hat fifty or a hundred years
earlier would have been the centre of a widespread epidemic of
possession was isolated, and hindered from producing a national
calamity.

In the following year this healthful growth of scepticism continued.
Fourteen persons had been condemned to death for sorcery, but public
opinion was strong enough to secure a new examination by a special
commission, which reported that "the prisoners stood more in need of
medicine than of punishment," and they were released.(391)

(391) For the Brossier case, see Clameil, La Folie, tome i, livre 3,
c. 2. For the cases at Tours, see Madden, Phantasmata, vol. i, pp. 309,
310.

But during the seventeenth century, the clergy generally having exerted
themselves heroically to remove this "evil heart of unbelief" so largely
due to Montaigne, a theological reaction was brought on not only in
France but in all parts of the Christian world, and the belief in
diabolic possession, though certainly dying, flickered up hectic, hot,
and malignant through the whole century. In 1611 we have a typical case
at Aix. An epidemic of possession having occurred there, Gauffridi,
a man of note, was burned at the stake as the cause of the trouble.
Michaelis, one of the priestly exorcists, declared that he had driven
out sixty-five hundred devils from one of the possessed. Similar
epidemics occurred in various parts of the world.(392)

(392) See Dagron, chap. ii.

Twenty years later a far more striking case occurred at Loudun, in
western France, where a convent of Ursuline nuns was "afflicted by
demons."

The convent was filled mainly with ladies of noble birth, who, not
having sufficient dower to secure husbands, had, according to the common
method of the time, been made nuns.

It is not difficult to understand that such an imprisonment of a
multitude of women of different ages would produce some woeful effects.
Any reader of Manzoni's Promessi Sposi, with its wonderful portrayal of
the feelings and doings of a noble lady kept in a convent against
her will, may have some idea of the rage and despair which must have
inspired such assemblages in which pride, pauperism, and the attempted
suppression of the instincts of humanity wrought a fearful work.

What this work was may be seen throughout the Middle Ages; but it is
especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we find it
frequently taking shape in outbursts of diabolic possession.(393)