The Possession at Loudun

In August 1634, a French priest named Urbain Grandier was convicted of sorcery and burned at the stake. His accusers held that he had brought the devil into the Ursuline nunnery of Loudon, and had there committed acts in violation of human and divine law--to say nothing of his priestly vows.

The possession at Loudon has provided the storyline for plays, novels, and films, but it has received little historical scrutiny. In this slender essay, the late Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau examines the possession in the context of the larger contemporary struggle between medieval values and the dawning Enlightenment. As he points out, during the eight years when the possession and its attendant trials and exorcisms were unfolding as a kind of morality play, Descartes published his Discourse on Method, and science and religion met on countless ideological battlefields. The era, he notes, was marked by plague, economic and social dislocation, and a general atmosphere of fearfulness, ideal for rituals of scapegoating and expiation. Certeau draws on several techniques of the Annales school of historians, examining the minutiae of the Loudon trials--including, for instance, a payment voucher to the woodcutter who provided the timber for Grandier's immolation--and remarking that the hysteria that visited the little town of Loudon points to "the strangeness of history." --Gregory McNamee