Almost every history of probability grapples at some point with an improbability: why was it that games of dice existed for two thousand years before any thinker understood and accurately recorded the mathematics of chance? Various answers have been suggested, but no general consensus has emerged. Instead, the best recent scholarship has turned to filling in a picture of all the hidden proto-probability lying nascent in the classical, medieval and early modern worlds. This material, it has been suggested, influenced the eventual formulation of mathematical probability when it finally broke through around 1660. In this short article, I certainly have little hope to answer that grand, tantalizing question, and my scope will be confined to gambling in the Renaissance. I would, however, like to highlight a feature of chance that seems uncomfortably foreign to mathematicians and has not been represented in accounts of the history of chance: namely, I’d like to examine the role the diabolical may have played in the prehistory of probability. I hope to show that Thomas Middleton’s short play A Yorkshire Tragedy is primarily concerned with the intersection of chance and demons. Through this play and the numerous moral pamphlets listing the dire effects of gaming, I argue that we can see the role of the demonic in the early modern understanding of gambling, and also the mystery that remains—the occult nature of chance. In both of these, the diabolical militates against quantification and informs gambling as it was experienced by early modern gamesters.

In the last decade and a half, since Stuart Clark’s seminal Thinking with Demons, critics have begun to take the devil more seriously in any consideration of early modern epistemologies. Clark makes perhaps the most succinct case for this as he locates the demonic as part of the natural world: