Isaac Newton was an alchemist. That fact is usually brushed aside as unrelated to his leading role in the scientific revolution, but author Philip Fanning has re-examined the evidence and concluded that the two were really inseparable. In this book Fanning shows us the surprisingly profound influence that Newton's study of alchemy had in shaping his scientific thinking. Transcending simple empiricism, alchemy was an experiential science that involved the experimenter as much as the subject of experiment, and it had profound spiritual and psychological dimensions. Often dismissed as simply an unscientific precursor to chemistry, it was in fact a complex Gnostic pursuit that drew upon the entire mental and moral being of its practitioners. Instead of the usual story of reason, curiosity, and scepticism overcoming ignorance, superstition, and gullibility, Fanning tells of an ancient, carefully tended occult institution passed from generation to generation until at last it came down to the man who gave the world modern science. He also details the ways that this infant science rose up to establish a limited but dominant paradigm of truth that relegated the major esoteric and spiritual tradition of alchemy to the fringes of discourse prior to its twentieth century revival by psychologist Carl Jung and other innovative thinkers.

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 reformer who alternately persecuted heretics and negotiated with them--a man who was by far the most important church authority to write on witchcraft in the early fifteenth century. Nider was a major source for the infamous Malleus maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches (1486), the manual of choice for witch-hunters in late medieval Europe. Today Nider's reputation rests squarely on his witchcraft writings, but in his own day he was better known as a leader of the reform movement within the Dominican order and as a writer of important tracts on numerous other aspects of late medieval religiosity, including heresy and lay piety. Battling Demons places Nider in this wider context, showing that for late medieval thinkers, witchcraft was one facet of a much larger crisis plaguing Christian society.

As the only English-language study to focus exclusively on the rise of witchcraft in the early fifteenth century, Battling Demons will be important to students and scholars of the history of magic and witchcraft and medieval religious history.