Human thought often seems to operate by analogy. Something seems like something else, and consequences flow from the similarity. This has certainly been true historically in views of the Christian devil and his demons. In the seventeen essays collected here (the results of a conference at Victoria University in Toronto in 2008), we repeatedly find that the notion of the devil or his influence appeared to be similar to disease, to Old Norse spirits, to Anabaptist heresy, to AntiChrist, and to the misfortunes that plague ordinary human life. The result is that thinking about the devil often became a fruitful way of thinking about God, life, death and all manner of ills. Far from representing a theologically stable entity, the devil has been as pliable as a rubber nose, conforming himself to the immediate contours of society and the problems confronting pre-modern Europeans in the most various circumstances. In a brief review one cannot usefully take up each essay in detail, and so I will content myself with singling out a few outstanding contributions. This is just as well because this collection, like most such assemblies, contains a fair amount of conventional and unsurprising material about which, perhaps, the less said, the better.

Richard Raiswell, one of the editors, begins this book with a substantial introduction (pp. 23–65), which analyses the different roles played by the devil in biblical, late ancient and medieval theological sources. Audrey Meaney follows (pp. 69–108) with a study of demonology and ‘devil sickness’ in Anglo-Saxon England, a too often neglected topic to which she adds a useful study of Ælfric's homilies and Lives of the saints, but especially of Bald's Leechbook. Martin Chase next (pp. 109–35) provides a fascinating study of the efforts made by certain Old Norse writers to assimilate Christian ideas of Satan and Leviathan with prior notions of the ‘world serpent’, the miðgarðsormr. Gary Waite (pp. 195–219) extends his well-received studies of the influence exerted by vehement opposition to the Anabaptists on the mid sixteenth-century fear of witches, who seemed to be organised like the Anabaptists and like them to be dedicated to worshipping the devil.

To my eyes the most significant contribution is the next one, by Jolanta N. Komornicka (pp. 221–56), which explores the little-noticed fact that even though the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 forbade clerical participation in judicial ordeals (tests that relied on God to reveal the guilt or innocence of defendants), during the fifteenth century ordeals were revived in nascent witchcraft trials. This included the notorious water test of ‘swimming’ a suspect, but in certain ways judicial torture itself depended on the idea that the right ritual (combined with pain) could elicit the truth. Komornicka comes to her topic with a wide range of reading and a keen ability to combine approaches to the history of the body with judicial theory, notions of rationality in ‘due process’, and scholarly demonology. She concludes that ‘judicium dei’ was transformed into a ‘judicium diaboli’. The broad resonance of this paper should earn it widespread attention.

Several other essays deserve at least brief attention. Suzanne Scanlan (pp. 313–38) intelligently examines a fresco cycle from c. 1465 in the refectory of the Oblates of the Tor de' Specchi in Rome, in which a devil figure or demonic men assault the saintly Francesca de’ Ponziani. Richard Kieckhefer (pp. 381–408) examines five late medieval trials for necromancy from Italy and France, trials that all involved fraud or insincerity on the part of the magician. This fact leads Kieckhefer to considerations of magic as comedy: sometimes the devil was indeed a laughing matter. María Tausiet (pp. 459–81) examines a Castilian soldier, Juan Vega della Guerra, who attempted to persuade Spanish authorities in 1608 that he had received divine revelations concerning the approaching millennium. Unfortunately for him, he charged an advisor to King Philip iii – probably the duke of Lerma – with being an incarnation of the devil, an accusation that led to counter-charges of heresy. Although the surviving records do not show what finally happened, the case adds usefully to our knowledge of the overheated atmosphere in Spain during the early seventeenth century. Finally, the two editors of this volume conclude (pp. 537–51) with several rather artificially constructed comparisons of the devils that have passed in review. As with so many conference volumes the best essays are much better than the assemblage as a whole.