L’Autobiographie de Jeanne des Anges (1644) : histoire d’une âme ou réécriture d’une affaire de possession ?

Abstract

In the numerous accounts of demonic possessions in the first half of the 17th century in France, the exorcists and the historians, in their capacity as spectators and sensible hermeneuts, are generally given the opportunity to speak about the torments of the possessed. The latter remain essentially passive, feminine objects, deprived of any voice. By giving her own account of the famous case of mass possession in Loudun in her Autobiography, written around 1644, the Ursuline nun Jeanne des Anges, also the main victim of the demons (in this case), seems to submit to the code of obedience which allows her, as a religious and possessed woman, to take up her pen. Though she resorts to a genre traditionally reserved for demonic history, she paradoxically uses it to recover her own voice and assert the legitimacy of her personal, feminine spiritual experience in the face of sanctioned ecclesiastical and historic authorities, thus emancipating herself from normal conventual life and endowing herself with a mystical, sanctifying aura.