Histoire De Magdelaine Bavent…Avec sa Confession generale & testamentaire.
Paris, J. le Gentil 1652.
4to (208 x 157 mm.). 80p.
Later stiff vellum.
FIRST EDITION OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE NUN AT THE CENTER OF THE LOUVIERS POSSESSIONS. IT IS ONE OF ONLY TWO PERSONAL ACCOUNTS BY WOMEN DEMONIACS PRINTED IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE.
In 1642, nuns at the convent of Saint-Louis-Sainte-Élisabeth at Louviers began to exhibit signs of demonic influence. Blame converged on the convent’s current and former male spiritual directors, who were charged with inveigling the sisters into cannibalistic orgies through sorcery, and on the nun Magdelaine, who was accused of witchcraft. Under torture she admitted to participating in sabbats with the priest Thomas Boullé and his two predecessors. Boullé was burned at the stake in 1647, as was the the exhumed body of the convent’s previous confessor. Magdelaine was sentenced to life imprisonment.
WRITTEN FROM PRISON, THIS IS MAGDELAINE’S CORRECTIVE ACCOUNT OF HER LIFE composed with help from her new confessor, Charles Desmarets (1602-75). In eighteen chapters, she describes her orphaned youth, her sexual abuse at the hands of the convent’s chaplains, their promotion of diabolical practices and her persecution by her fellow nuns and the judicial system. The lurid details strain credulity; Magdelaine asks readers to use their own judgment in discerning reality from trauma-induced hallucination. Legal extracts related to the case follow her narrative. Two more editions, without imprint, appeared the same year. I locate only one copy of this edition in an American library. Light browning with occasional stains, some page numbers just shaved; stamps of the Bibliothèque du Grand Séminaire de Caen (now dispersed).
¶Michelet, La Sorciére 292-308; Vautier, “La confession de Madeleine Bavent Le témoignage direct d’une sorcière su l’affaire de Louviers (1642)” in Études Normandes 1 (2019) 14-9; Dauge-Roth, Troubling Women: Reading and Writing Possessed Bodies in Early Modern France (PhD diss., 1999) 159-76; Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France 89-112; Carr, “A Checklist of Published Writings in French by Early Modern Nuns” in The Cloister and the World 236; Coumont, Demonology and Witchcraft: An Annotated Bibliography D57.1.
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