Richard Raiswell and David R. Winter, <i>The Medieval Devil: A Reader</i>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022, xviii, 397 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This compilation collects primary source materials on the history and representation of the devil in ancient and medieval Christianity. Over the course of eleven chapters, the ninety-eight excerpts included in this book chart the development of the character of Satan and the activities of his demonic minions among humankind from Jewish antiquity to the fifteenth century. The chapters follow a roughly chronological order, but some of them present specific themes over the course of time. Chapter 1 (Sources for the Medieval Devil) primarily comprises excerpts from the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament with two exceptions: samples from Plato on the nature of pagan daemones and from the medieval Aggadah on rabbinic interpretations of the fall of Satan (neither of which actually informed medieval Christian views of the devil). As the editors make clear, biblical texts do not present “a coherent narrative” about Satan, but only “sparse clues” about this “exceptionally elusive and contingent creature” (3). Chapter 2 (Development of a Narrative) focuses on the first three centuries of Christianity with excerpts from Philo of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Lactantius, as well as apocryphal stories like the Gospel of Moses and the Testament of Solomon. Although Origen of Alexandria is present in two excerpts, his important contribution to the doctrine of universalism, according to which all rational creatures obtain salvation, including the devil, deserves a fuller treatment than it receives here.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".