The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (review)

Nathan Johnstone's The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England begins with the fear expressed by early modern Protestants that the devil would somehow manage to convince mankind that he did not exist, and it proceeds from this dizzying paradox to explore Protestant demonology's focus on the temptations of the imagination —to unbelief, hypocrisy, rebellion, and despair.

Johnstone, thinking almost "New Historically," sums up these temptations as subversive, both of the Christian individual and the godly nation. This is no easy simplification, however, and indeed one of the book's great strengths is its ability to address both the headline trends of culture and history and the minute and sometimes conflicting detail that is often glossed over in less able critical writing. This history book is at home with both the factual minutiae of the past and the broader intellectual context of the scholarship of Renaissance cultural history, including that of Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey, Lyndal Roper, Diane Purkiss, and the most inventive recent historians of the period such as Peter Lake. Offering a broad but detailed history of the Reformation and its debates about the devil, Johnstone thus describes how the discourse of temptation of the body politic evolved with, and was part of, the discourse of demonic threat to the human body, surveying the historiography of the devil and theodicy, languages of temptation and narratives of crime, and the politics of representing demonized opponents in a sharply divided society.

It is refreshing to find that such a good and solid historian is not afraid to engage with literature, the linguistic turn, and interdisciplinary thinking in general. The book's obvious connections with the work of Stuart Clark, such as Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997) and "Protestant Demonology" (in Ankarloo and Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft [Oxford, 1990]), are thus those of affinity but judicious questioning. Johnstone suggests that a focus in recent scholarship on witchcraft can be misleading in thinking about the devil, over-emphasizing the significance of certain kinds of demonology at the expense of demonism. Demonism, argues Johnstone, is more nebulous than the academic demonology of witchcraft and is focused more evidently upon temptation. Freeing Satan from his witches gives a truer picture of his omnipresence in early modern culture, allowing a range of subtle readings to emerge. While other key contexts and precursors for The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England are clearly the works of historians of witchcraft such as Jim Sharpe and Keith Thomas and works on demonic possession such as Michael Macdonald's Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London (London, 1991) and D. P. Walker's Unclean Spirits (London, 1981), this book sets out to do something sharply different.

Perhaps its nearest neighbours are Jeffrey Burton Russell's books on the devil as Satan, Lucifer, and Mephistopheles and Darren Oldridge's The Devil in Early Modern England (Stroud, 2000). Johnstone engages most directly with Oldridge's analysis, which he argues is an over-simplification of early modern demonism. The variety of early modern people's stories about their experiences with the devil need to be freed, he suggests, from a functionalist paradigm—one that either connects the devil back to witchcraft or discusses his influence solely in terms of the guilt and angst of individual Christians, especially puritans. Incisively, Johnstone points out the dangers of regarding the devil as merely a mechanism for coping with the strains of the Protestant conscience. To avoid this trap, Johnstone is keen to stress the individuality of his subjects, most often the writers of spiritual autobiographies and godly lives, diaries, and commonplace books.

The book's conclusions are indeed interesting, thoughtful, and subtly nuanced. Johnstone concludes that the devil was not a relic of medievalism in an otherwise early modern world, but nor was the complex of beliefs surrounding him a kind of proto-rationalism. Demonism was driven by a sense of the reality of the devil as a presence in individual lives, which was more important to those experiencing...