Brian Paul Levack (born 1943) is an American historian of early modern Britain and Europe.
His research interests center on the history of the law, the relationship between law and politics in early modern Britain, the formation of the British state, witch-hunting, and demonic possession.
[1] Levack is most widely known for his book The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (4th edition, 2016), a comparative survey of witch-hunting throughout the early modern world that has been translated into eight languages.
[citation needed] His book, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (2013), challenges the commonly held belief that possession signals physical or mental illness and argues that demoniacs and exorcists—consciously or not—are following their various religious cultures, and their performances can only be understood in those contexts.
[2] His most recent book, Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America, covers the period from 16th to the 21st centuries.Levack has also edited more than twenty books, including The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2nd edition, 2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (2013).