Preface

y interest in this subject began in 1972 when my wife, Nancy, and I cared briefly for a four- month- old foster child whose teenage parents had severely beaten him. When this infant was committed to our care, he had suffered numerous broken bones, including a fractured skull, which had caused him to experience recurrent seizures. He also had cigarette burns on different parts of his body. When we asked how this infant could have been subjected to such extreme physical abuse, we learned that family members had come to the conclusion that he was possessed by the Devil and decided therefore to use physical force to expel the evil spirit. The childs mother also believed that her aunt, who often had violent seizures herself, had sent the Devil into this infant because her niece had laughed at her while experiencing these fits. I later discovered that our foster childs abuse was not that unusual. In the last fifty years there have been numerous incidents in which parents or relatives have used physical force to expel demons from children they believed were possessed. At the time this infant came into our home I was developing a scholarly interest in the subject of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe during the early modern period. In studying witchcraft, I learned that witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were often accused of having caused demonic possession by commanding demons to enter the bodies of their victims and seize control of their physical movements and mental operations. Research on the apparent possession of a young woman in early seventeenth- century England and an investigation of a cluster of possessions in late seventeenth- century Scotland led me to undertake a much broader, European- wide study of this phenomenon. This book is the product of that sustained inquiry. Its main purpose is to make sense of

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the pathological behaviour that demoniacs displayed in both Catholic and Protestant communities during these years. For most people in early modern Europe, demonic possession made perfectly good sense. For them the afflictions suffered by demoniacsthe convulsions, contortions, muscular rigidity, swelling, vomiting of alien substances, contempt for sacred objects, and speaking in languages previously unknown to themwere the result of the Devils entrance into the inner caverns of their bodies and the control he thereby acquired over their physical movements and mental operations. This belief that the Devil was responsible for the symptoms of possession was consonant with the dominant tradition in early modern Catholic and Protestant theology, which assigned him considerable power in the natural world. Demonic responsibility for possessions also made sense to the uneducated, who acquired at least a rudimentary knowledge of the demonic world from the clergy who preached and ministered to them. This supernatural, demonic interpretation of the symptoms of the possessed, however, has not satisfied most modern scholars, either because they do not accept the possibility of demonic power in the world or, even if they do, because such an interpretation of the phenomenon is incapable of verification. They have therefore offered alternative explanations of what was really happening when Christians in the early modern period acted in this unusual way. The two explanations that have gained the widest currency are that demoniacs were either faking the symptoms of their possession or that they were physically or mentally ill. These interpretations of possession cannot be readily dismissed, because some demoniacs actually did pretend that they were possessed, while others apparently suffered from severe psychological disorders. But neither interpretation provides a satisfactory explanation of the majority of possessions, in which the manifestation of the symptoms spread rapidly from one demoniac to another in convents, orphanages, and small villages. Pretending to be possessed required coaching and planning that was not possible when large numbers of demoniacs suddenly began to exhibit such pathological behaviour, and it is equally implausible to think that those demoniacs who began to exhibit the same symptoms were all afflicted by the same neurological or psychosomatic maladies. A third, more plausible interpretation of demonic possession that applies to both individual and collective possessions holds that demoniacs were performers in religious dramas who were following scripts they learned from others. In cases of group possessions, the newly afflicted simply imitated those whom they observed. This theatrical interpretation of demonic possession is compatible with those based on fraud and disease,

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but it goes beyond them in its explanation of why most early modern demoniacs uttered blasphemies and curses, violated moral and social conventions, and showed contempt for sacred objects. Unlike the theory of disease, which interprets the experiences of demoniacs in terms of modern medical or psychiatric theory, the theatrical interpretation of possession takes seriously the religious beliefs of the possessed and their families. Without understanding these religious beliefs, the epidemic of demonic possessions that occurred in early modern Europe does not make complete sense. The argument that demoniacs were actors in religious dramas is not new, but I develop this theatrical interpretation of possession in two ways. Whereas most of those who have written about the performative aspects of possession have focused on voluntary possessions, especially those that were fraudulent, I argue that all demoniacs, including those whose possession occurred spontaneously or involuntarily, assumed dramatic roles. Consciously or not, demoniacs followed scripts that were encoded in their religious cultures. I also argue that these scripts were strikingly different for Catholics and Protestants. I want to show that all possessions are culturally specificthat they are rooted in the distinct religious cultures in which demoniacs and other members of their communities were immersed. This book is concerned primarily with the early modern period of European history, which is broadly defined as the years between 1450 and 1800, but it also deals with earlier and later periods. My discussion of possession and exorcism in the time of biblical antiquity explores the different ways that Christians in the early modern period interpreted the accounts of Christs exorcisms in the New Testament, while references to possessions and exorcisms in the Middle Ages and the works of medieval scholastic theologians provide a context for understanding the early modern phenomenon. In the later chapters I discuss possessions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These possessions not only testify to the persistence of religious belief and practice in a secular world but allow for comparisons between modern possessions and those that took place centuries earlier. The surge in the number of possessions in early modern Europe had its origins in movements for religious reform that arose in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The most significant of these movements were the Protestant Reformation, which began in the early sixteenth century, and the Catholic Reformation, which had begun earlier but gathered new strength in response to the Protestant challenge. Both reformations urged the cultivation of personal piety, and the efforts by both Catholics and Protestants to achieve sanctity contributed to the late sixteenth- century increase in the number of possessions. The different

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ways in which Catholic and Protestant demoniacs acted and spoke when possessed and the different strategies that priests and ministers employed to dispossess them were deeply rooted in the religious cultures of their day. Studying demonic possession in this period offers us an opportunity to appreciate the variety of religious beliefs and experiences in the age of the Reformation and to compare those beliefs and experiences with those of both believers and sceptics in the modern world.