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Historical In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Begins, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance by Armando Maggi $40 / Univ. Chicago Press / 2006 Armando Maggi’s In the Company of Demons is an intriguing book. Though we generally think of the Italian Renaissance as an age of enlightenment, Maggi reminds us that the belief in human intercourse with demons was a real one, and that respected thinkers such as Giovan Francesca Pico della Mirandola wrote serious, scientific treatises on witchcraft and demonology. These familiar spirits, it was thought, could attach themselves to human beings, serve them, and even love them. Maggi examines a number of these treatises and draws some interesting conclusions. While the Italian humanist world was overtly Christian, Ludovico Maria Sinistrari’s idea that fauns were mortal creatures, not Satanic creatures, opened up the possibility of embracing our familiars, which is to say, our own flawed natures. Maggi argues that these varying opinions reflected not only differing views towards the supernatural and towards the classical tradition, but also different views towards the body and the body as a metaphor. Maggi’s work, along with Carlo Ginzberg’s The Night Battles, Walter Stephens’ Demon Lovers, and Barbara Newman’s God and the Goddesses, ought to be of interest to anyone fascinated by the reception of witchcraft, classical paganism, and heterodox belief in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. — Ken Mondschein

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