July 23, 2025

The Devil in History

A new collection of essays confronts one of the world's wiliest adversaries

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

The Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition offers a massive exploration of what the opening blurb calls an “innovative history of the anti-West — the West as seen through its anxieties, fears, and attempts to define and police itself and its boundaries.” It’s a stunning piece of work, bringing together a huge number of interdisciplinary scholars with topics stretching over the millennia.

We thought we’d celebrate its publication by inviting the editors (Richard Raiswell, Michelle D. Brock, and David R. Winter) to engage in a conversation over email about the project with Modern Medieval.

The answers below have been lightly edited for brevity.

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How did you all get interested in this topic?

Richard Raiswell: I did a paper as a graduate student on a case of fraudulent demon possession from the 1620s. What piqued my interest there was that far from being cowed by the idea of the demonic, the people involved were perfectly happy to exploit their neighbours’ fears in order to line their pocket. I initially thought perhaps this was a one-off, but as I did my PhD on early modern knowledge of India to 1600 and waded through the accounts of early European travellers to the region, I encountered many more demons. For them, demonism served not just as a useful frame for the assimilation and comprehension of difference, it was the filter through which to process their observations and experience.

David Winter: Not unlike Richard, I was led to the study of the devil after exploring other corners of the premodern world. In my case, though, I was focused on the history of medieval preaching, in particular, the kind of manuals and supporting texts medieval preachers used to reach audiences more effectively.

As you might expect, the devil and his minions make regular appearances throughout the canon of exemplary literature. Demons can be exceptionally effective discursive tools to deploy in support of Christian morality. So I found myself increasingly focused on precisely this: the use (and arguably, misuse) of the devil in the Christian narrative tradition of the Middle Ages. And demons change and adapt according to a given author’s discursive needs at any particular moment. They can be fierce, loathsome, grotesque, bawdy, all-powerful or merely an annoyance. Some are even helpful or funny. They can be precisely what a preacher needs them to be in any particular narrative context. Thus, their use as an explanatory device in Christian storytelling is really revealing of biases, assumptions, preconceptions, etc. of premodern culture: i.e., put a demon wherever you detect an obstacle or enemy! 

Michelle Brock: I came to the topic in the way that I think many early modernists do: through my interest in the history of witchcraft. I went to graduate school thinking I would focus on the witch-hunts in Scotland, but in reading through the trial records and other associated documents, I rather quickly became fascinated with other questions: what did early modern Scots, including ordinary men and women, believe about the devil? And more important, what did this belief do? How did ideas about the devil make people feel about themselves and the world around them, and how did they act on these fears and experiences? This became the subject of my PhD research and my first book, and I’ve been “thinking with demons” ever since.

On a less professional and more personal note, my fascination with the demonic was no doubt driven by growing up in a conservative area of Dallas, around quite a lot of evangelical Christians. I was always fascinated by religion and specifically the occult—I would check out books from the library as far back as elementary school about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and the like. This wasn’t my trying to be subversive, but rather to answer some of my own questions and doubts about God and the invisible world. I suppose I never stopped asking these questions!

This is an immense volume that draws on a lot of expertise by a wide variety of scholars. What was the most interesting thing you learned from your contributors?

RR: From the outset, we made a conscious decision to adopt a thematic rather than chronological structure. We didn’t want just the standard series of chapters: “the devil in antiquity,” “the devil in the Middle Ages,” “the devil in the Enlightenment.” By organising matters more thematically, we wanted to find new connections between fields. In particular, I wanted to highlight the fact that the way the devil was constructed at any point in time was as much a function of people’s experiences of misfortune, tragedy and catastrophe as it was a function of the theologians—that is, to highlight the reciprocal dynamic between different levels of culture.

Personally, I learned a lot from our contributors. But I’d have to say that what I found most particularly interesting were the two chapters “The devil and colonialism” and “Demons, missionaries and migrants” by Jutta Wimmler and Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps respectively. Both of these are focused on Africa and are concerned with the assimilation of iterations of Christian devil belief—how this process created a new, more emotively grounded, potent devil who is now being fed back into the west through diaspora communities.

DW: I would add that the three editors (Mikki, Richard and myself) are all premodernists. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that while we are firmly situated in the earlier part of the Christian demonological tradition, we all have a huge, abiding curiosity about the survival of the tradition into the modern world. More than anything, we wanted to create a book that, in a very real way, showed readers how the past continues to haunt, shape, and inform the present.

So, while I’ve learned much from all the contributors, I’ve quite appreciated some of the chapters that take me out of my chronological comfort zone. Though we flatter ourselves sometimes to imagine that the devil is an outdated relic of a distant, credulous past, in fact, the figure of Satan has arguably never been more important.

MB: I’ll just add that I think we made two really important decisions from the outset. First, we wanted to tackle a very wide chronology, because the majority of the extant literature on the devil focuses on the medieval and early modern periods. But, as Dave notes, the argument of our volume as a whole is that the devil still matters; he continues to shape not only theology, but politics, popular culture, gender, art, and so much more. Indeed, we argue that the devil is a defining feature of the “western” imagination—of how communities in Europe and North America have defined and policed their own boundaries, often to the great detriment of those construed as “other.” As a result, we wanted our chapters to offer readers insights not only into the foundations of the Christian devil—uneven and messy as they are—but also the ways in which thinking about evil generally and Satan more specifically continues to inform our modern world.

Second, we wanted to offer chapters that addressed the topic in new ways: to think about the relationship between the devil and big topics like war, sex, emotions, politics, cinema, and colonialism. One of my favorite examples of this is Philip Frana’s fascinating and innovative chapter on “the Digital Devil,” which looks at how ideas about the demonic have informed both the creation and reception of new technologies. 

The book, as it must, sits kind of at the intersection of "religion" and "history" - 2 things that many people (including some colleagues!) think of as distinct at their core. What's the value of thinking, as this volume does, across subfields? How should we deal with "the supernatural" as a historical force?

RR: I don’t think one could attempt even to think about the history of the devil without being very interdisciplinary. The devil is about more than the technical problem of how to reconcile the manifest existence of radical evil within the frame of an apparently perfect creation. The solutions proposed by theologians are often ingenious, but saying that evil is nothing, as St. Anselm argued, or that what we see as evil is actually providentially good, as Gregory the Great proposed, are wholly unsatisfying to a peasant whose livelihood has been destroyed by a freak hailstorm, or whose child is dying a slow and  painful death in their arms. That, of course, is if they ever encountered these arguments at all. 

The devil intruded on every level of society—and for many Christians, he is still engineering thousands of microaggressions every day in an attempt to undermine the actions of the godly and to destroy their country on the hill. I think ignoring the popular and emotively grounded devil who has developed out of the pentecostal and evangelical traditions from the middle of the 20th century is one of the major problems of the scholarship now. If we’re so snobby as to ignore developments outside the intellectual elite, then we can miss what’s really going on—and we’re left sitting around wondering in vain how Trump could have ended up elected president of the US twice!

DW: We’ve been toying with an idea that we could potentially call the “demonic turn”. In the last 40 yrs, there have been a number of movements that attempt to understand culture and make claims about it using particular frames and lenses. So, there has famously been a “spatial turn” and an “animal turn,” among others. I wonder whether we’re at a moment where a number of disciplines are putting an emphasis on investigating the daemonic (broadly understood) and/or viewing the culture through the “inverse” of its supposed core values.

At a time when world events seem driven by something very like the Freudian id, perhaps it’s not surprising that observers and critics are looking at belief in dark things to explain society’s motives and impulses. This volume is only one example of the cross pollination that’s occurring.

MB: Elaine Pagels, in the introduction to her seminal The Origin of Satan, writes that the death of her husband made her realize “how our imaginative perceptions of what is invisible relate to the ways we respond to the people around us, to events, and to the natural world.” Put differently, our ideas about the supernatural govern how we see and behave in the world. How could one disciplinary field ever tackle a subject so big and so foundational? For me, the value of thinking across subfields is primarily methodological: by putting history in dialogue with religion, media studies, art history, anthropology, and more, we can ask and begin to answer far richer, more comprehensive questions about the nature of belief and the evolution of one of history’s most important ideas.

In the same way that I cannot teach my “History of the Devil” seminar without things like theology, art, and literature, the story that we are trying to tell in this volume requires a broad and boundary-pushing approach. 

What's your favorite devil story?

RR: Have to say I am quite partial to the “Apocalypse in 9/8” section of Genesis’ Supper’s Ready. But I’ll go a little darker and say that I appreciate Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet--Mad Meg. I use it in my courses to get people thinking about the breakdown of coherence with the Reformation and its consequences. But reflecting on the painting anachronistically from the perspective of the middle of 2025, stick a red, white and blue top hat on Meg and a few MAGA caps on the demons and I think you have something of an allegory for the state of contemporary America.

DW: I don’t have a favourite story so much as favourite demonologists: Richalm of Schoental and Caesarius of Heisterbach. Both of them were German Cistercian monks of the late 12th and early 13th century. The Cistercians were a dour reform order stemming out of the Benedictine tradition. The order heavily emphasised proper training and spiritual formation. Because of this, a number of training manuals for junior monks survive and these two guys were involved in teaching the next generation of brethren.

Richalm, I think, fancied himself as a kind of David Attenborough: providing young monks with a field guide on the operation of demons within the precincts of the monastery. He wanted to show the novices how to identify them, what their characteristics were, how to defeat them, etc. The problem, of course, is that Richalm was demon obsessed! He saw demonic activity literally everywhere. In a passage that Richard and I translated for a Reader on the devil, he says that they are so numerous that they are  like motes of dust on a sunbeam. They haunted his cloister throughout the night. He heard them in distant claps of thunder, in the rumbling of his  stomach, and  in words that he seems to have heard or muttered or repeated under his breath. He saw them in the bandage covering a brother monk’s wounded ear, and in the blankets of the bed of a dying villager. They prevented him from sleeping at night; they disturbed his reading; they tried to prevent him from making the sign of the cross during prayer. I like this text because I think it shows students precisely what sort of eschatological landscape some medievals thought they were traversing.

Caesarius, on the other hand, was a teacher. He was also a great raconteur and trader in gossip. Even though he was in his monastery outside Cologne, he seems to have had the tea on everyone. In a number of the devil stories he tells, demons are lively threats to the Cistercian manner of life, but there are also some unexpected ones: like the knight who hired a squire who was able to perform all kinds of wonderful services for his master. It turns out he was a demon. Some of Caesarius’s demons are almost playful and humorous. I find this useful to help students understand how Christianity absorbed and rechanneled the folk beliefs of the age: it seems pretty clear, in some instances, that Caesarius is rewriting stories about fairies and elves in such a way that they align with the Christian worldview: for a 13th century Cistercian, that meant that a fairy had to become a demon.   

MB: I’ll offer a very contemporary story, one that I insisted we include in our introduction (and my co-editors humored me!). In early 2024, a post went viral on several social media sites. It reported that “a televangelist from Arkansas claims Satan is engineering Taylor Swift’s marriage to Travis Kelce so she can give birth to the antichrist and launch the apocalyptic thousand-year war against Christ.” The post closed with two rhetorical questions related to Swift’s popstar status: “Must she do everything? And during a world tour?” The Arkansas preacher in question was never identified, and no such Swift-Kelce offspring has been born—the whole thing is satire.

But what fascinates me is that the televangelist’s purported message, though false, is probable; people who shared this post took it seriously. And why not? It sure seems like something someone would have said in our current moment! The truth, of course, is not far off. Swift has been accused repeatedly of performing satanic rituals during her shows, despite her open identification as a Christian. In April 2024, the spread of these claims prompted PolitiFact to publish a piece debunking them, which included an interview with Lucien Greaves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, who dismissed such allegations as “incredibly asinine conspiracy theories.” This story has multiple elements of modern (and pre-modern!) demonic discourse that fascinates me: apocalyptic thinking, the use of media to spread misinformation, anxiety about women’s bodies and reproduction, fear blended with humor—what more could you want?

Anything else we should know?

MB: I just want to add that this book was the quintessential “covid-era” project. We began our work just as the pandemic was underway—we sent many a “hope this email finds you well in these strange times!” message–and we are grateful to all of our contributors as well as to Routledge for bearing with us as the volume came to fruition. 

 

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