Battling Demons

"The fifteenth century is more than any other the century of the persecution of witches." So wrote Johan Huizinga more than eighty years ago in his classic Autumn of the Middle Ages. Although Huizinga was correct in his observation, modern readers have tended to focus on the more spectacular witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, it was during the late Middle Ages that the full stereotype of demonic witchcraft developed in Europe, and this is the subject of Battling Demons. At the heart of the story is Johannes Nider (d. 1438), a Dominican theologian and…