Publications

Monographs

The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

Read the blurb and the endorsements (and buy a copy!) here.

The War on Witchcraft

The War on Witchcraft: Andrew Dickson White, George Lincoln Burr, and the Origins of Witchcraft Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
See the abstract here. A “green” (pre-publication) version of this publication can be found here.

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
To see reviews of this book and read the introduction, click here.

Translations

Jeanine De Landtsheer, In Pursuit of the Muses: The Life and Work of Justus Lipsius, ed. Marijke Crab and Ide François (Leuven: Lysa Publishers, 2021).
I translated the first half of this volume into English. You can find more details about the book here and my obituary of Jeanine De Landtsheer, who passed away unexpectedly at the beginning of 2021, here.

Edited Volumes

with Nina Lamal, eds, Jesuits and Print, a special issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies 10, no. 3 (2023). Available on open access here.

The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (London: Routledge, 2020).
You can find more details about this book here, and watch a short video recording about its contents (by my colleague Dr Emily Cock) here.

with Clare Copeland, eds, Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Journal Articles (peer reviewed)

  • Known unknowns: The mutilated and missing pages of Leiden MS. Lips 3 (2), Humanistica Lovaniensia 72 (2023): 173-188.
  • with Michelle Aroney (Pfeffer), A work out of time: Religion and the decline of magic at 50, Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 261 (2023): 259-296. (10.1093/pastj/gtad012)
  • The devil is in the tales: Evaluating eye-witness testimony in Martin Delrio’s Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600), Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 11, no. 2 (2022): 258-280. (10.5325/preternature.11.2.0258)
  • ‘The Making of a Teen Wolf: Pierre de Lancre’s Confrontation with Jean Grenier (1603–10)’, Folklore 130/3 (2019): 237-257.  
  • ‘When a Female Pope Meets a Biconfessional Town: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Popular Polemics in the 1630s’, Early Modern Low Countries 3/1 (2019): 1-31.  
  • ‘On the Confessional Uses and History of Witchcraft: Thomas Stapleton’s 1594 Witchcraft Oration’, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 13/3 (2018): 381-407.  
  • ‘An Aspiring Saint and His Work: Cesare Baronio and the Success and Failure of the Annales ecclesiastici, 1588–1607’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2/3 (2017): 233–87.  
  • ‘Sacrificing Josephus to Save Philo: Cesare Baronio and the Jewish Origins of Christian Monasticism’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23/3 (2016): 239–45. 
  • ‘The Rise and Fall of Seneca Tragicus, c. 1365–1593’, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes LXXVII (2014): 61–85.  
  • ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the King: Thomas Stapleton’s Apologia pro Rege Catholico Philippo II (1592)’, English Historical Review CXXIX (2014): 19–46.  
  • ‘Friendship and Religion in the Republic of Letters: The Return of Justus Lipsius to Catholicism (1591)’, Renaissance Studies 27/2 (2013): 161–82.  
  • ‘Thinking with Montaigne: Evidence, Scepticism and Meaning in Early Modern Demonology’, French History 25/4 (2011): 427–52.  
  • ‘How (not) to Get Published: The Plantin Press in the 1590s’, Dutch Crossing 34/2 (2010): 99–114.  

Book Chapters

  • ‘What’s in a name? Essenes, Therapeutae, and monks in the Christian imagination, c.1500–1700‘, in Dmitri Levitin and Ian Maclean, eds., The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age: Comparative Approaches (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 277-335.
  • ‘”Moved and Seduced by the Instigation of the Devil”: Witchcraft and the Law, 1450–1700’, in Russell Sandberg et al., eds, Research Handbook on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law and Religion (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019), pp. 72–93.
  • ‘The Counter Reformation’, in Philip Ford, Jan Bloemendal, and Charles Fantazzi, eds, Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2014), vol. 1, pp. 759–73 [revised online ed., 2017].  
  • ‘Bodin in the Netherlands’, in Howell Lloyd, ed., The Reception of Bodin (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 157–92.  
  • ‘Heretical Saints and Textual Discernment: The Polemical Origins of the Acta Sanctorum’, in Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen, eds., Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 103–41.  

Selected Reviews

  • ‘God’s Own Werewolf: The Afterlife of an Odd Old Story’, The Times Literary Supplement, 31 July 2020.
  • ‘Catholics’, The Times Literary Supplement, 3 September 2019.  
  • ‘Virgin Atlantic: Religious Expansion and Its Modern Parallels’, The Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 2019.  
  • ‘J’accuse’, The Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 2019.  
  • ‘Angels and Demons: The Elusive, Scholarly Jean Bodin’, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 February 2018.  
  • ‘Foul is Fair: Investigating Why Witchcraft is Back’, The Times Literary Supplement, 1 November 2017.  
  • ‘A Mother’s Trials’, The Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 2016.  

Selected Other Writings

  • ‘USS Strike: We Need an Honest Debate about Pension “Facts”‘, Times Higher Education Blog 8 March 2018.  
  • ‘A History of Early Modern Catholicism in a Single Object’, British Academy Review 26 (2015): 64–68.  
  • ‘Pierre De Lancre (1556–1631)’, in Luc Foisneau, ed., Dictionnaire des philosophes français du 17e siècle (Paris, 2015), pp. 984–88.