Raiswell, Dendle, Demon possession in anglo saxon and early modern england

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Journal of British Studies 47 (October 2008): 738–767
䉷 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 Early

Modern England: Continuity and Evolution

in Social Context

Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle

ometime between around 687 and 700, a distraught father brought his
raving son, in a wagon, to the island of Lindisfarne, where the holy relics
of 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 bouts
of screaming, weeping, and self-mutilation. A priest named Tydi had been unable
to put the demon to flight, so he advised the father to transport his son to the
relics. At that point, “Many people despaired of being able to secure any remedy
for the miserable boy, but a certain man of good and pure faith who was moved
to pity, placing his trust in God and entreating the help of St. Cuthbert, blessed
some holy water and sprinkled in it some dirt from the ditch in which had been
poured the bath water of the body of our holy bishop after his death. Once the
boy tried the holy water, he desisted from his babbling that night.”

Almost a thousand years later, an Essex teenager named Katheren Malpas

was likewise adjudged to be sorely afflicted by demons. According to the
testimony her grandparents gave in Star Chamber, Katheren’s torments began
on Candlemas Eve, 1621, presaged by several bouts of hideous screaming
that left her lame. Over the subsequent months, Katheren often appeared to
succumb to terrible fits that seemed all the more horrifying to those who
saw 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-century
English 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. He

works on early medieval demonology, especially as articulated in the literature, medicine, and liturgy
of Anglo-Saxon England.

Anon., Vita Cuthberti, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. Bertram Colgrave (New York, 1969),

4.15. All translations are those of the authors.

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pletely insensible. According to her mother, Katheren’s condition was such
that she

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

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

Although separated by almost a millennium, these two cases struck contem-

poraries as terrifying, in part at least because they participated in a venerable
discourse about possession, whose metaphysical reality was firmly anchored in the
New Testament.

According to the account in Mark’s gospel, demoniacs would

most typically manifest their appalling malady through a course of strange and
violent 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 sorely
afflicted by their possessors that they were moved to suicide, attempting to put an
end to their torments by throwing themselves into fire or water (Mark 9:17–29).
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 8:27–33). Finally,
the possessed were often able to exhibit preternatural knowledge: both the Gadarene
and the Capernaum demoniacs (Mark 1:24; cf. Luke 4:33–34; Matt. 8:29; Luke 8:
28) were able unprompted to recognize Christ’s divinity. Given its fundamental
position in premodern Christian cultures, in outlining the basic symptoms and pa-
thology diagnostic of demon possession, scripture provided English people with a
seemingly secure and unambiguous explanatory category that could be deployed to
account 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 in
particular, came to diverge significantly over the subsequent centuries from the
scriptural archetype. Consequently, possession cannot be construed as a physical
manifestation of a particular strand of biblicism, nor can it be treated as a static
ontological category with a fixed and stable meaning. Certainly, these biblically
adduced symptoms helped define the parameters within which premodern pos-
sessions were enacted and suggested the terms under which their remedies might
be sought. However, historians of medicine have long emphasized the importance
of the link between affliction and the social and cultural lens through which a

“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.

We use “possession” to denote the experience of an individual; possession is the general explanatory

category against which the behavior of an individual is evaluated in order to constitute a diagnosis.

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patient’s ailment is perceived. For them, disease is not just a biological event, a
cluster of symptoms or behaviors that manifest themselves nastily on the body of
an unfortunate. Rather, it has an important social component, since those features
of a condition that are deemed symptoms, the significance with which they are
invested, and the relationships posited to exist between them are a result of a
process of rationalization that is a function of the beliefs and values of the culture
inhabited by those deemed socially competent to effect a diagnosis.

In this context,

as a product of a continuing series of negotiations between the putative demoniac
and those who saw him or her, instances of possession were inextricably bound
up with the wider intellectual, social, and political discourses through which such
instances were viewed. These discourses as they are constructed historically map
out the space where possession has explanatory power, but by subsuming the par-
ticular symptoms of an apparent possession into the resultant epistemological
frame, they also help fix the significance of the case and, in so doing, translate it
into culturally significant information. As the relationship between these discourses
is renegotiated over successive historical moments and the location of possession
within 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 as
constituting possession, this model was expanded and adapted over time to embody
and reflect the cultural priorities of the age.

As a cultural product, particular instances of apparent possession can serve as

important microhistorical sites for the recovery of popular and learned mentalite´.
In recent years, there have been a few studies dealing with cases of demonic
possession based heavily upon contemporary legal records. These have gone some
way in reconstructing the intellectual apparatus and social dynamics that colluded
in manufacturing the perception of possession within a particular historical and
social context.

This present study, however, aims to take a much broader chro-

nological sweep in order to examine the idea and construction of possession in one
place at two distinct and historically disparate moments: Anglo-Saxon and early
modern England. Certainly, comparing two cross sections cut laterally through
the fabric of history poses some methodological difficulties. In the first place, the
very different nature of the extant historical record in these two periods makes
comparisons problematic. The material that survives for the Anglo-Saxon period
is decidedly limited due to low literacy and limited text production; by contrast,
the early modern period is copiously documented. But second, where Anglo-Saxon
records exist, they have no immediate analogue in terms of either form or genre
in the later period. The sources in both periods were written in different contexts
and 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 period
as a discrete unit, with its own particular types of evidence proper to it, it should

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 (New
Brunswick, NJ, 1992), xiii–xix.

The most important of these is James Sharpe, Bewitching of Anne Gunter (New York, 2001). But

see also Richard Raiswell, “Faking It: A Case of Counterfeit Possession in the Reign of James I,”
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Re´forme 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 29–48.

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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 comparison

between 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 idolatrous
competitor. The ability to diagnose possession and treat it is a deeply contested
issue because of its potential propaganda value to the proponents of the various
groups competing for religious ascendancy. Moreover, precisely because of its
contested nature, both moments endeavor to anchor possession in contemporary
constructions of authority—scriptural, textual, empirical, hierarchical, and paro-
chial—co-opting them to underscore the religious and ideological position of those
recording 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 in
its relationship to contemporary conceptions of witchcraft. In this respect, despite
the continuous tendency in both periods to situate apparent instances of possession
within the context of the scriptural paradigm, in practice possession proved far from
a category of unambiguous significance. Not only did the core of diagnostic symp-
toms differ radically during these two historical moments, but so too did the
explanatory power of the concept. Indeed, what becomes clear in this present
study is that as an ontological category for a body of symptoms and behaviors,
possession proved distinctly malleable and decidedly polysemous, shifting in response
to 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 those
few documents, promulgated almost exclusively within monastic scriptoria, that
have survived through the centuries. These sources offer tantalizing glimpses into
often alien worldviews, from which coherent pictures can be only tentatively and
speculatively 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 demonic
possession of a person and disease agents such as worms, the sudden stabbing or
internal pains they dubbed elf-shot, poisons, or other putative pathogens: at some
level, all can be construed as external assaults and forms of the “devil’s tribulations”
(deofles costunga). As external assaults, they can be expelled through some form
of adjuration. Indeed, some, like the late tenth- or early eleventh-century Lacnunga
book, suggest the possibility of a purgative capable of putting any sort of unpleasant
possessing agent to flight. Thoroughly blending an array of old pagan elements
with a series of Christian motifs, the book’s “Nine Herbs Charm” invokes the
herb sti

e as a universal that could expel almost any sort of demonically orchestrated

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affliction: “It dashes against poison, it expels evil things; it casts out poison. This
is the herb that fought against the worm. It is powerful against poison; it is powerful
against the ‘on-flyer’; it is powerful against the malignant things that fare through-
out the land.”

Another verse charm against elf-shot in the same collection directly

addresses the “shot” to be expelled and commands: “Out, little spear!”

These

adjurations are not conceptually distinct from the darts of demons protected against
by the Lorica of Gildas: “That the foul demons may not fling their darts into my
sides, as they so often do.”

In this sense, Anglo-Saxon nosology seems to have

built upon that of first-century Palestine, albeit, as it was known to them, refracted
through the lens of scripture. Christ reifies diseases as sentient beings, casting them
out largely without distinction: for instance, Luke describes him as “rebuking”
the spirit in the Capernaum demoniac (“a man who had the spirit of an unclean
demon”) with the same word (

␧p␧timhj␧n) used to describe him “rebuking” a

fever to depart and “rebuking” the wind to calm.

Although possession was a category broadly applied to account for many different

sorts of affliction in this period, it is difficult to reconstruct the precise nature and
extent 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 given
saint’s tomb, with demoniacs sometimes mentioned along with those suffering
from other infirmities. It is not possible, however, to substantiate these cursory
references by means of independent records—there are not yet the meticulously
compiled registries and miracle lists such as those later kept at popular healing
shrines and already starting to appear on the continent.

In fact, given the highly

stylized nature of hagiography as a genre, it is not clear whether such remarks can
be taken as literal descriptions or whether they should, more cautiously, be con-
sidered static literary tropes, consciously crafted to mirror the accounts of the
afflicted furnished by scripture and by continental models.

The Anglo-Saxon understanding of the Bible was in essence “processed”: it was

conditioned largely by the early Christian tradition of commentary literature and
homilies and by a host of apocryphal narratives that made their way very early
into a number of monastic book collections. In this respect, works by writers such
as Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, Gregory the Great, Venantius Fortunatus, and other
continental authorities were just as influential on the Anglo-Saxon understanding
of possession as the letter of the Bible itself. The filters through which Christianity
was bequeathed to the Anglo-Saxons can be seen in some of the works most
commonly appearing in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts: for instance, Augustine’s com-

J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (Oxford, 1952), 152. The

identification of sti

e is unclear. It might be nettle. “On-flyer” is perhaps some infectious disease.

Ibid., 174.

Ibid., 136.

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 Mark’s narrative, which has no such direct
rebuke: “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began
to serve them.” Mark 1:13; Graham Twelftree, Jesus the Exorcist (Peabody, MA, 1993), 138; see also
Todd Klutz, The Exorcism Stories in Luke-Acts: A Sociostylistic Reading (Cambridge, 2004), 75–77.

For these, see Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1977;

repr., London, 1995).

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mentaries on the Psalms and on the Gospel of John; Gregory’s Homilies on the
Gospels, Morals on the Book of Job, and Pastoral Care; Isidore’s Etymologies and
Synonyms; and the homilies of Paul the Deacon. Through such an authority as
Isidore, for example, Anglo-Saxons learned that the demons once enjoyed “heav-
enly bodies” but that after their fall from heaven they were turned into “aerial”
beings—not of pure air, but of thick or murky air, which would serve as a prison
to them until the time of the Second Coming.

This extrabiblical conceptualization

was very influential in determining how demons were portrayed in Anglo-Saxon
art, theology, and homiletics.

So great is the literary dependence on continental forerunners that the vast

majority of references in the Anglo-Saxon documentary record that relate to demon
possession or exorcism are simply retellings of events that happened not in England
but on the continent—and usually, a number of centuries earlier. Thus, the prolific
homilist and hagiographer Ælfric relates lively stories, such as that of three work-
men becoming possessed in his Passion of St. Maur and that of Apollinaris casting
a demon out of a nobleman’s wife in the Passion of St. Apollinaris, but here he
is simply translating into English the stories he finds in his source texts.

When

these accounts of possessions and exorcisms that occurred in other times and places
are subtracted from the documentary corpus, the pool of diagnosed cases of pos-
session in Anglo-Saxon England shrinks considerably. In fact, there are only nine
references to cases of demon possession for the entire Anglo-Saxon period that
provide 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 from

either 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 there
is an increase in literary activity overall in that time and place, a movement generally
dubbed the Northumbrian Renaissance, but it is significant that there is almost
no mention of native demon possession in subsequent periods of Anglo-Saxon
literary activity. For instance, there is no mention of possession in the literary,
historical, and pastoral writings promulgated under Alfred in the ninth century or
under the prolific monastic reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed,
this early window of exorcism activity is the only one from pre-Conquest England
that can be discussed in any detail and the only one that can be situated into a
particular cultural milieu.

The nine cases in table 1 in which demon possession is diagnosed adhere closely

to a fairly specific profile, and the literary contexts in which they appear reveal a
small range of recurring themes and anxieties. This can offer a fairly safe idea, if
not of the extent to which possession and exorcism played a role in the conversion
of the countryside or in the ongoing life and experiences of Anglo-Saxons, at least
of the construction of demon possession as an ontological category in the minds of
contemporary authors. While the Anglo-Saxon cases built on continental models,
they differ from them in several important respects: Jerome, for instance, refers

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

316A).

Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1, ed. Walter Skeat (London, 1881), 158, 476.

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to demoniacs levitating in the air; Gregory of Tours mentions people who are
possessed by multiple demons as well as a single demon possessing multiple people;
and Einhard has a possessed German girl speaking in Latin, although she could
not have known any. In continental cases like these, demoniacs dance through the
church, announce the approach of invading armies, and exit the demoniacs in the
shapes 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 those

described in scripture, closely mimic a handful of well-known neurological and
muscle-control disorders, such as epilepsy. In the anonymous Life of Cuthbert (ca.
699–705), Hildmær’s wife gnashes her teeth and lets out tearful groans.

She is

“shamefully broken, dirty with her own spittle.”

Bede’s account of the visitor

to Bardney Abbey in his Ecclesiastical History (731) likewise portrays a sufferer
“crying out, gnashing his teeth, foaming at the mouth, and flinging his limbs
about.”

The erratic and uncontrollable muscle motion is apparently the condi-

tion’s most salient characteristic: when he is cured, Bede relates, he “drew all his
limbs back in peacefully.”

Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Wilfrid (ca. 710–20) reports

that Queen Eorminburh is suddenly taken with some sort of demon, which man-
ifests in all her limbs being contracted and folded together.

Finally, in Felix of

Crowland’s Life of Guthlac (ca. 730–40), a youth named Hwætred is possessed
by a wretched spirit, which results in compulsive self-mutilation: he “lacerated his
own limbs with wood, iron, and with his own nails and teeth as much as he
could.”

He bites and strikes at anyone else who comes close also, even killing

three people with an axe, which suggests that what is being described is a transient
psychotic episode. Such destructive behavior also appears in the anonymous Life
of Cuthbert, in which a man’s son is “wearied by a demon” because he screams
out, weeps, and mutilates his own body.

He fills many with horror at the sound

of his shouting and crying out.

The broad profile of physical descriptors, then,

concerning the “raving” of these demoniacs, aligns them with neuropathological
conditions of limb paralysis or convulsions, sporadic fits, stroke, compulsive self-
mutilation, or random, violent out-lashes.

Since ancient times, of course, such convulsive disorders—inexplicable and

frightening to onlookers in premodern societies—have been explained in cultures
worldwide through recourse to indwelling demons. It is these neurological con-
ditions, in fact, that compose possession more generally; that is, in societies in which
possession behavior is widespread and is used to express a broad range of individual,
social, religious, and political dissatisfactions, demoniacs still return to the baseline
physiological core of immediate behaviors such as falling, convulsing, foaming at

Anon., Vita Cuthberti, 2.8.

Ibid.

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People,

ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 3.11.

Ibid.

Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), chap. 39.

Felix of Crowland, Vita Guthlaci, in Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge,

1956), chap. 41.

Anon., Vita Cuthberti, 4.15.

Ibid.

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

That said, the pathology of some Anglo-Saxon cases, as they are described in

the sources, does sometimes diverge in some important respects from scriptural
models. Scripture, for instance, has Christ cast out demons by means of the spirit
or finger of God (Matt. 12:28; cf. Luke 11:20). Bede, however, states that the
possessed often cannot be exorcized properly until they openly confess:

In our time the priests, who know how to cast out demons through the grace [or
“gift”] of exorcism, usually maintain that patients cannot be cured unless they openly
reveal through confession everything they endured from the evil spirits in visions,
sounds, tastes, tactile sensations, or through any senses whatsoever either physically
or mentally—especially when, appearing to men as women or to women dressed as
men (which demons the Gauls call Dusi), they pretend to desire sexual intercourse
with them and (an unspeakable marvel for an incorporeal spirit!) to consummate with
them in the flesh. And they advise that the demon’s name—that by which he says he
is known—and 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 testimony

of many people that a certain priest in my vicinity related that he began to cure a
certain holy woman from a demon, but as long as the matter lay concealed, there
was nothing he could do for her. When she confessed what phantasm was troubling
her, however, he quickly drove it out through prayers and other necessary kinds of
purifications, and, applying consecrated salt with medical zeal, he cured the woman’s
body from the ulcers that had been brought about by the demon’s influence.

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 which
the 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 suggests
that Anglo-Saxon modes of dispossession were becoming reconfigured to more
closely mirror the dynamic between patient and exorcist depicted in continental
exorcism narratives. Furthermore, there are literary uses of possession unknown
in scripture: in Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Wilfrid, the queen is seized with a
demon as direct punishment for King Ecgfrith’s imprisonment of Wilfrid. As soon
as the king has the bishop released, the queen is cured. Possession appears here
as 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 who
wrote of possession and its remedy, at least, seem to have appropriated elements
from the broader intellectual culture they inhabited to reconfigure elements of
possession and exorcism in such a way as to cause them to see both diagnosis and
remedy as dynamic processes. Reworked under the weight of these models, the
person of the demoniac seems to have been reconstrued to take an active part in

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

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the process of treatment. What seems to be emerging here, then, is a hermeneutic
circle. In one hemisphere, the symptoms manifested by the demoniac situate her
condition within the category of possession as it is understood through the filter
of a host of authorities. In the other, the preconditioned expectations of those
who treat the demoniac define the parameters under which particular possessions
could be enacted by virtue of their role in diagnosis and treatment.

A significant facet of the recorded cases of demon possession for Anglo-Saxon

England is that, even though the narratives are recorded in ecclesiastical docu-
ments, particularly saints’ lives, priestly adjuration is not necessarily the weapon
of 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, it
was the relics of Cuthbert that proved effective.

Bede likewise reports that the

relics of Oswald cure the demoniac, after the priest’s exorcisms fail; “the priest
recited exorcisms and did everything he could to assuage the miserable man’s
ravings. However hard he tried, though, he was unable to make any headway.”

As J. M. Wallace-Hadrill notes, the failure of formal exorcism “was a serious matter
at a time when the Church had to demonstrate the efficacy of its procedures to
a semi-pagan population.”

Although the corpus of possession cases is admittedly

limited, this suggests that the geography of power in the Anglo-Saxon church was
still heterogeneous. Instead of curative power being construed as distributed ho-
mogeneously through the ecclesiastical hierarchy, it seems to have been popularly
invested at local sites, especially through charismatic individuals and (after their
deaths) the places associated with them. Over time, some of these sites would
become powerful ecclesiastical centers in their own right, while others would fade
into obscurity. The ability to draw demoniacs—and people with other illnesses—
became an increasingly important factor in a site’s economic success, especially
after 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, for

it was the meeting point of the two distinct missionary campaigns in England: the
Irish, 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 resisted
Christian conversion longer than other areas while they were under Roman oc-
cupation, and their modes of spirituality had blended with local Celtic paganism
differently. Thus, the region was still something of a battlefield between these three
competing worldviews.

And so, written within living memory of the conversion

of many pagan regions in England on one hand and the Synod of Whitby on the
other, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History at times reflects some of the anxieties of the
new Roman faith as it attempted to gain a solid foothold in the land. Bede paints
the Christianization of England in epic terms, with missionaries perpetually on the
verge of violent martyrdom, braving new regions to talk sense into benighted

Anon., Vita Cuthberti, 4.15.

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.11.

J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary

(Oxford, 1988), xxx, 104.

See John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), esp. 10–34.

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pagan kings and their entourages. The populace was steeped in traditions that
were hard to break: “Some, in their mortal hour, turning from the sacraments of
the faith in which they had been instructed, rushed to the fraudulent relief of
idolatry, as though they could fend off a blow from God the Maker by means of
incantations, amulets, or any other secrets of demonic craft.”

But in some respects

the Northumbrian church was poorly prepared to deal with these potential relapses
of the populace into paganism. Indeed, Bede wrote in a letter to Bishop Ecgbert
that many areas of Northumbria did not receive a priest’s visit for years at a time.

If priests were scarce, bishops—the principal ecclesiastical authorities for England
at the time—were 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. These

were holy individuals of humble backgrounds, close to the lower orders and often
outside metropolitan politics and the entrenching authority structures within the
church. Valorizing local saints as mediators allowed the nascent English church
to satisfy the need for spiritual guidance at the local level, through example and
through miraculous healings, without fully asking the populace to submit unques-
tioningly to a church that could potentially be perceived as foreign, aloof, and
bureaucratic—a 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 members
of the community who had fully accepted the new Roman faith and those who
had not. The act of confession, not yet a sacrament at this time but nonetheless
a powerful symbolic act of submission, served to gauge the trust local Anglo-
Saxons were willing to place in representatives of the church. Subjects were not
necessarily made to confess their own sins in this context, but rather to divulge
their private thoughts to the church representative and to participate openly in
the dialogue that invariably places the “confessor” in a dominant position. Thus,
in the anonymous Life of Cuthbert, Hildmær learns that he must confide in Cuth-
bert the true nature of his wife’s illness; he cannot hope for effective help so long
as he tries to keep anything hidden from the man of God. Bede also emphasizes
that exorcism will not work unless it is accompanied by true and full confession:
“Patients cannot be cured unless they openly reveal through confession everything
they endured from the evil spirits.”

As Bede retells the story of Hildmær’s wife

in the Ecclesiastical History, the man is afraid to confide in Cuthbert for fear that
the holy man will think his wife is not a good Christian: “He was afraid that when
Cuthbert found her possessed, he would begin to suspect that she had only served
God with feigned rather than whole faith.”

The obstinate King Ceolred of Mercia

is portrayed by Boniface as dying in his demonic ravings, possessed by a spirit,
“without penance or confession.”

In this light, by linking dispossession with the

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.27.

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

Plummer (Oxford, 1896), 140.

Bede, In Lucae Evangelium expositio, 92, col. 438B.

Bede, Vita Cuthberti, chap. 15, in Colgrave, Two Lives.

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.

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act of confession in the Roman manner, possession becomes consistently associated
with 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 associated
with the chance of a successful cure.

While linking confession and dispossession helped the Roman Church to deepen

its toehold in the north, it also faced a strong challenge to its power over the
wider issue of the practice of the adjuration of other physical afflictions. With
disease configured as a possessing agent with a particular profile, the new church
clashed with other, much older curative practices. To local populations, such in-
herited remedies were likely not construed in particularly religious terms and could
easily be reworked to blend Christian “demon” constructs with native “elves” or
“poisons” and to incorporate holy water and Pater nosters on the one hand with
iron taboos and lore regarding the four cardinal points on the other. Indeed, from
the point of view of a supplicant seeking relief from whatever authority figures
were closest at hand, whether an “exorcism” of a demon or illness came from a
local healer using herbs and incantations or whether it came from a priest using
more ecclesiastically sanctioned means, such as formal exorcism, probably meant
very little. They may have found themselves caught in a clash between different
sorts of specialized knowledge and different sorts of specialized healers: traditional
healers who would have dealt with illness-possession and clerical healers whose
understanding came from continental textual traditions. Possession is one site
where the tension between the two could be played out—played out physically
between the practitioners but also played out by proxy as a battle for authority
and allegiance in the countryside. Village priests—many of them only semiliterate
in Latin, having memorized most of their necessary services, and not in regular,
meaningful contact with ecclesiastical centers—would probably have shared many
of the hybrid beliefs of their friends and neighbors.

But to Anglo-Saxon reformers

of the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, such folkloric practices were highly
suspicious and struck them as too reliant on pre-Christian beliefs and customs:
increasingly, they came to configure such popular remedies and adjurations as
witchcraft.

It is in this context that clerical writers, often relying on continental models for

their penitential, legal, and canon codes, vilified what they considered superstitious
customs and heathenish practices. Unfortunately, given the highly generic nature
of the sources, it is very difficult to determine, for the most part, to what extent
any given practice mentioned represented a living tradition in Anglo-Saxon En-
gland or to what extent clerics were rather perpetuating fossilized passages in a
literary tradition.

Alfred’s ninth-century laws, following Exodus 22:18, call for

the death of sorcerers: “Those women who habitually associate with spell-casters
and illusionists and witches, do not let them live.”

In the late tenth and eleventh

centuries, law codes such as 6 Æthelred (chap. 7) and 2 Cnut (chap. 4) call for

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

1996), 39.

See Audrey L. Meaney, “‘And we forbeodað eornostlice ælcne hæðenscipe’: Wulfstan and Late

Anglo-Saxon and North ‘Heathenism,’” in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The Proceedings of the Second
Alcuin Conference, ed. Matthew Townend (Turnhout, 2004), 461–500.

Alfred, Introduction, sec. 30, in Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1, ed. F. Liebermann (1903;

repr., Aalen, 1960), 38.

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driving “witches or diviners” into exile.

But what is clear is that witchcraft is

inextricably woven in with conceptions of heathenism and idolatry here. The Old
English Penitential, for instance, warns against curing children with the use of
witchcraft, “because that is a great heathenism.”

Love phylacteries (such as plac-

ing something enchanted in someone’s food or drink to excite their affections)
are prohibited in the same penitential, and a gnomic verse found in MS Cotton
Tiberius B.i implies that such practices were sufficiently current to gain proverbial
status: “A woman, a virgin, seeks out her object of affection through secret skill
to secure him in marriage, if she does not care about her position among people.”

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 a
fresh injection of pagan beliefs there in the late ninth and tenth centuries, keeping
this tension alive in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical authorities. The two
principal roles that Ælfric ascribes to “witches” are healing and divining or sooth-
saying.

Audrey Meaney notes that these are relatively innocuous forms of witch-

craft; Ælfric does not make reference to harmful magic directed against a neighbor
or rival.

There appear to be remedies against such spells or witchcraft in the

Anglo-Saxon medical books, as in the Leechbook (II.1): a recipe is prescribed for
a variety of conditions or foes, including the devil’s temptations (or “tribulations”;
the meaning of costnunga is uncertain here), “night-goers,” enchantment, and
“evil spell-craft.”

Thus, while the documentary record is much less complete and

precise than we might wish, there seems to be sufficient evidence to allow that
healing, hurting, and divining magic—practices that the clergy labeled “supersti-
tions” and associated with idolatry—were active to some extent among the general
Anglo-Saxon populace throughout the period. Since these practices are known
from the earliest historical sources, are virtually ubiquitous across the globe, and
have survived well into modern and even contemporary times, there is little surprise
in this, except to note the already gendered nature of witchcraft even at this early
period. It seems to be women who are singled out to a certain extent for suspicion
and repression, especially in their role as herb-lore keepers and local healers.

As we have seen, given that many pathogens in Anglo-Saxon medicine were

vaguely conceived as worms, poisons, elf-shot, or other noxious agents that invaded
the body, local healing often took the form of lay exorcism (in a broad sense of
the term) to expel these disease agents. This was not conceptually distinct from
liturgical exorcism as performed by officially ordained exorcists or priests in any

That is, wiccan o

ðð

e wigleras. See Anthony Davies, “Witches in Anglo-Saxon England: Five Case

Histories,” in Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D. G. Scragg (Manchester,
1989), 41–56, at 41.

Old English Penitential, in Die Altenglische Version des Halitgar’schen Bussbuches, ed. Josef Raith

(1933; repr., Darmstadt, 1964), 4.16.

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 43–45.

Audrey L. Meaney, “Ælfric and Idolatry,” Journal of Religious History 13 (1984): 119–35, 123.

Ibid., 135.

Thomas Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2 (Lon-

don, 1865), 307.

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rigorous sense.

In Bald’s Leechbook, there is explicit liturgical exorcism language

in a charm for ælf-sogo

a (meaning uncertain, though at the end of the passage

the 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” (Omnipotent
Lord, Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . cast out from your servant N. . .).

However, the various levels of ecclesiastical authority took steps to ensure that the
church could monitor and regulate such local practices. For instance, many of the
rites that did make their way into the books produced at scriptoria require the
participation of a priest. Clearly, these represent attempts by the church to assim-
ilate traditional modes of healing into more acceptable forms. Thus, a recipe against
ælf-cynne (elvenkind), “night goers,” and those who have intercourse with the devil
requires placing the herbal mixture in a vessel under an altar; a recipe to expel
ælf-adle (elf sickness) calls for lichen to be scraped from a cross and dipped in a
font of holy water and for Latin masses to be sung over it. A subsequent recipe
for ælf-sogo

a requires consecrated oil and the ability to write a short passage.

In his homily for St. Bartholomew’s Day, Ælfric demonstrates the fine line the
clergy sometimes walked in evaluating local practices. He assimilates the outward
form 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 his
health through illicit means or through wicked spells or through any witchcraft, then
he 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 health
from 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 practicing
idolatry (hæ

þen-gyld). . . . Wise Augustine said that it is safe for someone to use

medicinal herbs, but he denounces it as illicit sorcery if someone binds the herbs to
himself unless he is applying them to a sore. Nonetheless, we should not put our
faith in medicinal herbs, but in the almighty creator who gave the herbs power. No
one must sing spells over an herb, but must bless it with God’s words and then (he
may) use it.

For Ælfric, 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 assimilated
much of the outward form and content of these popular rituals but rejected the
notion that the witch’s spell made them effective; instead, the occult powers God
has placed in creation caused these rituals to work. Few village priests would be
likely to observe or even understand such conceptual distinctions; the thorough
blending of pre-Christian ritual with Christian elements in the medical recipes is
the result of conceptual overlap and hybridization. It is evident, however, that

Thus, Jolly notes that “the gap between liturgical books and medical books was so small that they

belong together as a single, larger group of manuals for health and well-being, along with penitentials”
(Popular Religion, 114).

Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft, 2:348.

Ibid., 345–51.

Original text in Peter Clemoes, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series Text, Early English Text

Society, Supplementary Series no. 17 (Oxford, 1997), 450. Ælfric’s source here is actually Caesarius
of Arles’ sermons (esp. 50 and 54).

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

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 emerge
from long-established generic traditions. But what is clear is that possession was a
deeply 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 bodies
of people who were likely subject to a number of psychiatric or neurological
afflictions. But on the other hand, the issue of possession’s remedy was a deeply
troubling one to the young church, for, as practiced in the countryside, it clearly
seemed to embrace elements that could only be described as heathenism and
idolatry. By coding these traditional rites as witchcraft, the church attempted to
marginalize these practices, asserting by extension the authenticity and veracity of
their own forms of adjuration. In this way, the extant instances of possession provide
a 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 England—or, at least, it
struck contemporaries as particularly worthy of documentation in those areas—
when the authority of the church, in the face of relapsing nobles and pre-Christian
traditions deeply rooted in the countryside, was not yet strongly established. Pos-
session and its attendant exorcisms thus served as points of tension, venting crises
of 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 in
Anglo-Saxon England, with the content of the discourse conforming closely to
that delineated by scripture, this is clearly not the case for the period between the
middle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period of profound
religious and political ferment, the frequency of cases of possession seems to have
increased in both absolute and relative terms. Of course, with the expansion of
literacy 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 illusion
divined by historians through the distorting lens of a much more expansive his-
torical record, for the increased frequency of instances of possession was widely
noted and commented upon at the time. As the character of M. B. lamented in
George Gifford’s 1593 Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, the situation
was such that “there be many examples in many places, and daylie it is seene, that
the devill is driven out of some possessed.”

Likewise, in their polemical 1601

Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels, the Anglican preachers John Deacon
and John Walker constructed the argument of the character Exorcistes for the

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

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reality of possession upon “common experience”; for Exorcistes, the overwhelming
quantity of experiential, empirical data proved the phenomenon.

This new concern with possession is a function of a broader diabolization of

English society that Nathan Johnstone has recently argued took place in the second
half of the sixteenth century. To Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestants, Johnstone
argues, the devil’s power was no abstract theological issue; it was a demonstrable
reality and an immediate threat. To be sure, the power of the devil was something
that could be perceived in the world, but crucially, it was also something the godly
felt and could identify in their conscience, for it was there that the devil most
effectively assailed them, tempting them by means of ungodly thoughts. Such was
the power of the devil that to the godly, life was a constant struggle to resist his
temptation 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.

This is important for two reasons. First, with the devil perceived as

immediate and active, the godly were especially adept at reading any sign manifest
in the physical world as a token of the demonic. But second, with this new emphasis
on the internal subversion of the individual, possession could be configured as a
particularly extreme form of demonic invasion, with the devil subverting not just
the conscience but the physical body as well.

This diabolization of the mentalite´ of the godly is reflected in the literature of

the period, for reports describing apparent demoniacs are common in a host of
different sorts of texts. Most colorfully, such narratives were a favorite of the pulp
press. In general, modern scholars have been prepared to treat these pamphlet
accounts of possessions fairly sympathetically.

However, this is methodologically

problematic, for such an approach ignores the fact that the majority of these works
have a clear didactic purpose. They were intended either as exempla of the devil’s
power or to prove such ideologically charged notions as the rectitude or falsity of
Catholicism, of the more extreme forms of Protestantism, or even of the moderate
position the state church was attempting to plot. In this respect, what is important
to the authors of such accounts is not the particular minutiae of what actually
happened, for these are just trivia; rather, they are concerned with the wider truth
that the events signify—that is to say, their focus is squarely set upon the final
cause of the account. Under such a view of history in the res scriptae sense of the
term, 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 detail
to be subsumed to the putative final cause of a work, such authors were following
a rhetorical strategy of sound classical precedent. Quintilian, for instance, argued
that it was wholly licit to embellish an account with fictitious incidents of the type
that commonly occur, in order to amplify the final cause of a work.

In this

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

199–200.

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

27–106.

Ibid., 102–6.

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.

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. H. E. Butler (London, 1966–69), VIII, iii, 70.

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respect, it is nigh on impossible to determine the extent to which the specific
details in an account of a particular possession are accurate, if they have been
embellished by the author in order to underscore what he knows really to be
happening, or if they have been added to highlight the overarching purpose of
the account.

But while the details of the pathology of the particular possessions

they purport to describe may well have been manipulated to serve didactic or
propagandistic ends, in order to ensure that the accounts had the intended effects
on their putative readers, they must have coincided to a large degree with a more
general, socially understood discourse about possession. Had they not done so, all
but the most credulous would have been inclined to dismiss them out of hand as
patently absurd. In this sense, even leaving aside the issue of dissemination, they
can be treated as broadly indicative of their author’s conception of their intended
audience’s idea of the nature of possession.

In some contexts, however, it is possible to go further and to recover the specific

symptoms manifested by a demoniac to a more certain degree. Precisely because
the issue of possession was widely understood to be deeply invested in the religious
politics of the day, some demonologists, propagandists, and polemicists went to
great lengths to compound the apparent authenticity of their accounts—and, by
extension, their arguments—by reproducing an array of official and semiofficial
documents. Samuel Harsnett, for instance, chaplain to the bishop of London at
the turn of the century, bolstered the authority of his various treatises attacking
certain Puritan and Catholic exorcists by appending transcriptions of the confes-
sions given at law of the putative demoniacs involved.

While some of these confessions were likely extracted under duress as Harsnett’s

Puritan opponents argued quite vehemently, these accounts can be juxtaposed

For a particularly egregious example, albeit a hostile one, of how this process worked in practice,

see Samuel Harsnett’s description of the redaction of Anon., The most wonderfull and true storie, of a
certaine Witch named Alse Gooderige (London, 1597), in S[amuel] H[arsnett], A Discovery of the
Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel (London, 1599), 266–69. Likewise, A true and most Dreadfull
discourse of a woman possessed with the Devill (London, [1584]) and Most Fearefull and Strange Newes
from the Bishippricke of Durham (London, 1641). The latter pamphlet reproduces all the salient details
of the narrative of the former, although it changes the name of the demoniac from Margaret Cooper
to Margaret Hooper and shifts the action from Somerset to Durham. Although the latter pamphlet
claims to be news and lists the names of six credible witnesses prepared to attest to the veracity of the
events therein recounted, the narrative is clearly set in the wonder-prodigy tradition, for it advises the
reader, “Let not this which is here declared seeme a fained fable unto thee, but assure thy selfe that
all such things are sent as warnings for our wickednesse, and to put us in mind of the Seate of our
salvation” (sig. A2). In this sense, it is clear that the historicity of the account is less important than
the lessons it purports to teach.

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 and
trances, in H[arsnett], Discovery, 80–82, 83–86, 294–96, 297–98. His Declaration of Egregious Popish
Impostures (London, 1603) concludes with an extended appendix in which he reproduces the confessions
of 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 Commission
for causes Ecclesiaticall.” See Harsnett, Declaration, 172, 173–284. Where possible, Harsnett’s op-
ponents did the same. See Anon., A Breife Narration of the possession, dispossession, and, repossession of
William Sommers (London, 1598), sigs. Ciii–Dii. The reproduction of documents was a standard feature
of ecclesiastical history, dating back to Eusebius in the fourth century. To Harsnett and his peers, it
was a rhetorical strategy used most recently and to great effect by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments
(London, 1563).

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against the trial records of a number of youths adjudged to have counterfeited
possession for their own nefarious ends. The most important and detailed of these
are the Star Chamber pleadings in the cases of Anne Gunter in 1606 and Katheren
Malpas in 1622. These cases are obvious instances in which the tension proved
irreconcilable between the particular possession as enacted and the wider discourse
of possession in which the participants sought to situate their imposture. But also
they provide a unique insight into the would-be demoniac’s understanding of her
neighbors’ perceptions of the nature and content of possession, divested from any
wider didactic agenda.

Despite the fact that these three types of sources emanated from different social

contexts and were targeted at different audiences and ordered toward different
ends, all point to the emergence of a widely accepted and understood discourse
of possession, the content and significance of which were broadly comprehended
across the social strata. Indeed, the playwright Ben Jonson thought that the es-
sential features of the discourse were sufficiently well known that he could rely
upon his audience’s understanding of it for comedic effect in his 1607 Volpone
and his 1616 Devil Is an Ass.

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 out
the symptoms he is meant to display:

He vomits crooked pinnes; his eyes are set,
Like a dead hares, hung in a poulters shop!
His mouth’s 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!

In the Devil Is an Ass, the character of Fitz-dottrel embellishes even this corpus

of symptoms in his counterfeited possession, for he exhibits a strange rising in his
belly that other characters are unable to suppress.

Despite the fact that the

majority of the symptoms that Jonson presents as diagnostic have no grounding
in the sacred page, it is quite clear from the various printed accounts of demoniacs
from the 1570s forth that all of these new nonscriptural symptoms had become
integral to both the discourse of possession and its particular enactments.

Indeed,

the Puritan minister George More, in his 1600 account of the possession of seven
youths in the Starkie family, argued that while the demoniacs manifested a few
symptoms unique to themselves, he accepted that they were possessed on the basis
of the fact that they shared eighteen rare and strange symptoms in common, the
majority of which had little or no scriptural precedent. These included “straung
visions, and fearfull apparitions” of the devil; hearing hideous voices; senselessness

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

1641), 5.8.

Jonson, Volpone, 5.10.

Jonson, Devell, 5.8.

For a detailed analysis of the extrascriptural symptoms of various sixteenth-century demoniacs, see

Raiswell, “Faking It,” 32–34; and Philip Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern
England (Cambridge, 2004), 26–34.

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to the extent that they could feel no pain even if “you should plucke an eare from
the head, or an arme from the bodie”; peculiar swellings in their bodies “to a
wonderfull huge bignes”; “marveilous sore heaving and lifting, as if their heartes
would burst”; disfigurement of the face; “a fearfull thrusting out of their tongues
with a most uglie distorting of their mouthes”; blasphemy; delighting in “filthie
& unsavorie speeches”; an inability to eat; and the stiffening of various parts of
their bodies so they were “inflexible, or verie hard to be bended.”

To Harsnett,

the addition of this body of extrascriptural symptoms was absurd: why do those
who concern themselves with demoniacs not form their diagnosis on the basis of
symptoms with biblical precedent that are contrary to nature—like breaking
chains?

To an anonymous defender of John Darrel, the controversial Puritan

exorcist of the 1580s and 1590s, the situation was precisely the reverse: God had
increased the number of signs of possession because most of those fixed by scripture
were too easy to simulate.

Yet the expansion of the corpus of symptoms requisite to possession is highly

significant, for it underscores its profoundly dynamic construction and the social
nature of diagnosis. Far from being a particular enactment of a series of fixed
behaviors bounded by the parameters defined by scripture, the content of possession
was progressively renegotiated through a mutually informing dynamic between
the would-be demoniac and his or her audience. To be sure, once the demoniac’s
condition was identified, he or she was expected to manifest certain signs and
particular behaviors. That is to say, the act of diagnosis situated the demoniac
within a culturally authored script that structured his or her subsequent behavior
and suggested a symptomology that could be read as diagnostic of his or her inner
condition. But with the fact of possession proven in the mind of the demoniac’s
spectators through the process of diagnosis, were he or she to stray beyond the
bounds of the script and to step outside what was commonly perceived to be the
appropriate manifestation or progression of the condition, at the prompting of
the audience, certain popularly sanctioned tests might be initiated in order to bring
the would-be demoniac back into character, thereby resituating the particulars of
the performance within the context of the broader discourse of possession.

While

it is impossible to prove, it is quite likely that some of the godly who found
themselves suffering from the onset of a sudden and inexplicable ailment trawled
their conscience for signs of the intervention of the devil and engaged in an
analogous dialogue with their bodies. This caused them to reframe their wholly
real physical afflictions into the context of possession, with the result that they began
increasingly to manifest the requisite pathology of the condition. Certainly, Gifford

George More, A True Discourse concerning the Certaine Possession and Dispossessio[n] of 7 Persons

(London, 1600), 42–47.

See H[arsnett], Discovery, 33.

Anon., Breife Narration, sigs. Biii–Biiiv.

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 that
what she had seen was actually an illusion of the devil. Accordingly, when the same vision recurred
four days later, horns obligingly sprouted from the figure’s head. E. Fairfax, Daemonologia, ed.
W. Grainge (Harrogate, 1882), 62–64. As Johnstone argues in the context of the experiential demonism
of the godly, the notion of a personal communication from God was far more problematic than special
attention from the devil. Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, 140.

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thought that this was sometimes the case, for he noted that if “a man feareth hee
is bewitched, it troubleth al the powers of his mind, and that distempereth his
bodie, maketh great alterations in it, and bringeth sundrie griefes.”

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 socially
created and, as such, reflects not a metaphysical core of beliefs but the specific
beliefs 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 possession

to both audience and demoniac were conditioned by the printed descriptions of
particularly notorious or colorful cases that were common by the latter part of
the sixteenth century. Indeed, some of these texts helped transform the fits and
trances of particular demoniacs into national events. Deacon and Walker, for in-
stance, noted that while the controversy over the apparent possession of William
Sommers had initially been confined just to the city of Nottingham, it soon became
“so publikely reported in Print” with rumors flying such that they “doe mightilie
over-runne the whole Realme.”

According to Harsnett, the possession even came

to form the subject of a popular ballad.

A number of demoniacs had access to such accounts at crucial periods imme-

diately prior to or during their afflictions, and they shaped their fits—either con-
sciously or unconsciously—to conform to these precedents. This is noticeable, for
instance, in the Sommers case. According to Sommers’s confession, as reproduced
by 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 Sommers’s tes-
timony, Sherratt spent much of his time with him describing the possession of the
Throckmorton children in Huntington that had taken place a decade earlier “and
having a printed booke thereof, hee declared to M. Evans in my hearing, the manner
of the fits that M. Throgmortons [sic] children had.” To this, Sommers added
significantly, “I learned something more then I knew before.”

And when Sommers

proceeded to recraft his possession along the lines of the book’s description, Evans
and Sherratt summoned Mr. Aldridge, a local preacher, who “being greatly afraid
when he saw me in my fits, he gave it out for a certainty I was possessed.”

The

book Sherratt produced was almost certainly the 1593 The most strange and ad-
mirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys. Similarly, Brian Gunter, Anne’s
father and the architect of his daughter’s imposture, was accused of having this
text along with “other bookes of lyke argument” brought to his house so that
Anne might read or have them read to her and embellish her fits accordingly.

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

Gifford, Dialogue, sig. G4.

Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, sigs. A2, A8v.

H[arsnett], Discovery, 119.

Ibid., 97. Sommers was clearly literate. See ibid., 81, 82, 87.

Ibid., 97.

“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. See
“INTERROGATORIES 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 Darrel’s activities.
Sharpe, Anne Gunter, 7, 62.

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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 the
normative bounds of the discourse of possession against which particular possessions
should be evaluated. Thus, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon possessions, the dynamic
among would-be demoniac, audience, and texts operated as a mutually authen-
ticating hermeneutic circle: the symptoms manifested by the demoniac confirmed
the expectations of the audience, which were themselves a product of its members’
encounters with the demonic both in person and on the page; thus conditioned,
the expectations of the audience define the parameters under which particular
possessions could be enacted.

The collusion of demoniac, audience, and text also goes some way in explaining

early modern reconfiguring of possession as a species of popular witchcraft belief.
This was not a product of its interaction with academic demonology, for the
construction of learned witchcraft belief tended to focus upon the pact a witch
was believed to make with the devil, a feature that is absent from popular notions
of witchcraft until later.

Instead, witch belief, as it developed in the context of

popular culture, centered upon the problem of maleficium—that is, the causing
of 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 means
to redress them.

Because of this emphasis on the concrete and manifest harm done by witches

as opposed to their material or formal cause, there was in practice little distinction
drawn between the effects of malevolent witchcraft and demonic possession.

Although technically obsession and possession were different things, the ways they
manifested themselves in the body of the afflicted were identical: both resulted in
illness and wasting. In popular discourse, the two categories of affliction were
conflated, with both classified as bewitchment.

However, the construction of

this identity served to reconfigure possession in a profound and dramatic way
through the second half of the sixteenth century and make possession a species of
the broader discourse associated with witchcraft belief, with sometimes deadly
consequences.

Because English witches were generally thought to feed and nurture familiars

who performed malevolent and obsessive acts for them, these creatures became
stock characters in particular possessions and their narratives, often taking on the
role 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 bewitch
with impunity, their familiars had an awkward—and potentially lethal—tendency
to 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, where
Christ asked an unclean spirit his name (Mark 5:9). However, by the sixteenth
century, this had developed into a doctrine that allowed the full-fledged inter-
rogation of a possessing demon. While theologically this is rather dubious, for, as
scripture makes clear, there is no truth in the devil (John 8:44), its proponents

James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Harlow, 2001), 41–42.

The distinctions are Scot’s. See Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of witchcraft (London, 1584), 472.

See Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand Jury Men (London, 1627), 53.

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argued that under such circumstances, a possessing demon was constrained by the
power of God to speak only the truth, with the result that his identification of his
mistress could be accepted uncritically.

Assimilated into possession, then, the de-

moniac’s identification of the witch responsible for his or her torments increasingly
became 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 Pinder’s possessing demon was asked to identify
the witch who sent him into her, and he obligingly singled out a certain Joane
Thorneton.

More telling, however, is the case of Richard Mainy. Mainy was one

of the youths manipulated by a number of Jesuits in Denham into believing that
he 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 course
of his fits Mainy exclaimed that a certain Goodwife White was responsible for
sending the evil spirits that tormented Frauncis and her sister.

Given that the

success of a fraud is contingent upon how well it conforms to popular expectations,
that Mainy—or the Jesuits—situated his counterfeit possession in the context of
witch belief suggests that at the very least they were endeavoring to capitalize and
exploit a current within popular epistemology. Had this nexus been an innovation,
the possessions would not have been popularly construed as authentic, and four
or five thousand souls would not have been reconciled to the pope as a result of
seeing or hearing about their public exorcism.

Predictably, once possession was linked to witch belief, witches were found lurking

behind the torments of almost every demoniac, with the identification of the witch
comprising a pivotal moment in the demonic fit. All of the demoniacs to whom
Darrel ministered, for instance, were able to name the witch apparently culpable
for their torments.

Sommers went further; although he himself claimed to have

been possessed by a demon sent by a woman of Derbyshire—or, in another ac-
count, by a woman of Worcestershire—he declared that he had had visions of
seven hitherto unknown witches otherwise unconnected to his possession. On his
word—or that of his demon—these men and women were jailed while the mayor
of Nottingham made inquiries throughout the town for evidence against them.

While the identification of the tormenting witch was an integral component of
the enactment of a possession, the idea was also sufficiently entrenched within
possession discourse that the ability of the demoniac to name the architect of his
or her suffering was popularly construed as an integral component of the con-
dition’s diagnosis. For his part, Brian Gunter sought to capitalize on this fact in
forcing his daughter to feign possession, for the goal of the imposture was to
accuse certain local women of witchcraft, bringing them in peril of their lives. In
many respects, it was the perception that this was a crucial element in the social
diagnosis of possession that was behind the collapse of the Malpas imposture.
According to Katheren’s testimony, she and her grandparents orchestrated their

See Boy of Bilson (London, 1622), 31.

Disclosing of a Late Counterfeyted Possession (London, 1574), sig. B1v.

Harsnett, Declaration, 224.

Ibid., 154.

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), 109–10.

H[arsnett], Discovery, 102, 141–42.

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scheme in order to capitalize on their neighbors’ charity. While the family had
only a very limited success in this capacity, despite the many persons of quality
who visited Katheren, they worked hard to try to situate her simulated torments
within the context of their comprehension of possession.

Accordingly, Katheren

had little choice but to name the witch responsible for her fits and trances, even
though doing so brought the imposture to the attention of the authorities, even-
tually even to the king, and caused the whole charade to collapse.

The assimilation of possession into witch belief also meant that the various tests

that were popularly used to identify witches could likewise be reconfigured to
establish the link between an apparent demoniac and his or her tormentor. But
the effect of these tests on a demoniac as they were applied to the body of an
accused witch were, of course, double, for establishing the occult link between
the two parties not only helped to confirm the diagnosis of the apparent possession
in the minds of those who saw him or her but also proved the culpability of the
witch. After Alice Gooderidge was identified as the architect of Thomas Darling’s
possession, for instance, she was brought to his chamber, in which Darling im-
mediately fell into a “marvellous sore fit.”

Some of those present then persuaded

the boy to scratch the witch, a test that, the author of the pamphlet account of
the possession declared, was “commonly received as an approved meanes to discry
þ

witch, and procure ease to the bewitched.”

Likewise, once the Throckmorton

children settled upon Mother Samuel as the witch responsible for their torments,
their spirits were calmed and their fits subsided when they found themselves in
the presence of the unfortunate old crone—indeed, this test was tried some twenty
times in the space of an hour, each time with the same effect.

But this assimilation had another important effect on the content of particular

possessions, for the dynamic believed to underlie specific cases was increasingly
reshaped by popular belief to conform to the model proper to English witchcraft
accusations more generally. In particular, possession came frequently to be con-
structed around the so-called “charity refused” model that sees witchcraft as a
response to a perceived social slight. In this model, an economically vulnerable
member of a community is refused a modicum of charity from her neighbor and
leaves, muttering ominously. When later some misfortune befalls the neighbor,
she situates it in the context of this speech and construes it as a consequence of
witchcraft.

While classically this model is associated with maleficium, in practice

the link between possession and witchcraft meant that it was also deployed to account
for the torments of a demoniac. Joan Jorden’s possession, for instance, was deemed
a consequence of the fact that she had refused to give Doll Barthram some of her

“The ioynt and severall annsweres of Thomas Saunders [and] Katherine Malpas thelder,” TNA:

PRO, STAC 8 32/13, fol. 16.

Ibid. Cf. “Examinat[i]o . . . Attornat[us],” STAC 8 32/13, fol. 12 and “The severall answeres

of Elizabeth Sanders,” STAC 8 32/13, fol. 17. See also Raiswell, “Faking It,” 42–45.

The most wonderfull and true storie, 5.

Ibid., 6.

The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys (London, 1593), sigs.

E2–E2v.

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

G4–G4v; cf. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (New York, 1970), 168–76.

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master’s goods.

Similarly, Samuel Pacy implied that his daughter’s possession was

caused after Amy Duny had been refused herrings at his door three times in a
single day; on the final occasion, Amy went away grumbling, at which his daughter
was overtaken by a series of violent fits that left her “Shreeking out in a most
dreadful manner like unto a Whelp.”

In his analysis of late Tudor and early Stuart witchcraft cases in Essex, Alan

Macfarlane points out that the “charity refused” model of witch accusations recast
the person who had breached neighborly norms into the role of victim, thereby
freeing her from guilt.

The situation in terms of possession, however, is slightly

different. In order to avoid Manichaeism, most authorities were at pains to stress
that the devil must be an instrument of God.

But if this is the case, then possession

can 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 must
be 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 the
equation recasts the demoniac as a victim, a creature to whom the appropriate
reaction is empathy. It is no longer the demoniac who is responsible for his or
her 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 cases

tended to be the weather-beaten old crone of popular stereotype, a woman at the
economic and social fringes of society, often with a general reputation for witchery.
Alice Gooderidge, for instance, was typical: she was about sixty and already held
“in great suspition of manie to bee a daper in those divellish practises,” even before
Thomas Darling leveled his accusations against her. Her position was not helped
by the fact that her mother had been before the Justice of the Peace on suspicion
of witchcraft offenses four or five times.

Likewise, Elizabeth Gregory had a

reputation as a notorious scold, a vile curser, and a blasphemer even before she
was implicated by Anne Gunter, while Agnes Pepwell, another of the witches
Gunter accused, was widely reputed among her neighbors to be the kind of woman
who could cause such an affliction.

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 byways
of every town and village, as the character of Samuel in Gifford’s Dialogue argued,
tended to increase the likelihood that any particular apparent possession might be
deemed authentic.

The result, as Samuel frets, is a demonized landscape into

which 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;

Triall of Maist[er] Dorrell (London, 1599), 92.

Anon., A Tryal of Witches at the Assizes held at Bury St. Edmunds (London, 1682), 16.

Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 174.

See, e.g., Gifford, Dialogue, 20–21.

See The most wonderfull and true storie, 4, 7.

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 Atturney
gen[er]all,” TNA: PRO, STAC 8 4/10, fol. 74.

Gifford, Dialogue, sig. A4v.

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

Samuel’s position may be overanxious, but the real empirical evidence of demonic
intervention that people saw in the world—through the machinations of witches
and in their conscience—readily caused many to see traces of the devil’s action in
the most mundane phenomena. Reasoning from the premise of the power and
immediacy of the devil and the concomitant notion of the relative distance of
humanity from God, many of the godly were quite ready to subsume the peculiar
behavior of various youths they saw into the discourse of possession. Contemporaries
were 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 see
such supposed to be possessed by a Divell or Divels; some are filled with fancyfull
imaginations, 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 relations
without truth, if they take not time, & come againe, and againe, to see and consider
with judgment, and with mature deliberation such deceiveable resemblances.”

Bernard’s advice aside, to the godly the danger in viewing the things of the world
lay not in being too ready to see the hand of the devil at work; it lay in being
lulled into complacency.

While it is enacted, then, possession subsumed into the context of witch belief

tends 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 and
witch: the testimony of the possessing demon garnered from the mouth of his
victim confirmed and compounded popular anxieties about certain local women
commonly construed to be witches; the subsequent examination of these accused
witches then authenticated the veracity of the original diagnosis. Removed from
the fallible realm of human interaction and recast into that of the preternatural,
this new circle sees apparent possessions function as particular pieces of empirical
data that point to the reality of witchcraft, while the reality of witchcraft serves as
a universal premise from which the authenticity of a particular case of possession
can readily be deduced. In this sense, then, witchcraft discourse becomes integral
to 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 1563
witchcraft statute, murder by occult means was punishable by death, bewitchment
and maleficium resulted only in one year’s imprisonment upon first offense. Nev-
ertheless, the fact that possession was entangled in the vines of the law by virtue
of its association with witchcraft had at least three significant and far-reaching
consequences. 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 an
unassailable legal fact. And third, if legal authorities could root out a witch and

Ibid.

Bernard, Guide to Grand Jury Men, 39.

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763

therefore cure possession, secular institutions could challenge the religious claim
to cast out demons.

These factors all came together in the case of Alice and John Samuel along with

their daughter Agnes in 1593. According to the pamphlet account, three indict-
ments were laid against the members of the Samuel family: one for bewitching to
death the wife of a local notable, a certain Lady Cromwell; the other two for
bewitching various children of the Throckmorton family.

Of these, only the

former should have warranted death under the Elizabethan witchcraft statute.
Nevertheless, the nature of the evidence that was taken to implicate the three
Samuels in the murder is important. Certainly, the court had two separate con-
fessions from Alice Samuel, who was nearly eighty years old at the time, but in
these she admitted only to bewitching the Throckmorton children and not to
murder by occult means.

Instead, the court relied heavily upon the apparent

possessions of the children as evidence. This was gathered both formally and
informally. On the day of the assizes, Joan Throckmorton traveled to Huntington
and lodged at an inn. There she fell into her usual course of fits in front of a large
audience. Seduced by the strangeness of the fits, these people then interrogated
Agnes Samuel, who was also present. But whenever Agnes uttered the word “God,”
Joan’s fits grew worse. At one point, the audience demanded that she recite the
Lord’s Prayer. But as she did so, Joan became so afflicted that the audience bade
Agnes stop. At various times throughout the day, some five hundred people tried
a hundred times to have Alice say to Joan, “God help you.” Predictably, this had
no effect upon the demoniac. Later that evening, Joan met Justice Fenner, who
was to preside at the trial, but while they strolled in the garden, Joan again fell
into a fit. At this, Joan’s father told the judge that if Agnes would recite the
adjuration “as I am a Witch, and a worse Witch then [sic] my mother, and did
consent to the death of the Lady Cromwel, so I charge the divil to let mistresse
Joan Throckmorton come out of her fit at this present,” his daughter’s fits would
end.

This was a reference to a prophecy that one of the possessing demons had

made through the mouth of Joan some six weeks earlier.

Understandably, per-

haps, Agnes was loath to recite an adjuration that was also an admission of a felony
before a judge, but after the formula had been repeated by a number of the crowd,
including Fenner himself, Agnes had little choice. The result was wholly predict-
able: Joan wiped her eyes, came out of her fit, and made a polite curtsy to the
judge.

In this way, the occult relationship between Agnes and Joan was established

informally by the judge on the basis of the verbal testimony of a demon and the
empirical evidence of his reaction to the accused witch.

When the trial eventually began the next day, Joan, having relapsed into one of

her fits, was brought before the judge, apparently devoid of her senses. She was
questioned, but although her eyes were open her possessing demon would not
suffer her to reply. Instead of participating as a witness at the trial, then, she was
recast, quite literally, into a body of evidence in her own right. As a result, the

See Witches of Warboys, sig. N4v .

Ibid., sigs. H1v–H2.

Ibid., sig. N4.

Ibid., sig. I4v.

Ibid., sig. N4.

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judge had John Samuel brought into court and forced him to recite an adjuration
similar to that he had had Agnes pronounce the previous evening. Once again,
the demoniac’s fits promptly abated, with the result that the nexus between her
and the witch was established formally as a piece of empirical evidence. Yet despite
the fact there was nothing directly implicating any of the three Samuels in the
death of Lady Cromwell other than the fact that all seemed to be witches, they
were convicted of her murder and sentenced to be hanged. With the possession
of the Throckmortons now authenticated as a legal fact, the execution of the
witches had the added value of serving as a dispossession. And true to their part
in the cultural script, the Throckmorton children were cured. As the pamphlet
account concludes, “if any bee desirous to know the present estate of these chil-
dren, how they are and have bin since the death of these parties: you shall un-
derstand, that since their day of execution, not any one of them have had any fit
at all, neither yet grudging or complayning of any such thing.”

To the Elizabethan state struggling to find an acceptable middle way between

Catholicism and the Protestantism of the godly (the Puritans), the authentication
of possession by means of the law by virtue of its link with witchcraft was a decidedly
awkward development. In this capacity, the cases of the Starkie family possessions
and that of Mary Glover are particularly illustrative. In the former, seven children
in the Starkie family became possessed and accused a cunning man named Edmund
Hartley of being the architect of their misery. The chronology of this possession
is curious, for Hartley met the children for the first time after they had apparently
become possessed; he had, in fact, been hired by their father, Nicholas Starkie, to
cure them. Nevertheless, Hartley was indicted for bewitching them and convicted,
at which he declared, “They could finde no lawe to hange him.” In response,
Nicholas Starkie conveniently recalled that Hartley had at one point tried to engage
him in conjuring evil spirits—and for this he was hanged.

But to Darrel and his

supporters, the “apprehe[n]ding, examining, imprisoning, indighting, condemn-
ing, & executing” of Hartley was part of a number of proofs that pointed to the
reality of the children’s possession.

Accordingly, the clearly observable fact that

all but one of the afflicted were restored to their proper condition by means of
dispossession through prayer and fasting was also proof that God favored the
Puritan agenda and advocated a faster and more comprehensive reform of the
church in England.

As an unsettling corollary, Darrel and his supporters pointed

out to their critics that if the demoniacs he had dispossessed were actually coun-
terfeits, then the sentences imposed upon Hartley and Gooderidge must have been
patently unjust, “to the publique and perpetuall preiudice of those her Maiesties
Courts of Assises.”

The official church suffered a second defeat in the propaganda wars against the

Puritans with the possession of Mary Glover. In the spring of 1602, Mary began
to display all the usual features of possession after an encounter with a certain
Elizabeth Jackson. At Jackson’s trial that December, Doctor Edward Jorden and

Ibid., sig. O4.

See More, True Discourse, 21.

Ibid., 22.

The idea of dispossession through prayer and fasting is based upon Matthew 17:21 and Mark 9:

39.

Triall of Maist[er] Dorrell, 84.

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John Argent tried to argue that Mary’s condition was the result of a wholly natural
affliction, although they were unable to offer definitive proof of this by curing the
girl. Like Joan Throckmorton, Mary was not treated as a witness at the trial of
her accused tormentor. Instead, brought into court in one of her fits, she was a
crucial piece of empirical evidence to be examined. And again, mirroring the
procedure in the Throckmorton case, Judge Anderson along with an array of other
notables decided to visit Mary in her chambers. There they tested the reality of
her possession by evaluating her senselessness and by gauging her response to the
presence of Elizabeth Jackson.

100

In his subsequent charge to the jury, Anderson

argued that the conclusions of Argent and Jorden amounted to mere supposition.
Instead, the fact of witchcraft and the reaction of Glover to the tests to which she
had been subjected were unassailable points of evidence that clearly implied Jack-
son’s guilt. With Mary’s possession established as a fact at law, she was publicly
dispossessed by means of prayer and fasting by a circle of Puritans. For the more
godly Protestants in their battle against the state church, this proved that theirs
was the authentic brand of the faith.

101

The controversy over the possibility and the means of dispossession in the late

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was sketched by D. P. Walker in 1981
and does not need reiterating here.

102

What is clear, however, is that because of

its value as propaganda, early modern possession was heavily contested territory.
The structures upon which its authenticity was anchored—scripture, networks of
authority, popular witch belief, and, increasingly, the law—made it difficult to
assail. Although medical discourse eventually came to assimilate most of these
behaviors into other explanatory discourses, to do so, it would have to snap the
hermeneutic circle that privileged preternatural notions of causation and shift the
burden of proof in favor of nature.

HISTORICAL CONTINUITIES AND CONTINGENCIES

Despite the fact that the essential features of possession and its remedy were clearly
delineated in the pages of the most important authority of the premodern age, in
neither Anglo-Saxon nor early modern England did possession function as a clear
and distinct explanatory category. To be sure, the handful of detailed Anglo-Saxon
diagnosed cases indicates that its pathology tended to be construed as following
very closely that mapped by scripture and that of a number of serious organic
conditions that affect muscle control and behavior that have been variously in-
terpreted as forms of spirit possession in many cultures around the world.

103

How-

ever, it seems that the Anglo-Saxons of Northumbria and Anglia had access to a
relatively open marketplace of possible remedies for possession, each premised

100

This procedure was still employed as late as 1665 in the trial of Amy Duny. Duny’s trial also saw

the pins voided by the demoniacs presented as evidence despite the fact that it was actually the act of
voiding them that was a sign of possession. Tryal of Witches, 13, 21.

101

See Walker, Unclean Spirits; and M. MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London

(London, 1991), vii–lxiv.

102

Walker, Unclean Spirits, esp. 4–5, 43–73.

103

This observation is detailed more completely in Peter Dendle, Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon

England (forthcoming).

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upon different interpretations of the relationship between the natural and preter-
natural and, by extension, implying the precedence of different configurations of
power in the here and now. In this capacity, the attempt by the practitioners of
the Roman Church to graft their conception of confession onto various earlier
forms of adjuration represents an attempt to co-opt those deemed possessed into
the church’s wonder-working apparatus, while simultaneously recasting their more
venerable competitors in the world of magical healing as witches, associating them
with heathenism, paganism, and idolatry. Witchcraft, then, is conceived as distinct
from possession, plotted along a different epistemological trajectory toward a dif-
ferent end.

Broadly speaking, much the same dynamic seems to have been at work in early

modern possessions. Once again, the reconfiguring of possession beyond the bounds
of scripture is a function of the relative difficulty the official church experienced
in asserting itself in the context of an array of competing alternatives. With au-
thority in the realm of diagnosing and curing preternatural affliction popularly
divested along a spectrum running between Catholics and the hotter sort of Prot-
estants, and with a litany of cunning folk dotted along at every point of the way,
representatives of the state church such as Samuel Harsnett found it almost im-
possible to reconfigure possession as a single, manageable, ontological category with
discrete explanatory power. Indeed, the assimilation of many of the elements of
witch belief into the social diagnosis of possession only underscored the relative
weakness of the state church in this aspect of the politics of knowledge production.
In contradistinction to the Anglo-Saxon situation, here it was the enemies of the
official religion who appropriated witch belief as appended to possession in order
to have the afflictions of particular demoniacs established as facts at law, to the
great chagrin of Harsnett and his ilk. In this way, the blame for possession behavior
was shifted from willful (but invisible) demons to witches, who purportedly sum-
moned and controlled the demons. This is precisely the reverse of the trend Peter
Brown has traced in Late Antique Rome, where—with the rise of Christianity—
sorcery faded as a Roman social evil, and demon possession quickly became wide-
spread: “If there is misfortune,” Brown argues, “it is divorced from a human
reference and the blame is pinned firmly on the ‘spiritual powers of evil.’”

104

this sense, early modern possession marks a return to situating conflict laterally and
directly among humans, rather than diverting it to the spiritual realm.

In both instances, then, possession is intimately linked to questions of spiritual

leadership in a relatively open market of ideas and so is a locus at which a host of
political, social, and intellectual tensions are tightly knotted together. But while
in the Anglo-Saxon case the evidence suggests that the Roman Church’s annex-
ation of possession was just the beginning of a process that saw it establish its power
as an institution homogeneously across the country, in early modern England the
official church was unable to compete in the sphere of preternatural relief. While
in the short term configuring possession as a product of human conflict between
witch and demoniac proved a defeat in the propaganda wars, shifting the realm
of debate into the courts ensured that it was left to a highly educated and in-
creasingly skeptical coterie of judges to assess the authenticity of any supernatural

104

Peter Brown, “Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the Middle

Ages,” in Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas (London, 1970), 17–45, esp. 33.

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link between witch and bewitched. Although the effect of this skepticism was slow
to trickle down the legal hierarchy, seventeenth-century judges were not always
as credulous as Judge Anderson. Indeed, it was only when the realm of diagnosis
shifted from community to the law courts that Katheren Malpas’s crude tricks and
trances were unmasked for what they were.

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