ABSTRACT
Throughout early modern Christendom every act of devotion, pious aspiration, moral injunction or examination of conscience was held in tension, as it were, with its demonic shadow. Demonic presences in the sacred system were both conceived in abstract ways, as temptation, confusion, doubt, despair or heresy, and sensed in the more concrete forms of obsession, possession and witchcraft.1 Each of the confessions came to treat the subject differently. In examining the reconstruction of Catholicism in the Upper Palatinate, it remains, therefore, to cast the spotlight on the Devil and his various roles more directly.
