Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

125 Pages·1981·2.923 MB·English

by  D. P. Walker

UNCLEAN SPIRITS

Unclean Spirits
Possession and exorcism in
France and England
in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth
centuries
D. P. W A L K ER
®
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
1981
First published in Great Britain in 1981 by Scolar Press,
90/91 Great Russell Street, London WCIB 3PY
This edition published in the United States of America
by University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981
Copyright © D. P. Walker, 1981
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Walker, Daniel Pickering
Unclean spirits
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Demonology - France - Case studies - Addresses,
essays, lectures. 2. Demonology - England - Case
studies - Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Demoniac
possession - Case studies - Addresses, essays,
lectures. 4. Exorcism - Case studies - Addresses,
essays, lectures. I. Title.
BF1517. F5W34 1981 I334'2'0942 80-22649
ISBN 0-8122-7797-X
Printed in Great Britain by
Western Printing Services Ltd
Bristol
CONTENTS
Foreword page vii
I INTRODUCTION page I
II CASES IN FRANCE
Laon, 1566 page ig
Soissons, 1582 page 28
Marthe Brossier, 1599 page 33
III CASES IN ENGLAND
Denham, 1585-6 page 43
The Throckmorton Children, 1589-93 page 4g
Thomas Darling, the Boy of Burton, 1596 page 52
The Seven in Lancashire, 1595-7 page 57
IV DARREL'S LAST CASE
William Sommers, 1597-8,
and the Trial, 1598-9 page 61
Controversies arising from the Trial page 66
V A GLANCE INTO
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
France page 75
England page 77
Appendix
'Modus jfesuitarum Daemones Exorcizando
page 8s
Notes page 8g
Index of Names page HI

FOREWORD
This little book consists, with minor alterations and additions, of the
Northcliffe Lectures which I gave at University College, London, in
January 1979.
I want to thank the following scholars for the valuable bibliographical
help they have generously given me: Dr Sydney Anglo, Dr Alice
Browne, Dr Sarah Hutton, Professor Sears Jayne, Mr David M. Jones,
Mr Peter Mack, Professor John L. Murphy, Professor Michael Screech,
Dr Malcolm Smith.
The Warburg Institute D. p. WALKER
September 1979

I INTRODUCTION
This book is based on a small sample of cases of possession, limited
geographically to France and England, and chronologically to the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Owing to the lack of adequate
and reliable secondary literature,1 we know very little about possession
in the rest of Europe at this period, or in other periods anywhere, with
the exception of seventeenth-century France, which is studied in Robert
Mandrou's excellent Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siecle
(Paris, 1968). Possession in Elizabethan England receives a few typically
illuminating pages (477-92) in Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline
of Magic (London, 1971), and there are brief summaries of some of the
cases in C. L'Estrange Ewen's useful and reliable book, Witchcraft and
Demonianism (London, 1933). The notorious affair at Loudun around
1634 is widely known through Aldous Huxley's well-informed, but
vulgar and fictionalized, account in his Devils of Loudun,2 and there are
a few monographs on other French cases. For the medieval period,
Adolf Franz's Die Kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter (Freiburg im
Breisgau, 1909, 2 vols), though it deals primarily with the formulae of
exorcism, would be a good starting-point. Mandrou's book is of parti-
cular interest in that it shows one way in which public exorcisms were of
great historical importance in seventeenth-century France, namely, that,
through the close connexion of these exorcisms with accusations of
sorcery, they were a major cause of a gradual change of attitude in the
legal profession and thus of the eventual obsolescence of trials for witch-
craft. This occurred because the enormous publicity surrounding these
cases and the manifest injustice of the trials of the supposed sorcerers
concentrated the attention of intelligently sceptical people, especially
doctors and lawyers, on diabolic phenomena, and thus led to doubts
about their supernatural causation.
I am, then, taking a step into a largely unexplored field. It is a small
step, but one which will, I hope, show that the field is worth exploring