What is it about?
Scholars reflecting on the power of the devil in the Middle Ages understood the devil as a creation of God and so—like all other creatures—constrained by nature and the way he was made. Consequently, there were various things he could not do: he couldn’t perform miracles or accurately predict the future, for instance. And crucially, he couldn’t destroy God’s creation. However, from the middle of the fifteenth century, lawyers—both secular and ecclesiastical—began to hear testimony from people accused of witchcraft that seemed to suggest a much more powerful devil, a devil with almost limitless abilities. Indeed, this devil seemed to have the powers almost of a god in his own right. This paper, then, looks at the tension between the devil of the theologians and that discovered by lawyers investigating accused witches. It argues that ultimately, this debate mirrors that between the theorists and empiricists that characterises early stages of the scientific revolution.
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Why is it important?
Much of the scholarship on the devil in early modern European history has tended to focus on his role insofar as it is related to the great witch hunts of the period. This piece, though, turns that dynamic around and asks how what the lawyers thought they had discovered from the witches they interrogated and tortured did to conceptions of the devil.
Perspectives
I thoroughly enjoyed working on this piece, in particular thinking about the extent to which the devil is a shadow lurking at the edges of what scholars used to describe as the scientific revolution. The devil of the lawyers ultimately has so much power that he confound all human ways knowing, for he has the power to manufacture illusions but also to completely undermine our all cognitive faculties. By extension, humans cannot be sure of anything--anything and everything could be some kind of demonic illusion. Thus, it was important for men like René Descartes in particular to re-found human knowledge on a basic truth about which we cannot be deceived. His point, ultimately, is that the devil cannot deceive people about the fact that they are thinking things. Whether he can get beyond that is a question I'll leave to the philosophers!
Richard Raiswell
University of Prince Edward Island
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Devil in Nature, August 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004536449_017.
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