The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman between Demons and Saints by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (review)

In the medieval period, when the tangible existence of demons and spirits was taken for granted by people at all levels of society, the struggle to discern the intention of spirits was a constant source of anxiety. Whether spirits were sent by God to offer consolation and comfort, or by the Devil to deceive, tempt, and torment, was a crucial dilemma, particularly for female visionaries and mystics, because women were perceived to be especially fragile, gullible, and vulnerable to demonic deception and possession. In this monograph, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski shows that for Ermine de Reims, an uneducated peasant woman lacking access to the appropriate vocabulary to articulate her visionary experiences, the intense spiritual relationship with her confessor, Jean le Graveur, was essential to the contemporary understanding and interpretation of her demonic torments and visionary experiences.

The horrific demonic assaults, self-inflicted suffering, and occasional, but consoling, divine visions of Ermine de Reims, during the last ten months of her life, were meticulously recorded by le Graveur, who sheltered Ermine in the spiritual community of his Augustinian priory in Reims after she was widowed in 1393. Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s careful and thoughtful analysis of le Graveur’s unique work, The Visions of Ermine de Reims, an abridged, translated version of which is provided as an appendix here, places Ermine’s demonic torments within their historical and political context of late fourteenth-century France. By advocating Ermine as a heroine, le Graveur was attempting, in the vernacular, to promote the Augustinian order in Reims by advocating the first peasant saint in its history. When he submitted Visions to Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, the descriptions of Ermine’s suffering proved excessive and dangerous given the prevailing apocalyptic atmosphere accompanying the Great Schism, and so the work was translated into Latin. This ecclesiastical censorship and suppression explains why le Graveur’s text virtually disappeared from view until it came to light again late in the twentieth century. Blumenfeld-Kosinski thus facilitates our understanding of a range of issues central to late medieval religious thought and life, from the political consequences of the Great Schism to devotional ideas and practices, the essence of female sainthood, and emerging notions of witchcraft and demonic possession during this transitional period.

Ermine de Reims and le Graveur lived during a time of political instability, violence, and disintegrating social fabric. Reims was close to the centre of the political, religious, and social crisis spawned by the Hundred Years’ War, religious rupture, and pestilence. The hostilities associated with the Great Schism were of particular influence on Ermine’s visions. Ermine was preoccupied by the controversial figure of Jean de Varennes, a charismatic hermit who had settled in a small sanctuary a few miles outside of Reims and attracted large crowds through his preaching. His eventual arrest and subsequent death in prison featured in her visions and discussions with le Graveur. Blumenfeld-Kosinski deftly shows how Ermine, despite her simplicity and lack of education, and unlike other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century holy women, at least as far as can be gleaned from the texts written by and about them, was deeply influenced and affected by the political life of her region.

Ermine de Reims was at the periphery of an era that saw a restructuring of the belief in and the purpose of supernatural forces. This was a period of transition when demonic visions, especially by women, were beginning to be seen as signs of witchcraft or demonic possession rather than symptoms of aspiring sainthood. The danger was particularly manifest in the sexual nature of some of Ermine’s visions at a time when copulation with demons, which, although several decades before the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, was being linked to witchcraft. We are thus given insight...