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A Little Book Of DEVILS & DEMONS

Before Cromwell’s Revolution our churches would have been full of Hell and damnation. Humanity has always believed in an underworld – a ghastly warning to miscreants and reprobates of the eternal consequences of sin – and enough paintings, carvings and statues have survived the smashing of the altars to preserve a vivid, even lurid picture of this Manichean world. Mike Harding has sought out Britain’s remotest churches and its finest cathedrals, as well as travelling as far afield as India, on a quest for the most remarkable devils and demons still to be found. Here, in his magnificent photographs, are mischievous little imps and gargoyles peering down at us from chathedral tympanums; here are magnificent Mediaeval Doom paintings of the Day of Judgement from Suffolk and from Coventry; here are Leviathan, Hellmouth and the snub-nosed devil Tutivillus, and Jacob Epstein’s twentieth-century sculpture of Satan. But this little book is as much a celebration of the wild, subversive energy of these weird, otherworldly creatures, just as diabolically mesmerising to behold as they were back in the Middle Ages.

2008