The Loudun Scandal of 1634 - Elizabeth Harper - Zoom

Sorcery, Possession, and Hysteria: The Loudun Scandal of 1634

On August 18th, 1634, Father Urban Grandier, a priest in Loudun, France, was tortured and burned alive for sorcery. The proof of his guilt was eleven nuns who were possessed by the devil and had begun levitating, stripping their clothes off, and vomiting demonic pacts. Grandier was charged by the first to be possessed, the young Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels. She named him sight-unseen; as a cloistered nun she had no first-hand knowledge of him.

There seems to be a limitless appetite for the history of sorcery in Loudun. The case inspired dozens of non-fiction books, a “non-fiction novel” by Aldous Huxley, a play, philosophical works by Michel Foucault, and the still-censored X-rated film by Ken Russell. At the heart of each of these lies the same question: Why did Jeanne do it? I ask a different question: Why do we tell this story? There are many nearly identical contemporaneous cases, yet the story of Jeanne and Grandier continues to speak to us about power, gender, sex, religion, and justice today.

Bio:

Elizabeth Harper is independent researcher on Catholicism and saints. Her essays and photographs have appeared in Hazlitt, Lapam’s Quarterly, the LA Review of Books, Image Journal, Death: A Graveside Companion, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalogue, The Body in Color. Her essay, “The Cult of the Beheaded” was a notable selection in Best American Essays. She has spoken at venues such as Cornell University and as part of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Lecture series at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Assistant Professor of Lighting Design at the University of Southern California.

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Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

A still from Kawalerowicz’s film, “Mère Jeanne des Anges” (1961)

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