The Devil in the Old World

• Renewed attention to the demonic in part because of the important role of the preternatural
• Preternatural-that which appears outside or beside the natural. In contrast to the supernatural, preternatural phenomena are presumed to have explanations that are unknown.
• The devil was suspected to play a role in many of the extraordinary deviations from the normal course of nature- investigations of the preternatural and demonology closely related

Spanish demonology and anti-superstition

•  Superstition provided a link between elite conceptions of the devil and an extensive catalog of popular rituals and techniques
• Superstitious practices had no casual force in the nature world and were not sanctioned by could-effects realized could only be produced with the aid of demons
• St Augustine of Hippo insisted that the symbols, talismans, incantations and gestures employed in such superstitious practices signified an intention to enter into a pact with the devil himself'
• Distinction between truly miraculous effects produced by God and seemingly supernatural ones produced by demons through the manipulation of natural causes
• Ignorance of natural mechanisms led to the attribution of any poorly understood event as a divine intervention or the agency of spirits

Medical Humanism

• Physicians dedicated to recovering Greco-Roman medical knowledge
• Allies in the identification and eradication of superstitious practices
• Natural forces at blame rather than demonic interventions

Preternatural Philosophy

• Thomas Aquinas argued that the supernatural consists in “God’s unmediated actions”; the natural is “what happens always or most of the time”; and the preternatural is “what happens rarely, but nonetheless by the agency of created beings"
• Only God had the power to disregard the laws of nature that he has created, but that demons could manipulate the laws of nature by a form of trickery, to deceive the unwary into believing they had experienced real miracles
• The emergence of early modern science- concept of the preternatural refereed to strange or abnormal phenomena that seemed to violate the normal working of nature, but which were not associated with magic and witchcraft