The great work arrives: Investigations into Magic, Books III–IV — Tome II of the Disquisitionum Magicarum of Martin Delrio, S.J. (Mainz, 1606), the most influential treatise on magic and superstition of the early modern age, in English for the first time.
When the Areopagitic Vindications joined the library, Delrio was introduced as “author of the great Disquisitiones Magicae.” Here is the middle of that work itself. Book III treats harmful magic — sleep-inducing, love-producing, and hostile in its ten kinds — and the vain observances by which superstition creeps into daily life. Book IV treats divination entire: how true prophecy and divine revelation are discerned from false; divination with open invocation of demons and without; conjectation from the stars, from faces and hands, and from dreams; and the old trials by combat, fire, and water, whose rites Delrio reports and whose logic he dismantles — “to demand miracles when they are not necessary is to tempt God.”
The edition keeps the print’s own apparatus. Del Rio’s summaries of both books stand before them as he placed them; more than five hundred of his marginal citations sit beside the passages they document; and the two great indexes at the back — the Index of Things and Words and the index of Places of Sacred Scripture and Various Writers — are not merely reproduced but clickable: every one of their fifteen hundred page citations jumps to the passage it names in the 1606 pagination. The work may be read online section by section, or downloaded as a PDF with a clickable table of contents and as an EPUB for e-readers, and the original Latin volume is linked for anyone who would check the translation against the print.
Books I–II and V–VI of the treatise are not yet translated; they will join the library as they are completed, God willing.