Brian P. Levack. The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West.

The publication of D. P. Walker's Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries in 1981 initiated the modern study of demonic possession and exorcism. Since that time, there has been a plethora of studies devoted to this theme. But there is a need for a book that not only brings together modern thinking on demonic possession, especially in the early modern period, but also extends its range beyond the current concentration on England and France and reaches back to the New Testament period and forward to our own times. Brian P. Levack's The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West fills that need superbly. Levack's book is shaped by the argument that demoniacs, exorcists, and audiences alike were involved in theatrical performances that, to a greater or lesser extent, encoded available cultural scripts. That demoniacs and exorcists were involved in religious dramas is not a new insight, having first been noted by Samuel Harsnett in A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures as early as 1603, and explained more recently by Stephen Greenblatt in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988). But Levack's insight is nuanced in two ways: first, he argues that all demoniacs, whether their performances were voluntary (and thus perhaps fraudulent) or involuntary, assumed dramatic roles; second, he convincingly shows the striking difference between Catholic and Protestant performances and deliverances.