Epilogue: endings

Machielsen, Jan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8492-0263 2026. Epilogue: endings. Machielsen, Jan, ed. The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil, Routledge, pp. 341-346. (10.4324/9781003476153-29)

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Abstract

Collectively, the chapters in this volume have grappled with a subject that, as all contributors – and, we trust, readers – acknowledge, is false. As we saw in the introduction, this lack of referentiality has been the field's central methodological difficulty. Even today, every aspect of early modern demonology – whether the demonic pact, the witches’ sabbat, or their sex with demons – may appear so instinctively untrue that it does not merit study at all. One of the first university-trained witchcraft historians, George Lincoln Burr (1857-1938) therefore described witchcraft as ‘the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma’, and ‘the shadow on the dial whose recession marks the upward course of the sun of civilization’. 1 Shadows only dimly reflect objects until daylight chases them away. They do not exist in their own right.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Global Humanities Schools > History, Archaeology and Religion
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032759135
Last Modified:	01 Sep 2026 10:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189267

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