| Uniform title | Histoire du diable, XIIe-XXe siècle. English |
| Contents |
1. Introduction : a thousand years of the devil -- 1. Satan make his entry : twelfth to fifteenth centuries -- Satan and the myth of primordial combat -- Good and bad devils -- Instilling fear : the diabolic obsession at the end of the Middle Ages -- The evil one and the beast -- 2. The night of the sabbath -- Heresy -- From Waldensians to witches -- A hammer to crush the witches -- Satanic nudity -- The triumph of demon-mania -- The mark of the devil -- 3. The devil and the body -- The magical body -- The female body -- Monsters and marvels -- The hell of sex -- Towards a history of the senses : the promotion of sight -- Towards a history of the senses : the demonizing of smell -- 4. Satanic literature and tragic culture : 1550-1650 -- The fear of oneself -- Devil books in Protestant Germany -- The tragic culture in France -- Rosset, the devil and the rotting corpse -- Jean-Pierre Camus, or 'the spectacle of horror' -- Bloodcurdling tales : the devil in the fait divers -- The baroque and transgression -- 5. The twilight of the devil : from classicism to romanticism -- Satan's final apotheosis -- The fragmented images of evil -- A disenchanted devil -- The symbolic transition : from Satan to Mephistopheles -- The role of fiction -- Beelzebub in love -- 6. The demon within : nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Doctrinal permanencies -- Having fun with the devil : the Gothic novel and the frénétiques -- The rebel angel of the Satanists -- The children of the devil -- The diabolic unconscious -- 'Taming the shadows' -- A paper devil? -- 7. Pleasure or terror : the devil at the end of the second millennium -- The devil, probably ... prudent exorcism -- 'Devilish good' : advertising, beer and the strip cartoon -- The expressionist devil : from The Golem to Dies Irae -- The film noir : horror, suspense and perversion -- America's demons -- Conclusion : dancing with the devil. |
| Review |
"This book by 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 to appear, and forward to the twenty-first century, dealing with, among others, the place of the diabolical in the film 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 the 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."--Jacket. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 304-321) and index. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2003004789 |
| ISBN | 074562815X (hardback ; alk. paper) |
| ISBN | 9780745628158 (hardback ; alk. paper) |
| ISBN | 0745628168 (pbk. ; alk. paper) |
| ISBN | 9780745628165 (pbk. ; alk. paper) |
