Abstract
In 1582 Elena Crusichi, known as ‘la Draga’, appeared for the second time before the Inquisition. Elena was a well-known healer in Venice, and in her earlier trial in 1571 she had spoken openly and expansively to her examiners about the invocations and rituals she used to cure those who came to her for her help.1 To us, the most striking thing about Elena was her claim that she was possessed. Indeed, it was from one of her spirits — ‘the dragon’ — that she derived her nickname. ‘I am called “la Draga”,’ she told the Inquisition, ‘because I have a spirit called “il Drago” (“the dragon”) in my body.’2 The possession was not an easy matter for Elena, even if the spirit that inhabited her also invested her with preternatural powers. On one occasion after receiving communion, she told the Inquisition, ‘this awful beast which I have on me gives me so much pain that I feel like I am finished. He eats my guts and destroys my legs, my throat and he takes my memory and he does not let me eat and he wishes to kill me and I hide the knife.’3 Having taken the body of Christ into her own, Elena seemed to be saying, the demon that had possessed her felt threatened and took revenge. Clearly, unlike many of the other figures we have encountered in this book, Elena’s was a universe in which the body failed to serve as a barrier between her internal and her external self — rather it was porous flesh through which spirits, good and evil, could pass. And the demons within her made it possible for her to make some sense of her physical suffering, her otherwise inexplicable loss of memory, and her troubling desire to take her own life.
I would like to propose, not the death of the author, but the dissolution of the ‘demonologist.’
Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, 1997
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Notes
Carlo Ginzburg, The Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 8.
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France’ in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 53–63
David Gentilcore, ‘The Ethnography of Everyday Life’ in Early Modern Italy, ed. John A. Marino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 202–5.
Jeffrey B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).
Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Late Antiquity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 107.
Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum, ed. M. Summers, trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), p. 106.
Peter Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ in his Ethics in Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 8–50
Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987), p. 57.
Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 433–8
Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 11–30.
Peter Burke, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico and his Strix’, in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 32–50.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), p. 493.
Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons; Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Menghi’s Latin texts on exorcism and possession include the Flagellum daemonum, exorcismos terribles, potentissimos, et efficaces (Venice: Apud I. V. Sauionum, 1644)
Alessio Porri, Antidotario contro li demoni, nel quale si trotta come entrano ne’ corpi humani (Venice: R. Megietti, 1601)
Zaccaria Visconti, Complementum artis exorcisticae (Venice: Francisum Barilettum, 1600)
Tomaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 493–8.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’ in Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 94–128.
Moshe Sluhovsky, ‘A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenty-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 1039–56
Cecilia Ferrazzi, Autobiogra la di una santa mancata, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1990)
Giancarlo Volpato, ‘Girolamo Menghi, o Dell’arte escorcista’, Lares 57 (1991): 381–97.
Garry Wills, Venice, Lion City: The Religion of Empire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 69–71.
Daniela Bohde, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern Culture, eds Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 32.
Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1–33.
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© 2004 John Jeffries Martin
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Martin, J.J. (2004). Possessions. In: Myths of Renaissance Individualism. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-53575-6_5
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