1. Главная
  2. Ресурсы
  3. Библиотечный поиск
The Devil in Societyin Premodern Europe Richard RaiswellPeter DendleStuart Clark2013 год

The Devil in Society in Premodern Europe
статья из журнала

Полный текстСтраница публикацииПубликация в OpenAlex
Аннотация: On reaching the end of this book the reader might be permitted a slightly uncharitable thought.In his well-judged introduction, Richard Raiswell tells us that the premodern Devil was not a single entity but a heterogeneous cluster of context-governed configurations-"a succession of inter-related, over-lapping concepts" (49).What follows is a collection of seventeen interrelated, overlapping essays, each of which considers one of these (potentially endless) configurations.The thought is this: has the collection's own heterogeneity been fashioned to suit this kind of Devil or is it the other way round?Raiswell certainly delivers his side of the equation, arguing well for a loosely defined medieval Devil, even among theologians, answering to logical characteristics that were often incoherent and contradictory.This probably underestimates the degree of almost cliché-driven uniformity displayed by demonology in later centuries, but it does leave the way clear for Raiswell's and Dendle's contributors to concentrate on the concrete, the momentary, and, above all, the experienced, with their Devil(s) constantly being "made and remade in response to context and circumstance" (24).The demonstration of this diversity, however, does not give the book enough coherence.Some thematic order appears with the use of headings-"The Devil's Identity, " "Recognising the Devil, " "Physical and Cultural Spaces of the Demonic, " and "Control, Restraining and Adjuration"-but, with the possible exception of the last, these are so capacious and porous that many of the essays could qualify for each.An epilogue to the volume tries to plot formalistically the axes and quadrants of the more general traits of demonic power and malevolence emerging from the preceding essays; yet on the whole, the book needs greater pre-emptive editorial direction to pull its different sections together.With 90 original contributors to the 2008 conference on "The Devil in Society in the Premodern World, " and a few of the chosen authors unable to address anything much beyond their immediate radar, this was always going to be difficult to achieve.The danger is nevertheless considerable: a topic of enormous complexity, geographical range, and temporal extension (from the first to the seventeenth century) risks being dealt with in a series of miniatures.
Год издания: 2013
Авторы: Richard Raiswell, Peter Dendle, Stuart Clark
Издательство: Iter Press
Источник: Renaissance and Reformation
Ключевые слова: Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Другие ссылки: Renaissance and Reformation (PDF)
Renaissance and Reformation (HTML)
Érudit (Université de Montréal) (PDF)
Érudit (Université de Montréal) (HTML)