Abstract
The church in Scotland was striving to create a godly society from the start of the Reformation in 1560. During the years 1563 to 1736, however, it was God’s opponent the Devil who appeared to get many of the headlines.
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Notes
C. Larner, Enemies of God: the Witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 134.
There are few ‘biographies’ of the Devil but J. B. Russell has attempted an extensive study of the subject: The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca, NY, 1977); Lucifer: the Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1984); Mephistopheles: the Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY, 1986); The Prince of Darkness (Ithaca, NY, 1988); Satan: the Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca, NY, 1981).
There are also several other works that cover interpretations and attitudes to the subject, notably K. Armstrong, A History of God (London, 1993)
L. Link, The Devil in Art (London, 1993).
P. Stanford, The Devil — A Biography (London, 1996), is also a useful, if less academic, work.
B. P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd edn, London, 2006), 32–7.
Green was also a popular colour for walls around the pulpit in post-Reformation churches in Scotland: M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 328.
S. Macdonald, ‘In search of the Devil in Fife witchcraft cases, 1560–1705’, in J. Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch Hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002), 46.
See also S. Macdonald, The Witches of Fife: Witch-hunting in a Scottish Shire, 1560–1710 (East Linton, 2002), 182.
M. Lynch, Scotland: a New History (London, 1992), 290.
See also W. Makey, The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651: Revolution and Social Change in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979).
D. Hamilton, The Healers: a History of Medicine in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987), 16–17.
I have been unable to find any reference to the Devil having a wife or to any demon named Antiochia or anything similar. St Margaret of Antioch, in present day Turkey, was the patron saint of women and nurses and was traditionally invoked for help with conception, childbirth and breastfeeding. It is unlikely that the Antiochia mentioned here refers to this saint. It is likely that the name had some older root but does not appear in listings of demons and deities, e.g. K. van der Toom, B. Bekking and P. W. van der Horst (eds), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden, 1999).
J. Goodare, ‘The Scottish witchcraft act’, Church History, 74 (2005), 39–67. He discusses the authorship and intentions of the 1563 Witchcraft Act and argues that, while it may have been conceived as part of the Scottish Reformers’ attack on Catholicism, the act was technically inept and problematic in confusing folk beliefs and practices with Catholic practices.
S. Clark, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), ch. 21, discusses the historiography of eschatological theories.
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© 2008 Joyce Miller
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Miller, J. (2008). Men in Black: Appearances of the Devil in Early Modern Scottish Witchcraft Discourse. In: Goodare, J., Martin, L., Miller, J. (eds) Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591400_7
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