This study has sought to demonstrate that the Devil in early modern English culture was neither a leftover from the medieval world, nor a half-way house on the way to a purely human concept of evil. Rather it was an idea that embodied a very real experience of struggle within the conscience, and a fear of hidden demonic subversion. Whilst the Enlightenment would eventually challenge much of the thinking that supported belief in the Devil, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not see ‘the Devil between two worlds’, a concept living on borrowed time as its hold on the imagination became increasingly tenuous. Stuart Clark has noted that within witchcraft the concept of the Devil did contain the seeds of its own downfall, as the emphasis on his power of illusion (a rejection of the preternatural powers of witches) brought into doubt the very identification of his ‘real’ agency, and undermined the ability to distinguish between wonder and miracle, in consequence ‘subverting’ preternature itself. Whilst Clark is adamant that the decline of demonology was not a foregone conclusion, he notes that ‘the category of preternature was sure to become unstable in early modern conditions’. But as this study has shown, witchcraft was unusual within early modern demonism. It was an area in which preternatural power came under unusually intense academic scrutiny, and was contested in a way that the Devil's wider power to influence human affairs was not.