Michelle D. Brock aimed, in this book, to provide “the first history of the Devil in early modern Scotland” (1). The topic of Brock's book is important, as it intersects with and would potentially organize a great deal of recent scholarship on religious culture in Scotland (from John Knox's Reformation to the witch hunts, from the kirk sessions to the First Great Awakening). In her telling, the Devil in Scotland was “not cosmic, but domestic” (1). She spends a great deal of time suggesting how the Calvinist Reformers in Scotland changed the nature and role of the Devil in Scottish society. Her thesis appears to be stated on page four: “In effect, the Reformed emphasis on total human depravity turned the spotlight on the relationship between Satan and ‘man's evil heart’ and lent the Devil primacy of place in how godly Scots understood themselves and their faith.” Brock has identified one of the fundamental aspects of any greater understanding of how ordinary Europeans (not merely Scots, nor Christians) found the modern self as they fashioned the modern world. Normally, one would proceed to examine an author's strengths, then mention any flaws at the end of the review. I want to mention the flaws first, as I would like to make a case for the book's merit at the end.

In regarding the execution of the book, the (Scottish) devil is in the details. The main problem is with organization. Her theological focus on the concept of double predestination, which seems to be invoked early on as an organizing principle, is not particularly helpful or persuasive. She does not have compelling evidence that Scots thought much about it, and she abandons the concept early on before briefly returning to it, with little effect, at the end of the book, where she argues that its decline somehow led Scots to resist adopting the demonic possession narrative so common in other parts of Europe. Other historians, myself included, would argue that the possession concept was hijacked in the seventeenth century by revivalists within Christianity itself. A second problem is contradiction. She tells us on page eleven that her book “is the first to use the records of the Scottish kirk sessions to uncover what ordinary Scots thought about the Devil outside of cases of witchcraft.” She does this because “the demonological ideas found in witchcraft records are unclear” (11). She then proceeds to give us an entire chapter on Scottish witchcraft (chapter 7) that, as promised, makes not a single mention of the kirk sessions. Why, then, mention witchcraft at all? And if one does, why not use the kirk session records, which Brock seems to suggest are otherwise reliable, to illuminate witchcraft more clearly? In another example, she states ” … the Protestant faith slowly overtook the vibrant, sensual Catholicism of medieval Scotland with surprisingly little violence” (2, emphasis mine) and then tells us (117) that she agrees with Margo Todd (The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland [Yale University Press, 2002], 173.) that other historians have presented a rather too-sunny view of Reformed Protestantism (Todd compares it to the Stasi in her own work!).

A third problem is omission. There are simply not enough Scottish devils in this book. No one who has set foot in Glasgow cathedral could miss the legions of devils that surrounded medieval Scots (in the form of stone bosses that hold up the ceiling). One can also find myriad devils in the writings of Robert Wodrow (a good friend of Cotton Mather, that other expert on devils). Finally, she ends the book just as the First Great Awakening takes off (ca. 1730), mentioning this once at the end of the book, not realizing that abundant evidence for her more persuasive claims were near at hand. One can find dozens of references to the Devil in the manuscript and published spiritual autobiographies of the Cambuslang and Kilsyth revivals. For example, there are about one hundred references to the devil (and related terms, such as “angel of light”) in William McCulloch, “Examination of Persons Under Spiritual Concern at Cambuslang During the Revival in 1741–1742” (Edinburgh University manuscripts, New College Library). See also, Roark Atkinson. “Satan in the Pulpit: Popular Christianity during the Scottish Great Awakening, 1680–1750” (Journal of Social History 47, no. 2 [2013]: 344–370.

Other, lesser problems are evident. She makes the mistake of using secondary literature to tally how often the devil was mentioned in England and elsewhere, assuming that other historians have the same priorities. She makes rather poor comparisons with recent scholarship on England and New England. In chapter 3, she lays out a promising survey of nearly one hundred “self-writings,” as she calls them, only to use them to little effect and to provide little to no context for them. There are also simple errors of fact (King James did not write Basilikon Doron for Charles I), moderate typos, and a nearly useless index.

The narrative is rather thin gruel, both because of the subject matter itself and Brock's framing of it. Brock misses opportunities to color in what was displaced by John Knox and his reforms (she puts off their mention until page one hundred sixty-three). The Calvinist binaries that shaped belief in the Devil incinerated the rich tapestry of pagan Scottish lore and the Catholic traditions woven into it. Without magic wells, healing springs, calendar customs, fair folk, Elfish bulls, and all the other things that Knox, his son-in-law John Welsh, King James, and others collapsed into the realm of Satan, there was precious little of aesthetic or cultural value that remained in the religion imposed on ordinary Scots. It was an intolerant, monochromatic, scorched-earth polity that commanded a timorous piety. This, indeed, may explain why so many Scots (notably the thousands of witchcraft suspects) defied the Calvinist regime—and paid for it with their lives. It also comes as little surprise that a mere century later, revivalists stole this “domestic” Satan idea away and put it to their own uses. This is indeed the most disappointing omission: Brock does not recognize that that the Scottish Reformation was a process of demonization and ethnocide akin to that experienced by non-Christians elsewhere in the world. This would explain why her domestic devil does not appear before the Reformation—it was created by reformers to destroy the earlier culture.

These criticisms do not take away from the importance of the book nor the useful ways Brock helps us think about the changing nature of the Devil in Scotland. Chapter 4, a reworking of her excellent article in the Journal of British Studies, allows us to consider, as she phrases it, the internalization of the demonic by Scottish men and women. This process occurred right before the first expressions of modern selfhood (that is, the spiritual autobiographies of the revivals) emerged in Scotland and is therefore a fundamental insight.

One is left with the sense that Brock relied too much on secondary literature (especially Stuart Clark, Margo Todd, and her thesis advisor Brian Levack) and too little on her own instincts. This reader hopes that in her next book she lets her own views, supported by compelling evidence, drive the narrative.