LE NORMANT, Jean

by Jean Le Normant

£2,450 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition, published simultaneously at Paris by Nicolas Buon, and a French translation in two volumes, entitled Histoire Veritable et Memorable de ce qui c est pass é sous l exorcisme de trois filles possed ées es pa√Øs de Flandre also published by Olivier de Varennes. The latin edition is even rarer than the French, itself very rare. Extremely interesting accounts of the diabolic possession and exorcisms of the Nuns of the Monastery of St. Brigitte in Lille in 1613, conducted by the Dominican inquisitor Sebatien Micha√´lis and recounted by his disciple Le Normant. Michaelis was vice-inquisitor in Avignon during the 1580s and was involved in a number of witch trials: a series of cases in 1581 and 1582 led to eighteen women being convicted and burnt. In 1587 he published a work on demons, the Pneumalogie ou discours des esprits . By 1610 he was prior of the Dominican community at Saint-Maxim near Aix-en-Provence where he was later involved in one of the most notorious witch trials, and cases of demonic possession, in the history of France, that of the priest Louis Gaufridi, who was convicted of sorcery, tortured and burnt, on the evidence of a nun possessed by the devil. The present work is even more extravagant in the details it gives than Michaelis account of the Louis Gaufridi possessions of nuns in Aix. It bears extraordinary and most detailed witness to the immense pressure, both moral and physical, the nuns were subjected to when they were pressed to confess that the

• Binding: Hardcover

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