"...explores the wide range of healers and forms of healing in the southern half of the Italian peninsula that was the kingdom of Naples between 1600 and 1800. By adopting the point of view of the sick people themselves, it uncovers religious and popular ideas about disease and its causation and cures. The training, preparation and practice of all healers is discussed, against a backdrop of ongoing attempts by the medical and ecclesiastical elites to limit their activities within bounds considered acceptable. Using fascinating and wide ranging sources which include medical and demonological treatises, hagiographies, guild statutes, hospital records, government edicts, chronicles, books of "secrets," local histories, episcopal visitations, canonization processes, trials for magic, diabolism and simulated sanctity, Jesuit mission accounts, and the records of the kingdom’s medical magistracy, the Protomedicato..." (publisher).