The Devil Nun

Təsvir

The mass demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of Loudon in1633–40is among the most famous (or infamous) episodes in the history of diabolic possession and witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe. Conventual possessions, even more than cases of possessions among the laity, demonstrated the difficulties of discerning between divine and diabolic spirits, between truth and fraud, and between licit and illicit spiritual practices. It was in con-vents, more than in any other space, that women pursued the new spiritual exercises and techniques that characterized interiorized contemplation in all its different configurations: passive, Jesuit, Teresian, Salesian, Theatine, and so on. It was therefore in convents that the growing anxiety concerning unauthorized practices, with its accompanying fears of diabolic illusions and temptations, came to the fore. Convents were gendered spaces, and women, as we have seen repeatedly, were regularly assumed to be deceived and/or deceivers, to mistake the diabolic for the divine, and to pursue spiritual exercises above their mental and biological capacities. Convents, more than other spaces, became, by the second half of the sixteenth century, sites of contention and confusion. They also became sites of ecclesiastical (male) interventions, when male clerics, be they exor-cists or Inquisitors, pondered the nature and reliability of possessions.