Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Pagels, Elaine - Norman Cohn (review date 21 September 1995)

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Norman Cohn (review date 21 September 1995)

SOURCE: "Le Diable au Coeur," in The New York Review, Vol. XLII, No. 14, September 21, 1995, pp. 18-20.

[In the review below, Cohn calls The Origin of Satan an important, original, and adventurous work.]

Whereas in the nineteenth century Satan seldom attracted the attention of serious historians—Gustave Roskoff's two-volume Geschichte des Teufels (1869) stands almost alone—of late he has done so repeatedly, and to excellent effect. The collection of essays published in 1948 under the auspices of the French Carmelites, and entitled simply Satan, heralded what became in the 1970s and 1980s a flood of scholarly studies. The five-hundred-page Teufelsglaube by Herbert Haag and others (1974), Jeffrey Russell's trilogy, The Devil, Satan, Lucifer (1977–1984), Henry Ansgar Kelly's The Devil at Baptism, Bernard Teyssèdre's Naissance du Diable and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. B. Cobbey Crisler (review date 3 December 1979)
   2. Raymond E. Brown (review date 20 January 1980)
   3. Hyam Maccoby (review date June 1980)
   4. Kathleen McVey (essay date January 1981)
   5. Robin Lane Fox (review date 21 August 1988)
   6. Thomas D'Evelyn (review date 14 September 1988)
   7. Judith Ochshorn (review date April 1989)
   8. James Finn Cotter (review date Spring 1989)
   9. Henry Chadwick (review date 21 March 1990)
   10. Leslie Houlden (review date 18 June 1995)
   11. Mary Gordon (review date 26 June 1995)
   12. John P. Meier (review date 9 July 1995)
   13. Rockwell Gray (review date 30 July 1995)
   14. Norman Cohn (review date 21 September 1995)
   15. Mary Troychak (review date September-October 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright