Medicine in the Middle Ages: Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. MinorDupouy, Edmond
History
Medicine in the Middle Ages: Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. Minor
Dupouy, Edmond
Medicine, Medieval
Bodin, in his “Demonomania” gives the observation of Jeanne Hervillier,
who was burned alive, by sentence of the Parliament of Paris. She
confessed to her Judges, that she had been presented to the Devil, by
her grandmother, at the age of twelve years. “A Devil in the form of a
large black man, who dressed in a black suit and rode a black horse.
This Devil had carnal intercourse with her, the same as men have with
women, only without seed. This sin had been continued every ten, or
fifteen days, even after she married and slept with her husband.”
This same author reports many instances of the same kind. Among others,
that of Madelaine de la Croix, Abbess of a nunnery in Spain, who went
to Pope Paul III., confessing, that from the age of twelve years,
she had relations with a demon, _in the form of a Moor_, and, that
for more than thirty years this commerce had been continued. Bodin
firmly believes, that this nun had been presented to Satan, “_from
the belly of her mother_,” and affirms that “such copulations are
neither illusions, nor diseases.” In his work, he also gives extracts
of the interrogatories put to the Sorcerers of Longni, in the presence
of Adrien de Fer, Lieutenant General of Laon. These sorcerers were
condemned to be burnt at the stake, for having commerce with incubi.
He mentions Marguerite Bremond, who avowed that she had been led off
one evening, by her own mother, to a reunion of Demons, and “found in
this place six devils in human shape, but hideous to behold. After the
demon dance was finished, the devils returned to the couches with the
girls, and one cohabited with her for the space of half an hour, but
she escaped conception, as he was seedless.”
One of the distinctive characters of demons, was their infectious
stink, which exhaled from all portions of the body. This odor
attributed to the Devil was an hallucination to the sense of smell
which entered, like those of the genesic sense, into all the complex
hallucinations of Demonomania.
Examples of men cohabiting with demons, are cited by many authors of
the Middle Ages. Gregory of Tours has left us the record of Eparchius,
Bishop of Auvergne, who cohabited with succubi.
Jerome Cardan, physician and Italian mathematician, tells of a priest
who cohabited for over fifty years, with a demon disguised as a woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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