What Lady Ghostbusters Have In Common With 17th-Century Nuns

A sexy priest who had earned the enmity of Cardinal Richelieu, demon-possessed nuns, and a fiery execution: it sounds like the premise of a period swashbuckler. The story was even written up by Alexandre Dumas. But the events at Loudun really took place: in 1634, a whole convent of nuns was publicly exorcised in front of thousands of spectators, and the priest accused of bedeviling them was tortured and burned alive.

Although these particular events were unusually grim, mass possessions were a regular occurrence in early modern Europe — and they were universally mass possessions of women. Women have always fought evil spirits. Evil spirits have always tried to possess our bodies.

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The demons at Loudun inhabited many of the nuns, including the prioress, a 30-year-old woman called Jeanne des Anges. Jeanne revealed to the priory’s confessor, Father Mignon, that she and other nuns had been approached by a local priest, Urbain Grandier, in their dreams at night. He had bewitched them, Jeanne said, and allowed them to be possessed by demons; there was no other way to explain their vulgar dreams, their sexualized ravings.

Father Urbain Grandier was considered to be very handsome, and it was already rumored that he was involved with local women. He wrote and published a…