This work is considered to be one of the most important manuals ever compiled on witchcraft, offering striking insight into the early seventeenth-century mind and society's attempts to cope with the evils it saw manifested in sorcery. It is a collection of writings by the Ambrosian monk Francesco Maria Guazzo which comprehensively and penetratingly describes the entire practice and profession of witchcraft. First published in 1608, the commentaries came at an appropriate time. Contemporary accounts noted that witchcraft and sorcery had "spread in all directions," leaving "no country, town, village, or district, no class of society" free from the practice. Reproduced from a rare limited edition published in 1929 and supplemented with many erudite editorial notes by the Rev. Montague Summers, it includes serious discussions of the witches' pacts with the devil, finely detailed descriptions of witches' powers, poisons, and crimes; sleep-inducing spells and methods for removing them, apparitions of demons and specters, diseases caused by demons, and other topics. Also examined in detail are witches' alleged powers to transport themselves from place to place, create living things, make beasts talk and the dead reappear, and much more.