Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent: “How Sister Ursula was Once Bewiched and Sister Margaret Twice” (review)

Designed to be accessible to scholars and students as well as to the general public, Ashgate’s Contemporary Editions series is dedicated to publishing texts written by, for, and about early modern women. Hallett’s volume is a part of that series and consists of primary sources, with modernized spelling, that recount the possession and exorcism of a pair of Welsh Carmelites—Margaret Mostyn (1625–79) and her sister Elizabeth (in religion, Sister Ursula, 1626–1700). The edited documents also present a wealth of information on Edmund Bedingfield (1615–80), the sisters’ confessor and exorcist. The volume includes Hallett’s introduction, Sister Margaret’s spiritual diary, correspondence, selections from convents’ annals, other nuns’ reminiscences about the Mostyns, Bedingfield’s hagiographic “lives” of the pair, and, unusually, a life of Father Bedingfield penned by Sister Ursula.

Like other English nuns of their era, the Mostyn sisters resided in exiled religious communities on the Continent, beyond the reach of, although not unaffected by, the anti-Catholic legislation of their homeland. The Mostyns’ vocations took them first to Antwerp and then to Lierre. The sisters were reasonably prominent nuns. Each in turn served as prioress at Lierre, and Sister Margaret in particular achieved renown for her holiness. Hallett’s text contains a wealth of detail on the material and spiritual concerns of these convents, as well as on internecine Carmelite disputes and the nuns’ responses to and involvement with international politics. Many of the early modern English convents’ annals were printed in the early twentieth century and provide such details about other religious communities, but they are long out of print. Furthermore, Carmelite cloisters often have been neglected and were beyond the scope of the best recent study of early modern English nuns, Claire Walker’s important Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (2003). Thus a modern scholarly edition of selections from convent annals, particularly Carmelite ones, is a welcome addition to historical scholarship. Coupled with Hallett’s Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Ashgate, 2007) this volume greatly augments the printed primary source material available on early modern English Carmelites. Likewise, Hallett has labored effectively to date documents, identify many individuals mentioned in them, and largely eliminate redundancy in her textual selections.

Most significant is the light that Hallett sheds on the Mostyn sisters’ exorcism, a highly sensitive subject expurgated from the nineteenth-century printed version of Bedingfield’s “life” of Margaret Mostyn, the source on which most scholars have relied for information on the pair. As the tale emerges from Hallett’s documents, the lovely, wealthy, teenaged Mostyn sisters yearned to pledge their virginity to Jesus and enter a convent. Their enraged “would-be lovers” (the Earl of Dumfries and an unnamed Mostyn relative) used magic in an attempt to force the sisters to love them. Although the sisters successfully overcame both parental opposition to their shared vocation and a harrowing sea journey in order to reach their new home in the Spanish Netherlands, they did not leave all of their troubles behind in Wales. Rather, the delayed effects of their suitors’ diabolical dabbling took hold, leaving the young women in states of dire physical suffering and, arguably more devastating, spiritual aridity. Ultimately, they and their confessor came to believe that they were possessed by hundreds of devils. Hallett’s introduction succinctly and forcefully contextualizes the Mostyns’ increasing desperation and Bedingfield’s intense desire to provide some succor within broader European intellectual conversations and popular controversies about possession and exorcism. The fact that Hallett includes documents that discuss the 1651 exorcism not only from Bedingfield’s perspective, but from that of the sisters as well, makes her book both poignant reading and quite valuable to scholars. Auxiliary themes concerning the supernatural—such as the...