Louviers possessions

The possessions at Louviers (Normandy, France), similar to those in Aix en Provence, occurred at the Louviers Convent in 1647. As with both the Aix case and its later counterpart in Loudun, the conviction of the priests involved hinged on the confessions of supposed possessed demoniacs. The source for information on the subject is in large part a book entitled Histoire de Magdelaine Bavent, Religieuse de Louviers, avec son interrogatoir, etc. (History of Madeleine Bavent, a Nun of Louviers, together with her Examination, etc. ), 4to: Rouen, 1652 from an interview with Madeleine Bavent by an Oratorian.

Madeleine Bavent was born at Rouen in 1607. An orphan, at the age of twelve she was bound as an apprentice to a linenworker, whose business was dependent on the Church's patronage. According to historian Jules Michelet, the confessor of the establishment, probably drugged the apprentices with something like Atropa belladonna and led them to believe that he was conducting taking them to a "Sabbath". He had his way with three of them, and Madeleine, at fourteen, was the fourth. Madeleine's confession prompted the investigation, which found that other nuns reported having been brought to secret sabbats by Picard and Boulle, where sexual intercourse with demons, particularly Dagon, took place. These confessions were accompanied by what investigators believed were classic signs of demonic possession: contortions, unnatural body movements, speaking in tongues (glossolalia), obscene insults, and blasphemies. They also differ from later cases of possession and witch hunt hysteria like that in England and Colonial America in that they involve lurid sex themes. During the exorcisms at Louviers, nuns were seen to raise their habits and beg for sexual attention, use vulgar language, and make lascivious movements. In the earlier case at Loudun, a local doctor named Claude Quillet wrote, "These poor little devils of nuns, seeing themselves shut up within four walls, become madly in love, fall into a melancholic delirium, worked upon by the desires of the flesh, and in truth, what they need to be perfectly cured is a remedy of the flesh." Most demonic possessions in France of this period (from the early to late 17th century) were of young women and appeared most often in the convents. Physicians and psychologists today attribute much of the activities to sexual hysteria, alluded to so long ago by Quillet. Robert Mandrou and Jean Martin Charcot echoed many seventeenth century physicians and following a French school of anti Catholic medical positivism of the nineteenth century argued that mental disorders —primarily hysteria triggered the bizarre behaviors. Extreme seizures explained in the 17th century are today believed to point to epilepsy and similar diseases. In the time frame of the cases in France, demonic possession served as a catchall explanation for any personality anomaly. Feminist historians reject the term "hysteria" as misogynistic, and reject the characterization of seventeenth century convents as places of "sexual frustration and/or debauchery and constant intellectual ennui."