The Possession at Loudun (review)

The story of the witches at Loudun is well known, largely due to Aldous Huxley's novel, The Devils of Loudun (New York, 1952), and Ken Russell's film, The Devils (1971). In the early 1630s, a group of Ursuline nuns in the town of Loudun in Poitou suddenly came to be perceived as possessed by demons. In 1634, Urbain Grandier, a local Catholic priest, was charged with being the source of the possession, and he was ultimately burned at the stake two years later. Jean-Joseph Surin, one of the Jesuit priests sent to exorcise the demons from the Ursulines, also claimed that he came to be possessed by Satan, and for many years, Jeanne des Anges, one of the principal Ursulines who was possessed, travelled France displaying the curious physical sign from God that was proof of her exorcism and healing: the names of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and François de Sales miraculously and indelibly etched on her left hand.

Curiously, academic historians have been less interested in this tale than the spate of books about early modern witchcraft that have appeared during the last thirty years might suggest. For that reason alone, the English translation of Certeau's La Possession de Loudun (Paris 1970), is welcome.

Before he died in 1986, Certeau was both a Jesuit historian at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and a proto-postmodernist student of discourse. This unlikely combination, along with the fact that most of his eighteen books have not been translated into English, make him a far less well-known figure among early modern historians than among scholars of literary criticism. To be sure, this book was far more innovative when it first appeared. Long before social historians such as Corbin introduced olfactory history, Certeau analyzed "the magic of smell" as a significant facet of seventeenth-century mentalities (Chapter 2).¹ Long before cultural historians turned to language as a means of understanding social and political power struggles, Certeau introduced "the discourse of possession" to demonstrate how a community of nuns came to want to believe in their own imprisonment by an external power (Chapter 3). And long before Davis and Greenblatt made "self-fashioning" fashionable, Certeau recounted how Jeanne des Anges reinvented herself from one of Satan's victims in an Ursuline convent into a Counter-Reformation mystic and reincarnation of St. Teresa of Avila, writing her own autobiography near the end of her life as a monument to her reinvention.²

Ultimately, however, the book's real value to students of witchcraft prosecution in the period is as a microhistorical case study. It is solidly based on archival sources, and it sheds light on many larger questions and issues, not the least of which is the role of the state. As the author points out, the real "turning point" in the entire affair was the arrival of Louis XIII's newly appointed intendent, the baron of Laubardemont in September 1633 (65). Although Certeau tends to treat Laubardemont exclusively as the agent of a centralizing absolutist state-originally sent to Loudun to dismantle the castle and dungeon of this Protestant town and only involved in the prosecution of Grandier during his stay by circumstance-he repeats the now-common argument that witchcraft persecution had a variety of sources and causes.

Though written in discourse mode rather than narrative mode, the book is one of Certeau's most approachable works. It still holds up well after thirty years.