Mephistopheles, 1st Edition

“Jeffrey Burton Russell is not only a conscientious historian, he is also an introspective essayist who acknowledges his own continuing struggle to understand the nature and the source of evil.”-Robert Coles, New York Times Book Review “It is more than the history of demonological imagination as it has been displayed for half a millennium in theological controversies, in poetry, novels, paintings, and witch trials: it is the history of European man trying to cope with the terrifying riddle of radical evil… Both an extremely rich scholarly work and an exiquisite exercise in a topic that is unlikely ever to die off in our civilization.”-Leslek Kolakowski, Journal of Modern History “This book moves with sustained seriousness and brilliance across five centuries, from Luther’s time to our own … and, although it has all the virtues of great intellectual history, it is explicitly rooted in a profound moral analysis of our own era.”-M. D. Aeschliman, National Review “No few sentences can adequately convey the book’s richness of content and seriousness of purpose. Russell has without doubt bequeathed us a magnificent synthesis of Western culture’s modern, tortuous grappling with the ideas of radical evil and the devil.”-Brian Easlea, American Historical Review “An excellent and important intellectual history.”-Library Journal

Jeffrey Burton Russell is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara.