Louviers possessions

According to historian Jules Michelet, the confessor of the establishment, probably drugged the apprentices with something like Atropa belladonna and led them to believe that he was conducting taking them to a "Sabbath".

Michelet says that the elderly supervisor, Father David, "was an 'Adamite', preaching the nudity Adam practised in his innocence", but that Madeleine declined "to submit to this strange way of living' and incurred the displeasure of her superiors.

[1] Upon Father David's death, he was succeeded as curé by Mathurin Picard, who appointed her sacristan, pursued her with amorous intentions and magic potions, and made her pregnant.

Sister Madeleine Bavent was 18 years old in 1625; the initial possession victim, she claimed to have been bewitched by the now deceased Picard, the nunnery's former director, and Father Thomas Boulle, the vicar of Louviers.

[2] Madeleine's confession prompted the investigation, which found that other nuns reported having been brought to secret sabbats by Picard and Boulle, where sexual intercourse with demons, particularly Dagon, took place.

These confessions were accompanied by what investigators believed were classic signs of demonic possession: contortions, unnatural body movements, speaking in tongues (glossolalia), obscene insults, and blasphemies.

During the exorcisms, though, parliament at Rouen passed sentence: Sister Madeleine Bavent would be imprisoned for life in the church dungeon, Father Thomas Boulle would be burnt alive, and the corpse of Mathurin Picard would be exhumed and burned.

Robert Mandrou and Jean-Martin Charcot echoed many seventeenth-century physicians and following a French school of anti-Catholic medical positivism of the nineteenth century argued that mental disorders —primarily hysteria triggered the bizarre behaviors.

"[4] Moshe Shulovsky views these instances in the context of feminine religious mysticism and notes that they tended to appear at new or recently reformed convents.