Demonic possession and poetic exorcism in early modern france

Abstract

New Historicist critics have recently drawn our attention to the errant nature of historiographical production. Michel de Certeau has reminded us that history refers both to a reality and a closed discourse. Stephen Greenblatt too considers mobility to be central to the historiographical method, noting that since Herodotus historical authority has been legitimized by eyewitness accounts of foreign lands and peoples. This essay will reconsider the vagaries of history in two sixteenth-century French documentations of demonic possessions. It will explore the role of gender and mimesis in these accounts and the means by which demonic ventriloquism is tied to the performance of power. Literary portrayals of witches and the demonic in works by Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’ Aubigné will further illustrate the uses of traditional gender topoi to figure the foreign and subversive in a time of religious conflict and social change.