans having sex with demons was as troublesome in the early modern era as it is today. But returning to the primary sources-particularly Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger's 1486 Malleus Malificarum-author Walter Stephens makes a convincing argument that understanding this bit of reasoning is the key to understanding the mentality of the time. In so doing, he debunks many commonly held beliefs about the mania for witch-hunting. Delving into the mindset of the period and the intellectual tradition from which the Inquisitors worked (such as the Aristotelian theology of Thomas Aquinas), Stephens acknowledges that the medieval and early modern mindset was far more "earthy" than our own, and that the perverse acts that accused witches were forced to admit to under torture were not brought on by the witch-hunter's warped libidos. But rather because touch is the surest measure of reality-and by "proving" that humans had sex with demons-they proved the reality of the supernatural realm. Witch-hunting, in short, was an intellectual antidote for the crisis of faith that plagued Europe during the 16th century. Along the way, Stephens describes how theologians explained the means by which supposedly spiritual beings could form bodies and impregnate mortal women, as well as debunks the myth that powerless women were the only ones accused. (Men, too, became the victims of the penitential flame.) Overall, Demon Lovers is an interesting, well-written, well-reasoned, and well-researched work of scholarship. —Ken Mondschein

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