Mephistopheles

An excellent and important intellectual history.

(Library Journal)

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)

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)

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)

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 Rev