Maus de Rolley, Thibaut. Moi, Louis Gaufridy, ayant soufflé plus de mille femmes. Une confession de sorcier au XVIIe siècle

In 1609, Madeleine de Demandolx, a young Ursuline nun, was praying in Sainte-Claire Church in Aix-en-Provence when she collapsed, trembling.Following this crisis, her condition only worsened as she began to suffer from incapacitating bouts of convulsions accompanied by visions.It was not long before the cause of her suffering was determined to be demonic possession, which then spread to other nuns in her convent, with blame soon falling on Louis Gaufridy, a priest from Marseille, subsequently accused of witchcraft.In the course of his trial, Gaufridy confessed to having bewitched Madeleine de Demandolx, her mother, and "more than a thousand women" by breathing on them.If some demons could exist as a breath of air (spiritus in Latin and pneuma in Greek), they could thus be exhaled by Gaufridy and inhaled by his victims.Gaufridy further confessed to having practised demonic magic (which he learned from books given to him by his uncle), participated in the orgies and devilries of the sabbat, and signed a pact with the devil, who subsequently granted him the power to "souffler" with aphrodisiac breath.On the basis of this confession, which was used as proof of guilt in his trial, Gaufridy was condemned for witchcraft and burned alive on 20 April 1611.The broad arc of this scandal foreshadowed what would take place in Loudun in the 1630s and Louviers in the 1640s, with the highly theatrical spectacle of public exorcisms, possessed nuns from aristocratic families, demonic voices and writings, and the figure of the priest-witch: causes clbres attracting broad public attention, including from intellectuals and members of the court.The scandalous events in Aix became a media sensation, circulated in pamphlets and retold in novella collections, as publishers found a market for "true crime fiction" straddling and crisscrossing the lines between news, predication, and storytelling.This is the fertile field of inquiry examined by Thibaut Maus de Rolley, who takes his title from an anonymous pamphlet titled Confession faicte par messire Louis Gaufridi printed by Jean Tholosan in 1611 and purporting to relate the confession Gaufridy made to two priests in his prison cell.Maus de Rolley examines the Confession alongside several other archival works

Art · Confession (law) · Humanities · Political science · Law · Social Policies and Family