The Devil Wins

Dallas G. Denery II is associate professor of history at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life and the coeditor of Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages.

"[A] fascinating and convincing argument."---Michaela Valente, Journal of Early Modern Studies --- "A splendid book. . . . The best among the many virtues of the book is its successful combination of history and philosophy."---Jeffrey Burton Russell, Catholic Historical Review --- "Asking whether it is ever acceptable to lie, The Devil Wins offers the reader a fascinating historical account of apodictic as well as iconoclastic answers."---Lewis Fried, Key Reporter --- "Denery . . . has written an impressively clear account of a difficult group of subjects, cleaving mostly to familiar figures but taking the time to get to know them properly."---Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Intellectual History Review --- "The Devil Wins is an enjoyable and well-written book, a serious contribution to what might constitute a history of the complicated elements of culture and society that enable people to tell lies."---Andrew Hadfield, Textual Practice --- "The Devil Wins sets forth lucidly the arguments of texts that grapple with how human beings should live in a world full of deception. . . . This important book's reach and ambition is amply vindicated in this conclusion in which the old alternatives--spanning Christian antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early eighteenth century--of rejecting or accepting a mendacious world yield to a third way: being true to one's sentiments, even when one lies, as a natural solution to a natural problem."---Edwin D. Craun, The Medieval Review --- "What emerges through all five chapters is a fascinating trajectory that takes us from a time when lies were considered by some theologians to be absolutely and categorically sinful, to an age when it was widely accepted that modern society depended on them . . . well researched, fluidly written, and persuasively argued."---Hans Rollman, PopMatters --- "The Devil Wins is a learned and accessible introduction to a fascinating subject."---Biancamaria Fontana, Times Higher Education --- "Denery explores analyses of an enormous variety of deceptions, and does so with an erudition that is never pedantic or monotonous. He is an entertaining writer, with a healthy skepticism about the dogmatic condemnation of lying as always, or even mostly, morally blameworthy. . . . I think Nietzsche would have loved this book."---Clancy Martin, Chronicle of Higher Education --- "[The Devil Wins is] an informative, sophisticated, and thought-provoking account of the efforts of theologians and philosophers from the early Christian era to the Enlightenment to define lies and understand their ethical, social, and political implications."---Glenn Altschuler, Psychology Today