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Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England: Continuityand Evolution in Social Context

Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle

The Journal of British Studies / Volume 47 / Issue 04 / October 2008, pp 738 - 767DOI: 10.1086/590169, Published online: 21 December 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021937100019079

How to cite this article:Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle (2008). Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England: Continuity andEvolution in Social Context. The Journal of British Studies, 47, pp 738-767 doi:10.1086/590169

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738

Journal of British Studies 47 (October 2008): 738767 2008 by The North American Conference on British Studies.All rights reserved. 0021-9371/2008/4704-0003$10.00

Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and EarlyModern England: Continuity and Evolutionin Social Context

Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle

Sometime between around 687 and 700, a distraught father brought hisraving son, in a wagon, to the island of Lindisfarne, where the holy relicsof Saint Cuthbert were kept. According to the author of the Life of Cuth-bert, the boy, wearied by the torments of a demon, was prone to succumb to boutsof screaming, weeping, and self-mutilation. A priest named Tydi had been unableto put the demon to flight, so he advised the father to transport his son to therelics. At that point, Many people despaired of being able to secure any remedyfor the miserable boy, but a certain man of good and pure faith who was movedto pity, placing his trust in God and entreating the help of St. Cuthbert, blessedsome holy water and sprinkled in it some dirt from the ditch in which had beenpoured the bath water of the body of our holy bishop after his death. Once theboy tried the holy water, he desisted from his babbling that night.1

Almost a thousand years later, an Essex teenager named Katheren Malpaswas likewise adjudged to be sorely afflicted by demons. According to thetestimony her grandparents gave in Star Chamber, Katherens torments beganon Candlemas Eve, 1621, presaged by several bouts of hideous screamingthat left her lame. Over the subsequent months, Katheren often appeared tosuccumb to terrible fits that seemed all the more horrifying to those whosaw her, by virtue of their violence and the fact that they rendered her com-

Richard Raiswell is assistant professor of history at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI),Canada. His current research focuses on the use of demonological discourse in early seventeenth-centuryEnglish accounts of India. He would like to thank UPEI for granting the funds to support this work.Peter Dendle is associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Mont Alto. Heworks on early medieval demonology, especially as articulated in the literature, medicine, and liturgyof Anglo-Saxon England.

1 Anon., Vita Cuthberti, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. Bertram Colgrave (New York, 1969),4.15. All translations are those of the authors.

DEMON POSSESSION 739

pletely insensible. According to her mother, Katherens condition was suchthat she

would drawe her hands togeath[e]r at other tymes . . . woulde holde her in herheade & make her heade shake as though she were trobled w[i]th the palsey & diverstymes when the fitts tok her she would fome att the mouth & shrike verie fearfullyatt other tymes it would draw her belly flatt to her backe & woulde drawe downeher shoulder bones & some tymes when the fitt did tak her her legges woulde turnebackwards & be verie stiffe & at other tymes she woulde be stretched out & be soestiffe that her whuole woulde not bend w[i]th out breakeinge.2

On the evidence of these strange and wondrous torments, Katherens family as-serted that she was the victim of demons who had taken physical possession ofher body.

Although separated by almost a millennium, these two cases struck contem-poraries as terrifying, in part at least because they participated in a venerablediscourse about possession, whose metaphysical reality was firmly anchored in theNew Testament.3 According to the account in Marks gospel, demoniacs wouldmost typically manifest their appalling malady through a course of strange andviolent fits: they would tear at themselves and collapse to the ground, often wal-lowing or foaming at the mouth. Some, the evangelist further notes, were so sorelyafflicted by their possessors that they were moved to suicide, attempting to put anend to their torments by throwing themselves into fire or water (Mark 9:1729).To this repertoire of symptoms, Luke adds that other demoniacs were able to dem-onstrate unusually great strength in the course of their fits (Luke 8:2733). Finally,the possessed were often able to exhibit preternatural knowledge: both the Gadareneand the Capernaum demoniacs (Mark 1:24; cf. Luke 4:3334; Matt. 8:29; Luke 8:28) were able unprompted to recognize Christs divinity. Given its fundamentalposition in premodern Christian cultures, in outlining the basic symptoms and pa-thology diagnostic of demon possession, scripture provided English people with aseemingly secure and unambiguous explanatory category that could be deployed toaccount for a set of disturbing and otherwise inexplicable symptoms.

Nevertheless, despite the unassailable position of scripture in premodern culture,the form and content of possession, as it was conceived in general and enacted inparticular, came to diverge significantly over the subsequent centuries from thescriptural archetype. Consequently, possession cannot be construed as a physicalmanifestation of a particular strand of biblicism, nor can it be treated as a staticontological category with a fixed and stable meaning. Certainly, these biblicallyadduced symptoms helped define the parameters within which premodern pos-sessions were enacted and suggested the terms under which their remedies mightbe sought. However, historians of medicine have long emphasized the importanceof the link between affliction and the social and cultural lens through which a

2 Examinat[i]o . . . Attorn[atus] gen[er]alis quer[ens] v[e]r[su]s Tho[mas] Saunders et Kathere[n]Malpas senior def[endan]tes, The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), Star Cham-ber (STAC) 8 32/13, fol. 1v.

3 We use possession to denote the experience of an individual; possession is the general explanatorycategory against which the behavior of an individual is evaluated in order to constitute a diagnosis.

740 RAISWELL AND DENDLE

patients ailment is perceived. For them, disease is not just a biological event, acluster of symptoms or behaviors that manifest themselves nastily on the body ofan unfortunate. Rather, it has an important social component, since those featuresof a condition that are deemed symptoms, the significance with which they areinvested, and the relationships posited to exist between them are a result of aprocess of rationalization that is a function of the beliefs and values of the cultureinhabited by those deemed socially competent to effect a diagnosis.4 In this context,as a product of a continuing series of negotiations between the putative demoniacand those who saw him or her, instances of possession were inextricably boundup with the wider intellectual, social, and political discourses through which suchinstances were viewed. These discourses as they are constructed historically mapout the space where possession has explanatory power, but by subsuming the par-ticular symptoms of an apparent possession into the resultant epistemologicalframe, they also help fix the significance of the case and, in so doing, translate itinto culturally significant information. As the relationship between these discoursesis renegotiated over successive historical moments and the location of possessionwithin this framework comes to be replotted as its axes shift, the nature, signifi-cance, and explanatory power of possession is reconfigured accordingly. Thus, de-spite the fact that scripture described a largely unambiguous set of behaviors asconstituting possession, this model was expanded and adapted over time to embodyand reflect the cultural priorities of the age.

As a cultural product, particular instances of apparent possession can serve asimportant microhistorical sites for the recovery of popular and learned mentalite.In recent years, there have been a few studies dealing with cases of demonicpossession based heavily upon contemporary legal records. These have gone someway in reconstructing the intellectual apparatus and social dynamics that colludedin manufacturing the perception of possession within a particular historical andsocial context.5 This present study, however, aims to take a much broader chro-nological sweep in order to examine the idea and construction of possession in oneplace at two distinct and historically disparate moments: Anglo-Saxon and earlymodern England. Certainly, comparing two cross sections cut laterally throughthe fabric of history poses some methodological difficulties. In the first place, thevery different nature of the extant historical record in these two periods makescomparisons problematic. The material that survives for the Anglo-Saxon periodis decidedly limited due to low literacy and limited text production; by contrast,the early modern period is copiously documented. But second, where Anglo-Saxonrecords exist, they have no immediate analogue in terms of either form or genrein the later period. The sources in both periods were written in different contextsand ordered toward different final causes. But while like-for-like comparisons be-tween the sources in the two periods may be impossible, by treating each periodas a discrete unit, with its own particular types of evidence proper to it, it should

4 For instance, Charles E. Rosenberg, Introduction; Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden (NewBrunswick, NJ, 1992), xiiixix.

5 The most important of these is James Sharpe, Bewitching of Anne Gunter (New York, 2001). Butsee also Richard Raiswell, Faking It: A Case of Counterfeit Possession in the Reign of James I,Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 2948.


be possible to reconstruct the broad contours of possession as well as its content,form, and social significance at these two historical instances.

Despite these methodological problems, there is much to justify a comparisonbetween these two periods, for both see the question of possession, its discernment,and its remedy tied up with the politics of knowledge production. In both eras,an insecure church tried to counter what it cast as the superstition of an idolatrouscompetitor. The ability to diagnose possession and treat it is a deeply contestedissue because of its potential propaganda value to the proponents of the variousgroups competing for religious ascendancy. Moreover, precisely because of itscontested nature, both moments endeavor to anchor possession in contemporaryconstructions of authorityscriptural, textual, empirical, hierarchical, and paro-chialco-opting them to underscore the religious and ideological position of thoserecording and interpreting the apparent events. Yet despite this similarity of con-text, its construction and significance in popular and learned physics and meta-physics varied significantly between these two moments, perhaps most notably inits relationship to contemporary conceptions of witchcraft. In this respect, despitethe continuous tendency in both periods to situate apparent instances of possessionwithin the context of the scriptural paradigm, in practice possession proved far froma category of unambiguous significance. Not only did the core of diagnostic symp-toms differ radically during these two historical moments, but so too did theexplanatory power of the concept. Indeed, what becomes clear in this presentstudy is that as an ontological category for a body of symptoms and behaviors,possession proved distinctly malleable and decidedly polysemous, shifting in responseto the prevailing cultural and epistemological winds.

ANGLO-SAXON POSSESSIONS

In reconstructing the context and character of Anglo-Saxon conceptions of pos-session and the attendant problem of its remedy, scholars are at the mercy of thosefew documents, promulgated almost exclusively within monastic scriptoria, thathave survived through the centuries. These sources offer tantalizing glimpses intooften alien worldviews, from which coherent pictures can be only tentatively andspeculatively crafted.

For Anglo-Saxons, possession was deployed to explain a broad category of af-flictions. Beyond physical possession of a person by a sentient spirit or demon,they considered a great variety of ills, disorders, and other physical and environ-mental misfortunes to constitute the work of demons in an abstract sense. Con-sequently, Anglo-Saxon medical books do not distinguish clearly between demonicpossession of a person and disease agents such as worms, the sudden stabbing orinternal pains they dubbed elf-shot, poisons, or other putative pathogens: at somelevel, all can be construed as external assaults and forms of the devils tribulations(deofles costunga). As external assaults, they can be expelled through some formof adjuration. Indeed, some, like the late tenth- or early eleventh-century Lacnungabook, suggest the possibility of a purgative capable of putting any sort of unpleasantpossessing agent to flight. Thoroughly blending an array of old pagan elementswith a series of Christian motifs, the books Nine Herbs Charm invokes theherb stie as a universal that could expel almost any sort of demonically orchestrated


affliction: It dashes against poison, it expels evil things; it casts out poison. Thisis the herb that fought against the worm. It is powerful against poison; it is powerfulagainst the on-flyer; it is powerful against the malignant things that fare through-out the land.6 Another verse charm against elf-shot in the same collection directlyaddresses the shot to be expelled and commands: Out, little spear!7 Theseadjurations are not conceptually distinct from the darts of demons protected againstby the Lorica of Gildas: That the foul demons may not fling their darts into mysides, as they so often do.8 In this sense, Anglo-Saxon nosology seems to havebuilt upon that of first-century Palestine, albeit, as it was known to them, refractedthrough the lens of scripture. Christ reifies diseases as sentient beings, casting themout largely without distinction: for instance, Luke describes him as rebukingthe spirit in the Capernaum demoniac (a man who had the spirit of an uncleandemon) with the same word (ptimhjn) used to describe him rebuking afever to depart and rebuking the wind to calm.9

Although possession was a category broadly applied to account for many differentsorts of affliction in this period, it is difficult to reconstruct the precise nature andextent to which demon possession, understood as the physical possession of a person,was a diagnosis deployed among the Anglo-Saxons. Several historical and hagio-graphical works of the period state flatly that many people were cured at a givensaints tomb, with demoniacs sometimes mentioned along with those sufferingfrom other infirmities. It is not possible, however, to substantiate these cursoryreferences by means of independent recordsthere are not yet the meticulouslycompiled registries and miracle lists such as those later kept at popular healingshrines and already starting to appear on the continent.10 In fact, given the highlystylized nature of hagiography as a genre, it is not clear whether such remarks canbe taken as literal descriptions or whether they should, more cautiously, be con-sidered static literary tropes, consciously crafted to mirror the accounts of theafflicted furnished by scripture and by continental models.

The Anglo-Saxon understanding of the Bible was in essence processed: it wasconditioned largely by the early Christian tradition of commentary literature andhomilies and by a host of apocryphal narratives that made their way very earlyinto a number of monastic book collections. In this respect, works by writers suchas Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, Gregory the Great, Venantius Fortunatus, and othercontinental authorities were just as influential on the Anglo-Saxon understandingof possession as the letter of the Bible itself. The filters through which Christianitywas bequeathed to the Anglo-Saxons can be seen in some of the works mostcommonly appearing in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts: for instance, Augustines com-

6 J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (Oxford, 1952), 152. Theidentification of stie is unclear. It might be nettle. On-flyer is perhaps some infectious disease.

7 Ibid., 174.8 Ibid., 136.9 Capernaum demoniac: Luke 4:35; rebukes fever: Luke 4:39; rebukes wind: Mark 4:39. Graham

Twelftree notes that Luke here seems to be embellishing Marks narrative, which has no such directrebuke: He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she beganto serve them. Mark 1:13; Graham Twelftree, Jesus the Exorcist (Peabody, MA, 1993), 138; see alsoTodd Klutz, The Exorcism Stories in Luke-Acts: A Sociostylistic Reading (Cambridge, 2004), 7577.

10 For these, see Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1977;repr., London, 1995).


mentaries on the Psalms and on the Gospel of John; Gregorys Homilies on theGospels, Morals on the Book of Job, and Pastoral Care; Isidores Etymologies andSynonyms; and the homilies of Paul the Deacon. Through such an authority asIsidore, for example, Anglo-Saxons learned that the demons once enjoyed heav-enly bodies but that after their fall from heaven they were turned into aerialbeingsnot of pure air, but of thick or murky air, which would serve as a prisonto them until the time of the Second Coming.11 This extrabiblical conceptualizationwas very influential in determining how demons were portrayed in Anglo-Saxonart, theology, and homiletics.

So great is the literary dependence on continental forerunners that the vastmajority of references in the Anglo-Saxon documentary record that relate to demonpossession or exorcism are simply retellings of events that happened not in Englandbut on the continentand usually, a number of centuries earlier. Thus, the prolifichomilist and hagiographer lfric relates lively stories, such as that of three work-men becoming possessed in his Passion of St. Maur and that of Apollinaris castinga demon out of a noblemans wife in the Passion of St. Apollinaris, but here heis simply translating into English the stories he finds in his source texts.12 Whenthese accounts of possessions and exorcisms that occurred in other times and placesare subtracted from the documentary corpus, the pool of diagnosed cases of pos-session in Anglo-Saxon England shrinks considerably. In fact, there are only ninereferences to cases of demon possession for the entire Anglo-Saxon period thatprovide any demographic details or particulars whatsoever (sex, age, social status,symptoms, etc.). Moreover, these are generally to be found in ecclesiastical ac-counts that stress the dispossession of these tormented souls.

The first thing to note in table 1 is that all of these cases hail temporally fromeither the seventh or the early eighth century and geographically from North-umbria and Anglia. To some extent, this is clearly a product of the fact that thereis an increase in literary activity overall in that time and place, a movement generallydubbed the Northumbrian Renaissance, but it is significant that there is almostno mention of native demon possession in subsequent periods of Anglo-Saxonliterary activity. For instance, there is no mention of possession in the literary,historical, and pastoral writings promulgated under Alfred in the ninth century orunder the prolific monastic reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed,this early window of exorcism activity is the only one from pre-Conquest Englandthat can be discussed in any detail and the only one that can be situated into aparticular cultural milieu.

The nine cases in table 1 in which demon possession is diagnosed adhere closelyto a fairly specific profile, and the literary contexts in which they appear reveal asmall range of recurring themes and anxieties. This can offer a fairly safe idea, ifnot of the extent to which possession and exorcism played a role in the conversionof the countryside or in the ongoing life and experiences of Anglo-Saxons, at leastof the construction of demon possession as an ontological category in the minds ofcontemporary authors. While the Anglo-Saxon cases built on continental models,they differ from them in several important respects: Jerome, for instance, refers

11 Isidore, Etymologies 8.11 (in Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina [Paris, 1850], 82, col.316A).

12 lfrics Lives of Saints, vol. 1, ed. Walter Skeat (London, 1881), 158, 476.

Tab

le1

Kno

wn

Pos

sess

ion

Cas

esfr

omA

nglo

-Sax

onE

ngla

nd

Sour

ceN

ame

(with

Sex)

Age

Soci

alSt

atus

Ano

n.,

Life

ofC

uthb

ert,

II.8

Wife

ofH

ildm

r

(F)

Adu

ltFr

eem

ans

(?)

wife

Ano

n.,

Life

ofC

uthb

ert,

IV.1

5A

non.

boy

(M)

Chi

ldor

adol

esce

nt[I

ndet

erm

inat

e]B

ede,

Ecc

lesia

stic

alH

istor

y,II

.5K

ing

Ead

bald

ofK

ent

(M)

Adu

ltR

oyal

tyB

ede,

Ecc

lesia

stic

alH

istor

y,II

I.11

Ano

n.m

anvi

sitin

gB

ardn

eyA

bbey

(M)

Adu

lt[I

ndet

erm

inat

e]B

ede,

Com

men

tary

onth

eG

ospe

lof

Luke

Ano

n.N

orth

umbr

ian

nun

(F)

[Ind

eter

min

ate]

Nun

Bon

iface

,Le

tter

toK

ing

Eth

elba

ldof

Mer

cia

Kin

gC

eolr

edof

Mer

cia

(M)

Adu

ltR

oyal

tySt

ephe

nof

Rip

on,

Life

ofW

ilfri

d,ch

ap.

39E

orm

inbu

rh,

Que

enof

Nor

thum

bria

(F)

Adu

ltR

oyal

tyFe

lix,

Life

ofG

uthl

ac,

chap

.41

Hw

tr

ed(M

)Yo

ung

man

Nob

leFe

lix,

Life

ofG

uthl

ac,

chap

.42

Ecg

a,a

war

rior

and

king

sth

ane

(M)

Adu

ltN

oble


to demoniacs levitating in the air; Gregory of Tours mentions people who arepossessed by multiple demons as well as a single demon possessing multiple people;and Einhard has a possessed German girl speaking in Latin, although she couldnot have known any. In continental cases like these, demoniacs dance through thechurch, announce the approach of invading armies, and exit the demoniacs in theshapes of animals or small black men. Compared with these spectacles, Anglo-Saxon possession cases are notably subdued.

In fact, the majority of recorded symptoms in the Anglo-Saxon cases, like thosedescribed in scripture, closely mimic a handful of well-known neurological andmuscle-control disorders, such as epilepsy. In the anonymous Life of Cuthbert (ca.699705), Hildmrs wife gnashes her teeth and lets out tearful groans.13 She isshamefully broken, dirty with her own spittle.14 Bedes account of the visitorto Bardney Abbey in his Ecclesiastical History (731) likewise portrays a sufferercrying out, gnashing his teeth, foaming at the mouth, and flinging his limbsabout.15 The erratic and uncontrollable muscle motion is apparently the condi-tions most salient characteristic: when he is cured, Bede relates, he drew all hislimbs back in peacefully.16 Stephen of Ripons Life of Wilfrid (ca. 71020) reportsthat Queen Eorminburh is suddenly taken with some sort of demon, which man-ifests in all her limbs being contracted and folded together.17 Finally, in Felix ofCrowlands Life of Guthlac (ca. 73040), a youth named Hwtred is possessedby a wretched spirit, which results in compulsive self-mutilation: he lacerated hisown limbs with wood, iron, and with his own nails and teeth as much as hecould.18 He bites and strikes at anyone else who comes close also, even killingthree people with an axe, which suggests that what is being described is a transientpsychotic episode. Such destructive behavior also appears in the anonymous Lifeof Cuthbert, in which a mans son is wearied by a demon because he screamsout, weeps, and mutilates his own body.19 He fills many with horror at the soundof his shouting and crying out.20 The broad profile of physical descriptors, then,concerning the raving of these demoniacs, aligns them with neuropathologicalconditions of limb paralysis or convulsions, sporadic fits, stroke, compulsive self-mutilation, or random, violent out-lashes.

Since ancient times, of course, such convulsive disordersinexplicable andfrightening to onlookers in premodern societieshave been explained in culturesworldwide through recourse to indwelling demons. It is these neurological con-ditions, in fact, that compose possession more generally; that is, in societies in whichpossession behavior is widespread and is used to express a broad range of individual,social, religious, and political dissatisfactions, demoniacs still return to the baselinephysiological core of immediate behaviors such as falling, convulsing, foaming at

13 Anon., Vita Cuthberti, 2.8.14 Ibid.15 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, in Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People,

ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 3.11.16 Ibid.17 Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), chap. 39.18 Felix of Crowland, Vita Guthlaci, in Felixs Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge,

1956), chap. 41.19 Anon., Vita Cuthberti, 4.15.20 Ibid.


the mouth, and screaming. The Anglo-Saxon sources are notable in adhering veryclosely to this physiological core and are relatively devoid of more cultural symp-toms. As with demon possession in early medieval accounts as a whole, demoniacsin Anglo-Saxon sources are generally treated with the same empathy and pityaccorded to unfortunate sufferers of other illnesses.

That said, the pathology of some Anglo-Saxon cases, as they are described inthe sources, does sometimes diverge in some important respects from scripturalmodels. Scripture, for instance, has Christ cast out demons by means of the spiritor finger of God (Matt. 12:28; cf. Luke 11:20). Bede, however, states that thepossessed often cannot be exorcized properly until they openly confess:

In our time the priests, who know how to cast out demons through the grace [orgift] of exorcism, usually maintain that patients cannot be cured unless they openlyreveal through confession everything they endured from the evil spirits in visions,sounds, tastes, tactile sensations, or through any senses whatsoever either physicallyor mentallyespecially when, appearing to men as women or to women dressed asmen (which demons the Gauls call Dusi), they pretend to desire sexual intercoursewith them and (an unspeakable marvel for an incorporeal spirit!) to consummate withthem in the flesh. And they advise that the demons namethat by which he says heis knownand the ways in which they devised their mutual pact of passion by oaths,should be brought out.

This may seem like a fable, but it is true insofar as there is the most notable testimonyof many people that a certain priest in my vicinity related that he began to cure acertain holy woman from a demon, but as long as the matter lay concealed, therewas nothing he could do for her. When she confessed what phantasm was troublingher, however, he quickly drove it out through prayers and other necessary kinds ofpurifications, and, applying consecrated salt with medical zeal, he cured the womansbody from the ulcers that had been brought about by the demons influence.21

This insistence on the active role of the demoniac in helping to allow the ex-orcism to succeed is at odds with the majority of New Testament exempla in whichthe demoniac is depicted simply as a passive victim, unable to assist in the cure.But this divergence from the model laid out in scripture is significant, for it suggeststhat Anglo-Saxon modes of dispossession were becoming reconfigured to moreclosely mirror the dynamic between patient and exorcist depicted in continentalexorcism narratives. Furthermore, there are literary uses of possession unknownin scripture: in Stephen of Ripons Life of Wilfrid, the queen is seized with ademon as direct punishment for King Ecgfriths imprisonment of Wilfrid. As soonas the king has the bishop released, the queen is cured. Possession appears hereas divine punishment (in a third party, no less) rather than as unfortunate affliction,again unlike possession accounts in the New Testament. In this sense, those whowrote of possession and its remedy, at least, seem to have appropriated elementsfrom the broader intellectual culture they inhabited to reconfigure elements ofpossession and exorcism in such a way as to cause them to see both diagnosis andremedy as dynamic processes. Reworked under the weight of these models, theperson of the demoniac seems to have been reconstrued to take an active part in

21 For Luke 8:30: Bede, In Lucae Evangelium expositio, in Migne, Patrologia Latina, 92, col. 438B.


the process of treatment. What seems to be emerging here, then, is a hermeneuticcircle. In one hemisphere, the symptoms manifested by the demoniac situate hercondition within the category of possession as it is understood through the filterof a host of authorities. In the other, the preconditioned expectations of thosewho treat the demoniac define the parameters under which particular possessionscould be enacted by virtue of their role in diagnosis and treatment.

A significant facet of the recorded cases of demon possession for Anglo-SaxonEngland is that, even though the narratives are recorded in ecclesiastical docu-ments, particularly saints lives, priestly adjuration is not necessarily the weaponof choice in combating the inhabiting demons. Indeed, these sources draw sig-nificant attention to the failure of formal exorcisms. The anonymous Life of Cuth-bert states that Tydi was incapable of putting the demon to flight; instead, itwas the relics of Cuthbert that proved effective.22 Bede likewise reports that therelics of Oswald cure the demoniac, after the priests exorcisms fail; the priestrecited exorcisms and did everything he could to assuage the miserable mansravings. However hard he tried, though, he was unable to make any headway.23

As J. M. Wallace-Hadrill notes, the failure of formal exorcism was a serious matterat a time when the Church had to demonstrate the efficacy of its procedures toa semi-pagan population.24 Although the corpus of possession cases is admittedlylimited, this suggests that the geography of power in the Anglo-Saxon church wasstill heterogeneous. Instead of curative power being construed as distributed ho-mogeneously through the ecclesiastical hierarchy, it seems to have been popularlyinvested at local sites, especially through charismatic individuals and (after theirdeaths) the places associated with them. Over time, some of these sites wouldbecome powerful ecclesiastical centers in their own right, while others would fadeinto obscurity. The ability to draw demoniacsand people with other illnessesbecame an increasingly important factor in a sites economic success, especiallyafter the Conquest, when greater political stability allowed for more reliable pil-grimage routes throughout the island.

In the seventh century, Northumbria had been deeply contested territory, forit was the meeting point of the two distinct missionary campaigns in England: theIrish, from Iona to the north, and the Roman, from Canterbury to the south.Moreover, there is some evidence that parts of the north of England had resistedChristian conversion longer than other areas while they were under Roman oc-cupation, and their modes of spirituality had blended with local Celtic paganismdifferently. Thus, the region was still something of a battlefield between these threecompeting worldviews.25 And so, written within living memory of the conversionof many pagan regions in England on one hand and the Synod of Whitby on theother, Bedes Ecclesiastical History at times reflects some of the anxieties of thenew Roman faith as it attempted to gain a solid foothold in the land. Bede paintsthe Christianization of England in epic terms, with missionaries perpetually on theverge of violent martyrdom, braving new regions to talk sense into benighted

22 Anon., Vita Cuthberti, 4.15.23 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.11.24 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary

(Oxford, 1988), xxx, 104.25 See John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), esp. 1034.


pagan kings and their entourages. The populace was steeped in traditions thatwere hard to break: Some, in their mortal hour, turning from the sacraments ofthe faith in which they had been instructed, rushed to the fraudulent relief ofidolatry, as though they could fend off a blow from God the Maker by means ofincantations, amulets, or any other secrets of demonic craft.26 But in some respectsthe Northumbrian church was poorly prepared to deal with these potential relapsesof the populace into paganism. Indeed, Bede wrote in a letter to Bishop Ecgbertthat many areas of Northumbria did not receive a priests visit for years at a time.27

If priests were scarce, bishopsthe principal ecclesiastical authorities for Englandat the timewere virtually as distant as the gods themselves to most rural Anglo-Saxons.

In this climate, it was the local saints who could often serve as mediators. Thesewere holy individuals of humble backgrounds, close to the lower orders and oftenoutside metropolitan politics and the entrenching authority structures within thechurch. Valorizing local saints as mediators allowed the nascent English churchto satisfy the need for spiritual guidance at the local level, through example andthrough miraculous healings, without fully asking the populace to submit unques-tioningly to a church that could potentially be perceived as foreign, aloof, andbureaucratica church whose very language was incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxons. In this light, it is hardly surprising that the cases of possession in Anglo-Saxon England are associated primarily with these regions of recent conversion,for in places like Northumbria there was still a tension between those membersof the community who had fully accepted the new Roman faith and those whohad not. The act of confession, not yet a sacrament at this time but nonethelessa powerful symbolic act of submission, served to gauge the trust local Anglo-Saxons were willing to place in representatives of the church. Subjects were notnecessarily made to confess their own sins in this context, but rather to divulgetheir private thoughts to the church representative and to participate openly inthe dialogue that invariably places the confessor in a dominant position. Thus,in the anonymous Life of Cuthbert, Hildmr learns that he must confide in Cuth-bert the true nature of his wifes illness; he cannot hope for effective help so longas he tries to keep anything hidden from the man of God. Bede also emphasizesthat exorcism will not work unless it is accompanied by true and full confession:Patients cannot be cured unless they openly reveal through confession everythingthey endured from the evil spirits.28 As Bede retells the story of Hildmrs wifein the Ecclesiastical History, the man is afraid to confide in Cuthbert for fear thatthe holy man will think his wife is not a good Christian: He was afraid that whenCuthbert found her possessed, he would begin to suspect that she had only servedGod with feigned rather than whole faith.29 The obstinate King Ceolred of Merciais portrayed by Boniface as dying in his demonic ravings, possessed by a spirit,without penance or confession.30 In this light, by linking dispossession with the

26 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.27.27 Bede, Epistola ad Ecgbertum Episcopum, in Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, vol. 1, ed. Charles

Plummer (Oxford, 1896), 140.28 Bede, In Lucae Evangelium expositio, 92, col. 438B.29 Bede, Vita Cuthberti, chap. 15, in Colgrave, Two Lives.30 Boniface, Letter 73, in Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, in Mon-

umenta Germaniae historica, Epistolae Selectae 1 (Berlin, 1955), 153.


act of confession in the Roman manner, possession becomes consistently associatedwith the potential for a relapse in faith or a failure to adopt Christianity wholly,and trust in a man of God or a representative of the church is closely associatedwith the chance of a successful cure.

While linking confession and dispossession helped the Roman Church to deepenits toehold in the north, it also faced a strong challenge to its power over thewider issue of the practice of the adjuration of other physical afflictions. Withdisease configured as a possessing agent with a particular profile, the new churchclashed with other, much older curative practices. To local populations, such in-herited remedies were likely not construed in particularly religious terms and couldeasily be reworked to blend Christian demon constructs with native elves orpoisons and to incorporate holy water and Pater nosters on the one hand withiron taboos and lore regarding the four cardinal points on the other. Indeed, fromthe point of view of a supplicant seeking relief from whatever authority figureswere closest at hand, whether an exorcism of a demon or illness came from alocal healer using herbs and incantations or whether it came from a priest usingmore ecclesiastically sanctioned means, such as formal exorcism, probably meantvery little. They may have found themselves caught in a clash between differentsorts of specialized knowledge and different sorts of specialized healers: traditionalhealers who would have dealt with illness-possession and clerical healers whoseunderstanding came from continental textual traditions. Possession is one sitewhere the tension between the two could be played outplayed out physicallybetween the practitioners but also played out by proxy as a battle for authorityand allegiance in the countryside. Village priestsmany of them only semiliteratein Latin, having memorized most of their necessary services, and not in regular,meaningful contact with ecclesiastical centerswould probably have shared manyof the hybrid beliefs of their friends and neighbors.31 But to Anglo-Saxon reformersof the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, such folkloric practices were highlysuspicious and struck them as too reliant on pre-Christian beliefs and customs:increasingly, they came to configure such popular remedies and adjurations aswitchcraft.

It is in this context that clerical writers, often relying on continental models fortheir penitential, legal, and canon codes, vilified what they considered superstitiouscustoms and heathenish practices. Unfortunately, given the highly generic natureof the sources, it is very difficult to determine, for the most part, to what extentany given practice mentioned represented a living tradition in Anglo-Saxon En-gland or to what extent clerics were rather perpetuating fossilized passages in aliterary tradition.32 Alfreds ninth-century laws, following Exodus 22:18, call forthe death of sorcerers: Those women who habitually associate with spell-castersand illusionists and witches, do not let them live.33 In the late tenth and eleventhcenturies, law codes such as 6 thelred (chap. 7) and 2 Cnut (chap. 4) call for

31 Karen L. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill, NC,1996), 39.

32 See Audrey L. Meaney, And we forbeoda eornostlice lcne henscipe: Wulfstan and LateAnglo-Saxon and North Heathenism, in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The Proceedings of the SecondAlcuin Conference, ed. Matthew Townend (Turnhout, 2004), 461500.

33 Alfred, Introduction, sec. 30, in Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1, ed. F. Liebermann (1903;repr., Aalen, 1960), 38.


driving witches or diviners into exile.34 But what is clear is that witchcraft isinextricably woven in with conceptions of heathenism and idolatry here. The OldEnglish Penitential, for instance, warns against curing children with the use ofwitchcraft, because that is a great heathenism.35 Love phylacteries (such as plac-ing something enchanted in someones food or drink to excite their affections)are prohibited in the same penitential, and a gnomic verse found in MS CottonTiberius B.i implies that such practices were sufficiently current to gain proverbialstatus: A woman, a virgin, seeks out her object of affection through secret skillto secure him in marriage, if she does not care about her position among people.36

The hostility toward witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon sources thus comes from or-thodox reformers and is mostly limited to curtailing and controlling possible sur-vivals of pagan customs. The areas of Viking settlement in the east allowed for afresh injection of pagan beliefs there in the late ninth and tenth centuries, keepingthis tension alive in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical authorities. The twoprincipal roles that lfric ascribes to witches are healing and divining or sooth-saying.37 Audrey Meaney notes that these are relatively innocuous forms of witch-craft; lfric does not make reference to harmful magic directed against a neighboror rival.38 There appear to be remedies against such spells or witchcraft in theAnglo-Saxon medical books, as in the Leechbook (II.1): a recipe is prescribed fora variety of conditions or foes, including the devils temptations (or tribulations;the meaning of costnunga is uncertain here), night-goers, enchantment, andevil spell-craft.39 Thus, while the documentary record is much less complete andprecise than we might wish, there seems to be sufficient evidence to allow thathealing, hurting, and divining magicpractices that the clergy labeled supersti-tions and associated with idolatrywere active to some extent among the generalAnglo-Saxon populace throughout the period. Since these practices are knownfrom the earliest historical sources, are virtually ubiquitous across the globe, andhave survived well into modern and even contemporary times, there is little surprisein this, except to note the already gendered nature of witchcraft even at this earlyperiod. It seems to be women who are singled out to a certain extent for suspicionand repression, especially in their role as herb-lore keepers and local healers.

As we have seen, given that many pathogens in Anglo-Saxon medicine werevaguely conceived as worms, poisons, elf-shot, or other noxious agents that invadedthe body, local healing often took the form of lay exorcism (in a broad sense ofthe term) to expel these disease agents. This was not conceptually distinct fromliturgical exorcism as performed by officially ordained exorcists or priests in any

34 That is, wiccan oe wigleras. See Anthony Davies, Witches in Anglo-Saxon England: Five CaseHistories, in Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D. G. Scragg (Manchester,1989), 4156, at 41.

35 Old English Penitential, in Die Altenglische Version des Halitgarschen Bussbuches, ed. Josef Raith(1933; repr., Darmstadt, 1964), 4.16.

36 Old English Penitential, 4.14; Maxims II, in The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, vol. 6 of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. Elliott van Kirk Dobbie (New York, 1942), lines 4345.

37 Audrey L. Meaney, lfric and Idolatry, Journal of Religious History 13 (1984): 11935, 123.38 Ibid., 135.39 Thomas Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2 (Lon-

don, 1865), 307.


rigorous sense.40 In Balds Leechbook, there is explicit liturgical exorcism languagein a charm for lf-sogoa (meaning uncertain, though at the end of the passagethe recipe is also said to be good for every assault of the devil): Deus omni-potens, pater domini nostri Iesu Christi . . . expelle a famulo tuo .N (OmnipotentLord, Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . cast out from your servant N. . .).41

However, the various levels of ecclesiastical authority took steps to ensure that thechurch could monitor and regulate such local practices. For instance, many of therites that did make their way into the books produced at scriptoria require theparticipation of a priest. Clearly, these represent attempts by the church to assim-ilate traditional modes of healing into more acceptable forms. Thus, a recipe againstlf-cynne (elvenkind), night goers, and those who have intercourse with the devilrequires placing the herbal mixture in a vessel under an altar; a recipe to expellf-adle (elf sickness) calls for lichen to be scraped from a cross and dipped in afont of holy water and for Latin masses to be sung over it. A subsequent recipefor lf-sogoa requires consecrated oil and the ability to write a short passage.42In his homily for St. Bartholomews Day, lfric demonstrates the fine line theclergy sometimes walked in evaluating local practices. He assimilates the outwardform of the ritual but argues that its efficacy comes from the power of God:

If a Christian person who is afflicted with anything similar to this wishes to seek hishealth through illicit means or through wicked spells or through any witchcraft, thenhe is like the heathens who gave offerings in devil-worship for their bodies health,and thus wasted their souls. . . . It is not permitted to any Christian to seek his healthfrom any stone, nor from any tree, unless it is the holy cross, nor from any location,unless it is the holy house of God. He who does anything else, surely he is practicingidolatry (hen-gyld). . . . Wise Augustine said that it is safe for someone to usemedicinal herbs, but he denounces it as illicit sorcery if someone binds the herbs tohimself unless he is applying them to a sore. Nonetheless, we should not put ourfaith in medicinal herbs, but in the almighty creator who gave the herbs power. Noone must sing spells over an herb, but must bless it with Gods words and then (hemay) use it.43

For lfric, then, it is the power of God in the herbs that causes the adjuration,not any ritual or incantation associated with them. In this sense, he has assimilatedmuch of the outward form and content of these popular rituals but rejected thenotion that the witchs spell made them effective; instead, the occult powers Godhas placed in creation caused these rituals to work. Few village priests would belikely to observe or even understand such conceptual distinctions; the thoroughblending of pre-Christian ritual with Christian elements in the medical recipes isthe result of conceptual overlap and hybridization. It is evident, however, that

40 Thus, Jolly notes that the gap between liturgical books and medical books was so small that theybelong together as a single, larger group of manuals for health and well-being, along with penitentials(Popular Religion, 114).

41 Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft, 2:348.42 Ibid., 34551.43 Original text in Peter Clemoes, lfrics Catholic Homilies: The First Series Text, Early English Text

Society, Supplementary Series no. 17 (Oxford, 1997), 450. lfrics source here is actually Caesariusof Arles sermons (esp. 50 and 54).


church representatives insisted that the church became a part of such rituals, toreinforce their presence in the community and to emphasize that divine powercan only be properly accessed through the church and its officially sanctionedrituals.

To be sure, the small corpus of Anglo-Saxon possession cases cannot be inter-preted outside the body of the documents that contain them, and these emergefrom long-established generic traditions. But what is clear is that possession was adeeply contested locus in seventh- and early eighth-century England. On one hand,possession seems to have been configured in terms of missionary and priestly ex-pectations, derived from scriptural and exegetical models, mapped onto the bodiesof people who were likely subject to a number of psychiatric or neurologicalafflictions. But on the other hand, the issue of possessions remedy was a deeplytroubling one to the young church, for, as practiced in the countryside, it clearlyseemed to embrace elements that could only be described as heathenism andidolatry. By coding these traditional rites as witchcraft, the church attempted tomarginalize these practices, asserting by extension the authenticity and veracity oftheir own forms of adjuration. In this way, the extant instances of possession providea rare window into a moment of transition in terms of the construction of eccle-siastical power and presence in the countryside. Possession may be especially prev-alent in the newly converted areas of north and central Englandor, at least, itstruck contemporaries as particularly worthy of documentation in those areaswhen the authority of the church, in the face of relapsing nobles and pre-Christiantraditions deeply rooted in the countryside, was not yet strongly established. Pos-session and its attendant exorcisms thus served as points of tension, venting crisesof authority between peasant and priest and perhaps also between pagan (or semi-pagan) and Christian.

EARLY MODERN POSSESSIONS

While diagnosed instances of possession seem to have been comparatively rare inAnglo-Saxon England, with the content of the discourse conforming closely tothat delineated by scripture, this is clearly not the case for the period between themiddle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period of profoundreligious and political ferment, the frequency of cases of possession seems to haveincreased in both absolute and relative terms. Of course, with the expansion ofliteracy and the coming of the printing press, this later period is far better doc-umented than that of the Anglo-Saxon age. But this impression is no illusiondivined by historians through the distorting lens of a much more expansive his-torical record, for the increased frequency of instances of possession was widelynoted and commented upon at the time. As the character of M. B. lamented inGeorge Giffords 1593 Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, the situationwas such that there be many examples in many places, and daylie it is seene, thatthe devill is driven out of some possessed.44 Likewise, in their polemical 1601Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels, the Anglican preachers John Deaconand John Walker constructed the argument of the character Exorcistes for the

44 George Gifford, Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (London, 1593), sig. F3v.


reality of possession upon common experience; for Exorcistes, the overwhelmingquantity of experiential, empirical data proved the phenomenon.45

This new concern with possession is a function of a broader diabolization ofEnglish society that Nathan Johnstone has recently argued took place in the secondhalf of the sixteenth century. To Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestants, Johnstoneargues, the devils power was no abstract theological issue; it was a demonstrablereality and an immediate threat. To be sure, the power of the devil was somethingthat could be perceived in the world, but crucially, it was also something the godlyfelt and could identify in their conscience, for it was there that the devil mosteffectively assailed them, tempting them by means of ungodly thoughts. Such wasthe power of the devil that to the godly, life was a constant struggle to resist histemptation and his incessant attempts to subvert their consciences from the inside;in such an anxious climate, then, their most important weapon was rigorous in-trospection.46 This is important for two reasons. First, with the devil perceived asimmediate and active, the godly were especially adept at reading any sign manifestin the physical world as a token of the demonic. But second, with this new emphasison the internal subversion of the individual, possession could be configured as aparticularly extreme form of demonic invasion, with the devil subverting not justthe conscience but the physical body as well.47

This diabolization of the mentalite of the godly is reflected in the literature ofthe period, for reports describing apparent demoniacs are common in a host ofdifferent sorts of texts. Most colorfully, such narratives were a favorite of the pulppress. In general, modern scholars have been prepared to treat these pamphletaccounts of possessions fairly sympathetically.48 However, this is methodologicallyproblematic, for such an approach ignores the fact that the majority of these workshave a clear didactic purpose. They were intended either as exempla of the devilspower or to prove such ideologically charged notions as the rectitude or falsity ofCatholicism, of the more extreme forms of Protestantism, or even of the moderateposition the state church was attempting to plot. In this respect, what is importantto the authors of such accounts is not the particular minutiae of what actuallyhappened, for these are just trivia; rather, they are concerned with the wider truththat the events signifythat is to say, their focus is squarely set upon the finalcause of the account. Under such a view of history in the res scriptae sense of theterm, it was safe to embellish accounts as long as the embellishments were edifying,remained in the spirit of truth, underscored the theme of the narrative, and rep-resented the kind of thing that could have happened. In permitting historical detailto be subsumed to the putative final cause of a work, such authors were followinga rhetorical strategy of sound classical precedent. Quintilian, for instance, arguedthat it was wholly licit to embellish an account with fictitious incidents of the typethat commonly occur, in order to amplify the final cause of a work.49 In this

45 John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels (London, 1601),199200.

46 Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006),27106.

47 Ibid., 1026.48 See, for instance, D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England

in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1981), 2.49 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. H. E. Butler (London, 196669), VIII, iii, 70.


respect, it is nigh on impossible to determine the extent to which the specificdetails in an account of a particular possession are accurate, if they have beenembellished by the author in order to underscore what he knows really to behappening, or if they have been added to highlight the overarching purpose ofthe account.50 But while the details of the pathology of the particular possessionsthey purport to describe may well have been manipulated to serve didactic orpropagandistic ends, in order to ensure that the accounts had the intended effectson their putative readers, they must have coincided to a large degree with a moregeneral, socially understood discourse about possession. Had they not done so, allbut the most credulous would have been inclined to dismiss them out of hand aspatently absurd. In this sense, even leaving aside the issue of dissemination, theycan be treated as broadly indicative of their authors conception of their intendedaudiences idea of the nature of possession.

In some contexts, however, it is possible to go further and to recover the specificsymptoms manifested by a demoniac to a more certain degree. Precisely becausethe issue of possession was widely understood to be deeply invested in the religiouspolitics of the day, some demonologists, propagandists, and polemicists went togreat lengths to compound the apparent authenticity of their accountsand, byextension, their argumentsby reproducing an array of official and semiofficialdocuments. Samuel Harsnett, for instance, chaplain to the bishop of London atthe turn of the century, bolstered the authority of his various treatises attackingcertain Puritan and Catholic exorcists by appending transcriptions of the confes-sions given at law of the putative demoniacs involved.51

While some of these confessions were likely extracted under duress as HarsnettsPuritan opponents argued quite vehemently, these accounts can be juxtaposed

50 For a particularly egregious example, albeit a hostile one, of how this process worked in practice,see Samuel Harsnetts description of the redaction of Anon., The most wonderfull and true storie, of acertaine Witch named Alse Gooderige (London, 1597), in S[amuel] H[arsnett], A Discovery of theFraudulent Practises of John Darrel (London, 1599), 26669. Likewise, A true and most Dreadfulldiscourse of a woman possessed with the Devill (London, [1584]) and Most Fearefull and Strange Newesfrom the Bishippricke of Durham (London, 1641). The latter pamphlet reproduces all the salient detailsof the narrative of the former, although it changes the name of the demoniac from Margaret Cooperto Margaret Hooper and shifts the action from Somerset to Durham. Although the latter pamphletclaims to be news and lists the names of six credible witnesses prepared to attest to the veracity of theevents therein recounted, the narrative is clearly set in the wonder-prodigy tradition, for it advises thereader, Let not this which is here declared seeme a fained fable unto thee, but assure thy selfe thatall such things are sent as warnings for our wickednesse, and to put us in mind of the Seate of oursalvation (sig. A2). In this sense, it is clear that the historicity of the account is less important thanthe lessons it purports to teach.

51 Harsnett reproduces the confessions of William Sommers, Thomas Darling, and Katherine Wright,along with the testimony of various witnesses who claimed to see these demoniacs enact their fits andtrances, in H[arsnett], Discovery, 8082, 8386, 29496, 29798. His Declaration of Egregious PopishImpostures (London, 1603) concludes with an extended appendix in which he reproduces the confessionsof many of the people involved in the apparent possession of a number of youths in Denham in 1585.These he set downe word for word as they were taken upon oath before her Maiesties Commissionfor causes Ecclesiaticall. See Harsnett, Declaration, 172, 173284. Where possible, Harsnetts op-ponents did the same. See Anon., A Breife Narration of the possession, dispossession, and, repossession ofWilliam Sommers (London, 1598), sigs. CiiiDii. The reproduction of documents was a standard featureof ecclesiastical history, dating back to Eusebius in the fourth century. To Harsnett and his peers, itwas a rhetorical strategy used most recently and to great effect by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments(London, 1563).


against the trial records of a number of youths adjudged to have counterfeitedpossession for their own nefarious ends. The most important and detailed of theseare the Star Chamber pleadings in the cases of Anne Gunter in 1606 and KatherenMalpas in 1622. These cases are obvious instances in which the tension provedirreconcilable between the particular possession as enacted and the wider discourseof possession in which the participants sought to situate their imposture. But alsothey provide a unique insight into the would-be demoniacs understanding of herneighbors perceptions of the nature and content of possession, divested from anywider didactic agenda.

Despite the fact that these three types of sources emanated from different socialcontexts and were targeted at different audiences and ordered toward differentends, all point to the emergence of a widely accepted and understood discourseof possession, the content and significance of which were broadly comprehendedacross the social strata. Indeed, the playwright Ben Jonson thought that the es-sential features of the discourse were sufficiently well known that he could relyupon his audiences understanding of it for comedic effect in his 1607 Volponeand his 1616 Devil Is an Ass.52

In Volpone, the title character tries to instruct Voltore on how to simulate pos-session. He advises him to stop your wind hard, and swell and then calls outthe symptoms he is meant to display:

He vomits crooked pinnes; his eyes are set,Like a dead hares, hung in a poulters shop!His mouths running away! . . .Now, tis in his belly! . . .Now, in his throate . . .Twill out, twill out; stand cleere. See, where it flyes!In shape of a blew toad, with a battes wings!53

In the Devil Is an Ass, the character of Fitz-dottrel embellishes even this corpusof symptoms in his counterfeited possession, for he exhibits a strange rising in hisbelly that other characters are unable to suppress.54 Despite the fact that themajority of the symptoms that Jonson presents as diagnostic have no groundingin the sacred page, it is quite clear from the various printed accounts of demoniacsfrom the 1570s forth that all of these new nonscriptural symptoms had becomeintegral to both the discourse of possession and its particular enactments.55 Indeed,the Puritan minister George More, in his 1600 account of the possession of sevenyouths in the Starkie family, argued that while the demoniacs manifested a fewsymptoms unique to themselves, he accepted that they were possessed on the basisof the fact that they shared eighteen rare and strange symptoms in common, themajority of which had little or no scriptural precedent. These included straungvisions, and fearfull apparitions of the devil; hearing hideous voices; senselessness

52 See Ben Jonson, Volpone; or, The Foxe (London, 1607), 5.10; cf. his The Devell is an Asse (London,1641), 5.8.

53 Jonson, Volpone, 5.10.54 Jonson, Devell, 5.8.55 For a detailed analysis of the extrascriptural symptoms of various sixteenth-century demoniacs, see

Raiswell, Faking It, 3234; and Philip Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early ModernEngland (Cambridge, 2004), 2634.


to the extent that they could feel no pain even if you should plucke an eare fromthe head, or an arme from the bodie; peculiar swellings in their bodies to awonderfull huge bignes; marveilous sore heaving and lifting, as if their hearteswould burst; disfigurement of the face; a fearfull thrusting out of their tongueswith a most uglie distorting of their mouthes; blasphemy; delighting in filthie& unsavorie speeches; an inability to eat; and the stiffening of various parts oftheir bodies so they were inflexible, or verie hard to be bended.56 To Harsnett,the addition of this body of extrascriptural symptoms was absurd: why do thosewho concern themselves with demoniacs not form their diagnosis on the basis ofsymptoms with biblical precedent that are contrary to naturelike breakingchains?57 To an anonymous defender of John Darrel, the controversial Puritanexorcist of the 1580s and 1590s, the situation was precisely the reverse: God hadincreased the number of signs of possession because most of those fixed by scripturewere too easy to simulate.58

Yet the expansion of the corpus of symptoms requisite to possession is highlysignificant, for it underscores its profoundly dynamic construction and the socialnature of diagnosis. Far from being a particular enactment of a series of fixedbehaviors bounded by the parameters defined by scripture, the content of possessionwas progressively renegotiated through a mutually informing dynamic betweenthe would-be demoniac and his or her audience. To be sure, once the demoniacscondition was identified, he or she was expected to manifest certain signs andparticular behaviors. That is to say, the act of diagnosis situated the demoniacwithin a culturally authored script that structured his or her subsequent behaviorand suggested a symptomology that could be read as diagnostic of his or her innercondition. But with the fact of possession proven in the mind of the demoniacsspectators through the process of diagnosis, were he or she to stray beyond thebounds of the script and to step outside what was commonly perceived to be theappropriate manifestation or progression of the condition, at the prompting ofthe audience, certain popularly sanctioned tests might be initiated in order to bringthe would-be demoniac back into character, thereby resituating the particulars ofthe performance within the context of the broader discourse of possession.59 Whileit is impossible to prove, it is quite likely that some of the godly who foundthemselves suffering from the onset of a sudden and inexplicable ailment trawledtheir conscience for signs of the intervention of the devil and engaged in ananalogous dialogue with their bodies. This caused them to reframe their whollyreal physical afflictions into the context of possession, with the result that they beganincreasingly to manifest the requisite pathology of the condition. Certainly, Gifford

56 George More, A True Discourse concerning the Certaine Possession and Dispossessio[n] of 7 Persons(London, 1600), 4247.

57 See H[arsnett], Discovery, 33.58 Anon., Breife Narration, sigs. BiiiBiiiv.59 A particularly telling example of this concerns the possession of Helen Fairfax, who claimed to

have seen a vision of God in the course of one of her fits. At this, her family tried to convince her thatwhat she had seen was actually an illusion of the devil. Accordingly, when the same vision recurredfour days later, horns obligingly sprouted from the figures head. E. Fairfax, Daemonologia, ed.W. Grainge (Harrogate, 1882), 6264. As Johnstone argues in the context of the experiential demonismof the godly, the notion of a personal communication from God was far more problematic than specialattention from the devil. Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, 140.


thought that this was sometimes the case, for he noted that if a man feareth heeis bewitched, it troubleth al the powers of his mind, and that distempereth hisbodie, maketh great alterations in it, and bringeth sundrie griefes.60 In this sense,then, the content of any diagnosed possession was a product of a series of ne-gotiations between demoniac and audience. The content of a possession is sociallycreated and, as such, reflects not a metaphysical core of beliefs but the specificbeliefs of the people involved in its performance and diagnosis at a specific instance.

That said, it is also clear that the content, pathology, and significance of possessionto both audience and demoniac were conditioned by the printed descriptions ofparticularly notorious or colorful cases that were common by the latter part ofthe sixteenth century. Indeed, some of these texts helped transform the fits andtrances of particular demoniacs into national events. Deacon and Walker, for in-stance, noted that while the controversy over the apparent possession of WilliamSommers had initially been confined just to the city of Nottingham, it soon becameso publikely reported in Print with rumors flying such that they doe mightilieover-runne the whole Realme.61 According to Harsnett, the possession even cameto form the subject of a popular ballad.62

A number of demoniacs had access to such accounts at crucial periods imme-diately prior to or during their afflictions, and they shaped their fitseither con-sciously or unconsciouslyto conform to these precedents. This is noticeable, forinstance, in the Sommers case. According to Sommerss confession, as reproducedby Harsnett, after he first began to throw his fits, Sommers was visited by Mr.Evans, a local curate, and his clerk, John Sherratt. According to Sommerss tes-timony, Sherratt spent much of his time with him describing the possession of theThrockmorton children in Huntington that had taken place a decade earlier andhaving a printed booke thereof, hee declared to M. Evans in my hearing, the mannerof the fits that M. Throgmortons [sic] children had. To this, Sommers addedsignificantly, I learned something more then I knew before.63 And when Sommersproceeded to recraft his possession along the lines of the books description, Evansand Sherratt summoned Mr. Aldridge, a local preacher, who being greatly afraidwhen he saw me in my fits, he gave it out for a certainty I was possessed.64 Thebook Sherratt produced was almost certainly the 1593 The most strange and ad-mirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys. Similarly, Brian Gunter, Annesfather and the architect of his daughters imposture, was accused of having thistext along with other bookes of lyke argument brought to his house so thatAnne might read or have them read to her and embellish her fits accordingly.65

To Sommers and Gunter, then, these texts served as epitomes of empirical datathat they could appropriate, with the whole functioning as a framework upon

60 Gifford, Dialogue, sig. G4.61 Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, sigs. A2, A8v.62 H[arsnett], Discovery, 119.63 Ibid., 97. Sommers was clearly literate. See ibid., 81, 82, 87.64 Ibid., 97.65 To the kinges moste excellent Ma[jes]ty, TNA: PRO, STAC 8 4/10, fol. 75. Among the other

books seems to have been an account of the youths reputedly possessed at Denham in 1585. SeeINTERROGATORIES to be ministered unto Brian Gunter, TNA: PRO, STAC 8 4/10, fol. 75.Sharpe notes that Brian Gunter also obtained a copy of one of the many accounts of Darrels activities.Sharpe, Anne Gunter, 7, 62.


which to plot the course of their putative afflictions. To their audiences, however,these texts functioned in precisely the opposite way, for they helped establish thenormative bounds of the discourse of possession against which particular possessionsshould be evaluated. Thus, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon possessions, the dynamicamong would-be demoniac, audience, and texts operated as a mutually authen-ticating hermeneutic circle: the symptoms manifested by the demoniac confirmedthe expectations of the audience, which were themselves a product of its membersencounters with the demonic both in person and on the page; thus conditioned,the expectations of the audience define the parameters under which particularpossessions could be enacted.

The collusion of demoniac, audience, and text also goes some way in explainingearly modern reconfiguring of possession as a species of popular witchcraft belief.This was not a product of its interaction with academic demonology, for theconstruction of learned witchcraft belief tended to focus upon the pact a witchwas believed to make with the devil, a feature that is absent from popular notionsof witchcraft until later.66 Instead, witch belief, as it developed in the context ofpopular culture, centered upon the problem of maleficiumthat is, the causingof physical injury or death of people or animals by occult means. In this respect,then, it accounted for physical misfortune and harm, making the apparently ran-dom vicissitudes of fate appear ordered and, more ominously, suggested a meansto redress them.

Because of this emphasis on the concrete and manifest harm done by witchesas opposed to their material or formal cause, there was in practice little distinctiondrawn between the effects of malevolent witchcraft and demonic possession.67

Although technically obsession and possession were different things, the ways theymanifested themselves in the body of the afflicted were identical: both resulted inillness and wasting. In popular discourse, the two categories of affliction wereconflated, with both classified as bewitchment.68 However, the construction ofthis identity served to reconfigure possession in a profound and dramatic waythrough the second half of the sixteenth century and make possession a species ofthe broader discourse associated with witchcraft belief, with sometimes deadlyconsequences.

Because English witches were generally thought to feed and nurture familiarswho performed malevolent and obsessive acts for them, these creatures becamestock characters in particular possessions and their narratives, often taking on therole of the demon as he subsisted outside the body of his victim. In many cases,these familiars were visible to the naked eye. But to witches hoping to bewitchwith impunity, their familiars had an awkwardand potentially lethaltendencyto identify their owners when placed under the duress of an attempted dispos-session. Ultimately, this is a notion that traces its pedigree back to scripture, whereChrist asked an unclean spirit his name (Mark 5:9). However, by the sixteenthcentury, this had developed into a doctrine that allowed the full-fledged inter-rogation of a possessing demon. While theologically this is rather dubious, for, asscripture makes clear, there is no truth in the devil (John 8:44), its proponents

66 James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Harlow, 2001), 4142.67 The distinctions are Scots. See Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of witchcraft (London, 1584), 472.68 See Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand Jury Men (London, 1627), 53.


argued that under such circumstances, a possessing demon was constrained by thepower of God to speak only the truth, with the result that his identification of hismistress could be accepted uncritically.69 Assimilated into possession, then, the de-moniacs identification of the witch responsible for his or her torments increasinglybecame something of a sine qua non in the enactment of possession.

This assimilation is apparent as early as the last quarter of the sixteenth century.In 1574, for instance, Rachael Pinders possessing demon was asked to identifythe witch who sent him into her, and he obligingly singled out a certain JoaneThorneton.70 More telling, however, is the case of Richard Mainy. Mainy was oneof the youths manipulated by a number of Jesuits in Denham into believing thathe was possessed so that he might be publicly exorcized. According to the testi-mony of Frauncis Williams, another of the victims of the scheme, in the courseof his fits Mainy exclaimed that a certain Goodwife White was responsible forsending the evil spirits that tormented Frauncis and her sister.71 Given that thesuccess of a fraud is contingent upon how well it conforms to popular expectations,that Mainyor the Jesuitssituated his counterfeit possession in the context ofwitch belief suggests that at the very least they were endeavoring to capitalize andexploit a current within popular epistemology. Had this nexus been an innovation,the possessions would not have been popularly construed as authentic, and fouror five thousand souls would not have been reconciled to the pope as a result ofseeing or hearing about their public exorcism.72

Predictably, once possession was linked to witch belief, witches were found lurkingbehind the torments of almost every demoniac, with the identification of the witchcomprising a pivotal moment in the demonic fit. All of the demoniacs to whomDarrel ministered, for instance, were able to name the witch apparently culpablefor their torments.73 Sommers went further; although he himself claimed to havebeen possessed by a demon sent by a woman of Derbyshireor, in another ac-count, by a woman of Worcestershirehe declared that he had had visions ofseven hitherto unknown witches otherwise unconnected to his possession. On hiswordor that of his demonthese men and women were jailed while the mayorof Nottingham made inquiries throughout the town for evidence against them.74

While the identification of the tormenting witch was an integral component ofthe enactment of a possession, the idea was also sufficiently entrenched withinpossession discourse that the ability of the demoniac to name the architect of hisor her suffering was popularly construed as an integral component of the con-ditions diagnosis. For his part, Brian Gunter sought to capitalize on this fact inforcing his daughter to feign possession, for the goal of the imposture was toaccuse certain local women of witchcraft, bringing them in peril of their lives. Inmany respects, it was the perception that this was a crucial element in the socialdiagnosis of possession that was behind the collapse of the Malpas imposture.According to Katherens testimony, she and her grandparents orchestrated their

69 See Boy of Bilson (London, 1622), 31.70 Disclosing of a Late Counterfeyted Possession (London, 1574), sig. B1v.71 Harsnett, Declaration, 224.72 Ibid., 154.73 John Darrel provides a full list of these in his A Detection of that Sinnful, Shamful, Lying, and

Ridiculous Discours, of Samuel Harshnet (London, 1600), 10910.74 H[arsnett], Discovery, 102, 14142.


scheme in order to capitalize on their neighbors charity. While the family hadonly a very limited success in this capacity, despite the many persons of qualitywho visited Katheren, they worked hard to try to situate her simulated tormentswithin the context of their comprehension of possession.75 Accordingly, Katherenhad little choice but to name the witch responsible for her fits and trances, eventhough doing so brought the imposture to the attention of the authorities, even-tually even to the king, and caused the whole charade to collapse.76

The assimilation of possession into witch belief also meant that the various teststhat were popularly used to identify witches could likewise be reconfigured toestablish the link between an apparent demoniac and his or her tormentor. Butthe effect of these tests on a demoniac as they were applied to the body of anaccused witch were, of course, double, for establishing the occult link betweenthe two parties not only helped to confirm the diagnosis of the apparent possessionin the minds of those who saw him or her but also proved the culpability of thewitch. After Alice Gooderidge was identified as the architect of Thomas Darlingspossession, for instance, she was brought to his chamber, in which Darling im-mediately fell into a marvellous sore fit.77 Some of those present then persuadedthe boy to scratch the witch, a test that, the author of the pamphlet account ofthe possession declared, was commonly received as an approved meanes to discrye witch, and procure ease to the bewitched.78 Likewise, once the Throckmortonchildren settled upon Mother Samuel as the witch responsible for their torments,their spirits were calmed and their fits subsided when they found themselves inthe presence of the unfortunate old croneindeed, this test was tried some twentytimes in the space of an hour, each time with the same effect.79

But this assimilation had another important effect on the content of particularpossessions, for the dynamic believed to underlie specific cases was increasinglyreshaped by popular belief to conform to the model proper to English witchcraftaccusations more generally. In particular, possession came frequently to be con-structed around the so-called charity refused model that sees witchcraft as aresponse to a perceived social slight. In this model, an economically vulnerablemember of a community is refused a modicum of charity from her neighbor andleaves, muttering ominously. When later some misfortune befalls the neighbor,she situates it in the context of this speech and construes it as a consequence ofwitchcraft.80 While classically this model is associated with maleficium, in practicethe link between possession and witchcraft meant that it was also deployed to accountfor the torments of a demoniac. Joan Jordens possession, for instance, was deemeda consequence of the fact that she had refused to give Doll Barthram some of her

75 The ioynt and severall annsweres of Thomas Saunders [and] Katherine Malpas thelder, TNA:PRO, STAC 8 32/13, fol. 16.

76 Ibid. Cf. Examinat[i]o . . . Attornat[us], STAC 8 32/13, fol. 12 and The severall answeresof Elizabeth Sanders, STAC 8 32/13, fol. 17. See also Raiswell, Faking It, 4245.

77 The most wonderfull and true storie, 5.78 Ibid., 6.79 The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys (London, 1593), sigs.

E2E2v.80 See George Gifford, Discourse of the subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches (London, 1587), sigs.

G4G4v; cf. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (New York, 1970), 16876.


masters goods.81 Similarly, Samuel Pacy implied that his daughters possession wascaused after Amy Duny had been refused herrings at his door three times in asingle day; on the final occasion, Amy went away grumbling, at which his daughterwas overtaken by a series of violent fits that left her Shreeking out in a mostdreadful manner like unto a Whelp.82

In his analysis of late Tudor and early Stuart witchcraft cases in Essex, AlanMacfarlane points out that the charity refused model of witch accusations recastthe person who had breached neighborly norms into the role of victim, therebyfreeing her from guilt.83 The situation in terms of possession, however, is slightlydifferent. In order to avoid Manichaeism, most authorities were at pains to stressthat the devil must be an instrument of God.84 But if this is the case, then possessioncan only occur with the explicit approval of the Lord. And, as the Lord is just,this means that such an affliction must be warranted. Therefore, possession mustbe construed as a sign of egregious sin on the part of the demoniac and dispos-session an impious attempt to flout divine justice. However, adding a witch to theequation recasts the demoniac as a victim, a creature to whom the appropriatereaction is empathy. It is no longer the demoniac who is responsible for his orher condition; rather, it is a consequence of the action of a witch. In this respect,the introduction of a witch frees both God and the demoniac from culpability,transferring the formal cause of the affliction to the witch.

Nevertheless, the kind of witch who was invariably implicated in possession casestended to be the weather-beaten old crone of popular stereotype, a woman at theeconomic and social fringes of society, often with a general reputation for witchery.Alice Gooderidge, for instance, was typical: she was about sixty and already heldin great suspition of manie to bee a daper in those divellish practises, even beforeThomas Darling leveled his accusations against her. Her position was not helpedby the fact that her mother had been before the Justice of the Peace on suspicionof witchcraft offenses four or five times.85 Likewise, Elizabeth Gregory had areputation as a notorious scold, a vile curser, and a blasphemer even before shewas implicated by Anne Gunter, while Agnes Pepwell, another of the witchesGunter accused, was widely reputed among her neighbors to be the kind of womanwho could cause such an affliction.86

In this sense, possession was fed and nurtured by popular anxieties about witch-craft. Indeed, the very fact that so many witches inhabited the shadows and bywaysof every town and village, as the character of Samuel in Giffords Dialogue argued,tended to increase the likelihood that any particular apparent possession might bedeemed authentic.87 The result, as Samuel frets, is a demonized landscape intowhich any particular thing could be subsumed and recast as an object of fear:When I goe but into my closes, I am afraide, for I see nowe and then a Hare;

81 Triall of Maist[er] Dorrell (London, 1599), 92.82 Anon., A Tryal of Witches at the Assizes held at Bury St. Edmunds (London, 1682), 16.83 Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 174.84 See, e.g., Gifford, Dialogue, 2021.85 See The most wonderfull and true storie, 4, 7.86 Sharpe, Anne Gunter, 48, 52, 192. See also The severall Annsweres of Brian Gunter gent[leman]

one of the defend[an]tes to the Informat[i]on of Sir Edward Coke knight the kinges Ma[jes]tes Atturneygen[er]all, TNA: PRO, STAC 8 4/10, fol. 74.

87 Gifford, Dialogue, sig. A4v.


which my conscience giveth me is a witch, or some witches spirite, shee starethso uppon me. And sometime I see an ugly weasell runne through my yard, andthere is a foule great catte sometimes in my Barne, which I have no liking unto.88

Samuels position may be overanxious, but the real empirical evidence of demonicintervention that people saw in the worldthrough the machinations of witchesand in their consciencereadily caused many to see traces of the devils action inthe most mundane phenomena. Reasoning from the premise of the power andimmediacy of the devil and the concomitant notion of the relative distance ofhumanity from God, many of the godly were quite ready to subsume the peculiarbehavior of various youths they saw into the discourse of possession. Contemporarieswere well aware of this problem. As the plaine Countrey Minister Richard Ber-nard counseled his would-be grand jurymen in 1627, when people come to seesuch supposed to be possessed by a Divell or Divels; some are filled with fancyfullimaginations, some are possessed with feare; so as they at first time on a sudden,thinke they heare and see more then they doe, and so make very strange relationswithout truth, if they take not time, & come againe, and againe, to see and considerwith judgment, and with mature deliberation such deceiveable resemblances.89

Bernards advice aside, to the godly the danger in viewing the things of the worldlay not in being too ready to see the hand of the devil at work; it lay in beinglulled into complacency.

While it is enacted, then, possession subsumed into the context of witch belieftends both to strengthen the hermeneutic circle and to broaden its circumference.Now, instead of hinging upon the dynamic among demoniac, audience, and text,the circle turns upon a mutually reinforcing dynamic between the demon andwitch: the testimony of the possessing demon garnered from the mouth of hisvictim confirmed and compounded popular anxieties about certain local womencommonly construed to be witches; the subsequent examination of these accusedwitches then authenticated the veracity of the original diagnosis. Removed fromthe fallible realm of human interaction and recast into that of the preternatural,this new circle sees apparent possessions function as particular pieces of empiricaldata that point to the reality of witchcraft, while the reality of witchcraft serves asa universal premise from which the authenticity of a particular case of possessioncan readily be deduced. In this sense, then, witchcraft discourse becomes integralto the diagnosis of possession.

But this linking of possession and witchcraft had a further important consequence,for it entwined possession and its diagnosis with the law. While, under the 1563witchcraft statute, murder by occult means was punishable by death, bewitchmentand maleficium resulted only in one years imprisonment upon first offense. Nev-ertheless, the fact that possession was entangled in the vines of the law by virtueof its association with witchcraft had at least three significant and far-reachingconsequences. First, one or more apparent possessions could serve as tangible,physical evidence at law against an accused witch. Second, in the event of a con-viction against the witch, the authenticity of the possession would become anunassailable legal fact. And third, if legal authorities could root out

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