Unclean spirits. Possession and exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

D. P. WALKER, Unclean spirits. Possession and exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, London, Scolar Press, 1980, 8vo, pp. 116, £9.95. Professor Walker's exact and concise book emerging from his Northcliffe Lectures at London University in 1979 investigates demoniacal possession in theory and practice in France and England chiefly in the late sixteenth century. Professor Walker examines a handful of well-documented cases, both to illuminate contemporary attitudes to the phenomenon and to sketch a historical interpretation of his own: in France at Laon in 1566, at Soissons in 1582, and the extended performances of Marthe Brossier from 1599; in England the case of Catholic exorcism at Denham in 1585-6, that of the Throckmorton children of 1589-93 (the first to end in the execution of witches), and then a series of cases from 1598 involving the Puritan divine, John Darrel, as a caster-out of devils. In apparent instances of possession the dilemma facing religious and civil authorities was to determine whether the case was one of genuine diabolical possession, or of "fraud", or of disease (epilepsy, melancholy, or hysteria). While a few doctors e.g., Levinus Lemnius sought to reduce all supposed possession to natural causes, most, such as Jean Fernel and Edward Jordan, would not rule out the possibility of genuine demonism, while counselling caution before pronouncing in favour of spirits. Tests were devised e.g., speaking in tongues, or clairvoyance to sift the genuine from the fraudulent. Religious and political circumstances shaped cases differently in the two countries. In France, outbreaks were exploited by the Catholic hierarchy as literally heaven-sent anti-Huguenot propaganda, particularly as the favoured means of exorcism generally successful was through the Real Presence in the Host. Hence, though medical opinion pronounced Marthe Brossier a fraud ("nihil a Spiritu, multa ficta, pauca a morbo"), ecclesiastical leaders found her too spectacular a case of divine intervention to forego. In England, by contrast, it was Anglican dignitaries such as Richard Bancroft who were most sceptical of the reality of diabolism, not least because notable exorcisms were performed by Catholic priests or by Puritans (anxious to show that Papists had no monopoly of casting out devils). Bishop Bancroft engineered the trial of John Darrel, the Puritan exorcist, as part of his prolonged campaign against "enthusiasm", and the "official" Anglican line was spelt out soon after in John Deacon and John Walker's Dialogicall Discourses (1601), where it was argued that most so-called demoniacs were in reality melancholics. In a concluding chapter, Professor Walker suggests this as part of the general "naturalization" of spiritual and diabolical phenomena which gathered momentum in the seventeenth century. As to Professor Walker's own interpretation: ruling out, qua historian, the reality of demonism, he suggests we see possession as a mixture of initial illness and psychological opportunism (the possessed relished attention), which led to an element of fraud on behalf of both the possessed and of the exorcists, anxious to milk such events for religious propaganda. This little book does much to map out the disputed territory between the natural and the spiritual, the medical and the priestly, around the turn of the seventeenth century. One hopes it will encourage further detailed examination,