Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Magic in History) by Michael D. Bailey (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003)

Michael D. Bailey. Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Paperback edition. 200 pages.  Condition: New Description from the publisher:  "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 witchc