A history of the devil : from the middle ages to the present / Robert Muchembled ; translated by Jean Birrell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Muchembled, Robert, 1944-

Standardized Title:

Histoire du diable, XIIe-XXe siècle. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Devil--History of doctrines.

Devil.

Demonology--History.

Demonology.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 349 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK : Polity Press in association with Blackwell Pub. ; Malden, MA : Distributed in the USA by Blackwell Pub., 2003.

Summary:

This highly original and engaging book by the leading French historian Robert Muchembled is a journey through time and space in search of the changing perception and significance of the devil in Western culture. The author takes the story back to the thirteenth century, when visual images of Satan first started to appear, and forward to the twenty-first century, dealing with, among others, the place of the diabolical in the films of Stanley Kubrick, including the Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. The changing figure of Evil over time is shown as intertwined with the way in which men conceive of their destinies and the future of their civilization. Fascination with the diabolical reached its height in the witch hunts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but by the Enlightenment it began to show signs of decline, a process which has continued up to today. The result of this process, for modern Western society, is a subtle metamorphosis of the notion of the devil, from fear of Satan into an internal evil, 'the demon within', characterized by a distrust of oneself and one's desires. It is this conception of the diabolical that is visible today in our interest in the supernatural, exorcism and, for example, in the role of the 'devilish good' in advertising.

Contents:

Introduction: A Thousand Years of the Devil 1

1 Satan Makes his Entry: Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries 9

Satan and the myth of primordial combat 10

Good and bad devils 12

Instilling fear: the diabolic obsession at the end of the Middle Ages 21

The Evil One and the Beast 27

2 The Night of the Sabbath 35

Heresy 36

From Waldensians to witches 38

A hammer to crush the witches 44

Satanic nudity 46

The triumph of demon-mania 52

The mark of the devil 60

3 The Devil and the Body 69

The magical body 70

The female body 74

Monsters and marvels 80

The hell of sex 86

Towards a history of the senses: the promotion of sight 96

Towards a history of the senses: the demonizing of smell 99

4 Satanic Literature and Tragic Culture: 1550-1650 108

The fear of oneself 109

Devil books in Protestant Germany 111

The tragic culture in France 116

Rosset, the devil and the rotting corpse 124

Jean-Pierre Camus, or 'the spectacle of horror' 129

Bloodcurdling tales: the devil in the fait divers 138

The baroque and transgression 139

5 The Twilight of the Devil: From Classicism to Romanticism 148

Satan's final apotheosis 149

The fragmented images of evil 153

A disenchanted devil 161

The symbolic transition: from Satan to Mephistopheles 167

The role of fiction 174

Beelzebub in love 181

6 The Demon Within: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 187

Doctrinal permanencies 188

Having fun with the devil: the Gothic novel and the frenetiques 190

The rebel angel of the Satanists 197

The children of the devil 204

The diabolic unconscious 208

'Taming the shadows' 212

A paper devil? 217

7 Pleasure or Terror: The Devil at the End of the Second Millennium 227

The devil, probably ... prudent exorcism 230

'Devilish good': advertising, beer and the strip cartoon 236

The expressionist devil: from The Golem to Dies Irae 245

The film noir: horror, suspense and perversion 250

America's demons 262

Conclusion: Dancing with the Devil 271.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-321), filmography (pages 322-331) and index.

ISBN:

074562815X

0745628168

OCLC:

51818709