Sinistrari was the last of the demonologists in the inquisitorial tradition of Remy and Boguet. Originally a Franciscan friar, he became Professor of Theology at Pavia University, consultant to the supreme tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome, and Vicar-General to the Archbishop of Avignon.
This work on demons was
not known in his own time. Itself an expansion of a section in his most famous
work, De Delictis et Poenis, or On Crimes and Punishments, the manuscript was
only discovered in 1875. It was found in a London bookshop by the French
publisher Isidore Liseux who paid sixpence for it. The work is devoted to the
problems arising from the relations between devils and
humans.