As the title of her new book indicates, Allison P. Coudert has set herself an impressive challenge: an overview of religion, magic, and science not only in Europe but also in America, spanning the whole of the early modern period. As an eminent scholar who has been investigating this field for decades already, Coudert certainly seems qualified to tackle so large and demanding a project. As she relates in the acknowledgments, she took her first steps under the guidance of Frances Yates at the Warburg Institute. Her research has focused on the interactions of science, religion, and esotericism ever since, and in this book she sets out to show that “religion, magic, and science were all of a piece” (ix) during the early modern period. Published as part of the Praeger Series on the Early Modern World, the result is, regrettably, not satisfactory, even if we take the book as...
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