SCREENING SATAN

The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema by Nikolas Schreck. Headpress, revised edition 2024.

“True to its mirroring nature, the satanic cinema has often portrayed the Devil as whatever force was perceived by consensus consciousness as embodying cosmic maleficence at the time.” 

MEETING THE DEVIL IN THE LANE

Jeremy Harte. Cloven Country, the Devil and the English Landscape. Reaktion Books, 2022.

You might think that bumping into the Devil on the way home from the pub or from work might be a rather terrifying experience – bottomless pit, eternal fires, that sort of thing. However in this book Jeremy Harte shows us that if you keep your wits about you, you can avoid such a fate, and might even turn a bit of a profit.

🔽

HEAVEN-SENT FOR SATAN

Erik Butler, The Devil and his Advocates, Reaktion Books, 2021.

Let’s be honest, Satan has had a bad press. If he’s not luring confused people into his net to siphon off their immortal souls just to give two fingers up to the great Enemy, God, he’s shown as a truly monstrous character with goaty face and bat-like wings. Sometimes you wonder what the attraction is.
🔻🔻🔻

BETWEEN DEMONS AND SAINTS

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints. Pennsylvania University Press, 2015.

Ermine, who died in 1396, was a widow who had caught hard religion, which entailed mortification of the flesh and that sort of thing. Over the last ten months of her life she experienced a series of mainly, but not exclusively, night visions. Strange people entered her bedroom and tempted her. A naked couple came into her room and had sex in front of her.
🔻

HISTORY OF SATAN

Miguel A. De La Torre and Albert Hernández. The Quest for the Historical Satan. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2011.

On the face of it, this is not quite the same as writing about, say, ‘The Quest for the Historical Arthur’, which implies that there was a historical King Arthur underlying the medieval romances, as it is rather more contentious to suggest that there was a historical Satan.
🔻