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