Steven Vanden Broeke's 2005 review in Renaissance Quarterly is the most substantive critical assessment of Lehrich's The Language of Demons and Angels in the major journals of Renaissance studies. Broeke is himself a historian of Renaissance astrology and natural philosophy with deep expertise in the period, and his review engages seriously with Lehrich's arguments while raising a significant methodological objection.

Broeke acknowledges the intellectual originality and philosophical sophistication of Lehrich's reading. The identification of the DOP as organized by a philosophy of language — rather than by a cosmological system or a catalogue of magical practices — is a genuinely new and productive analytical lens, and Broeke credits Lehrich with opening interpretive possibilities that earlier scholarship had not explored. The close readings of Book III are particularly praised.

The principal objection concerns the use of Derridean and semiotic theory as a hermeneutic frame. Broeke's concern is not that the theoretical frameworks are wrong in themselves but that applying them to a sixteenth-century text risks finding in Agrippa the concerns of twentieth-century critical theory rather than of the Renaissance. The question is whether Agrippa's paradoxes about language are structurally homologous to Derrida's deconstruction of the logocentric tradition, or whether the resemblance is superficial and the apparent philosophical parallels obscure more than they illuminate.

Lehrich's implicit answer — that the tensions in Agrippa's text are genuinely philosophical and that the theoretical frameworks illuminate rather than project them — is not directly refuted by Broeke, who acknowledges that the close reading supports the thesis reasonably well. But the review raises a legitimate concern about methodological transparency that any reader of Lehrich should keep in mind: the book's argument depends on a particular theoretical vocabulary, and readers unfamiliar with that vocabulary may find the philosophical claims more opaque than illuminating. Broeke's review is valuable as a guide to reading Lehrich critically.