Volume 32, Number 7 · April 25, 1985
Giving the Devil His Due
By Norman Cohn
Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages
by Jeffrey Burton Russell
Cornell University Press, 356 pp., $29.95
During the past two decades Jeffrey Burton Russell has established himself as a respected historian of medieval religion. Though some of his extraordinarily abundant writings have dealt with the Roman Catholic mainstream, more have dealt with varieties of religion that flourished outside, and in opposition to, the Church. Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (1965), Religious Dissent in the Middle Ages (1971), Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (1972), and (with C.T. Berkhout) Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography (1981) are all concerned with types of belief and behavior that lay well beyond the limits of orthodoxy and orthopraxis. In the work of which Lucifer is the concluding installment Russell has cast his net much wider still. Taken together, the three volumes—The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977), Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981), and the recent Lucifer—are an impressively wide-ranging history of the theme of the Devil, starting in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and ending in fifteenth-century Europe. The third volume can be fully appreciated only when it is considered in relation to its precursors.
Review, 3540 words
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