came known as "tarantism." Though it continued much longer than the
corresponding manifestations in northern Europe, by the beginning of
the eighteenth century it had nearly disappeared; and, though special
manifestations of it on a small scale still break out occasionally, its
main survival is the "tarantella," which the traveller sees danced at
Naples as a catchpenny assault upon his purse.(389)

(389) See Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-104; also
extracts and observations in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, London,
1888, pp. 321-315; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 73 and
following.

But, long before this form of "possession" had begun to disappear, there
had arisen new manifestations, apparently more inexplicable. As the
first great epidemics of dancing and jumping had their main origin in a
religious ceremony, so various new forms had their principal source in
what were supposed to be centres of religious life--in the convents, and
more especially in those for women.

Out of many examples we may take a few as typical.

In the fifteenth century the chroniclers assure us that, an inmate of
a German nunnery having been seized with a passion for biting her
companions, her mania spread until most, if not all, of her fellow-nuns
began to bite each other; and that this passion for biting passed from
convent to convent into other parts of Germany, into Holland, and even
across the Alps into Italy.

So, too, in a French convent, when a nun began to mew like a cat,
others began mewing; the disease spread, and was only checked by severe
measures.(390)

(390) See citation from Zimmermann's Solitude, in Carpenter, pp. 34,
314.

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation gave new force to
witchcraft persecutions in Germany, the new Church endeavouring to show
that in zeal and power she exceeded the old. But in France influential
opinion seemed not so favourable to these forms of diabolical influence,
especially after the publication of Montaigne's Essays, in 1580, had
spread a sceptical atmosphere over many leading minds.

In 1588 occurred in France a case which indicates the growth of this
sceptical tendency even in the higher regions of the french Church,
In that year Martha Brossier, a country girl, was, it was claimed,
possessed of the devil. The young woman was to all appearance under
direct Satanic influence. She roamed about, begging that the demon
might be cast out o