ABSTRACT
The case of possession at Loudun did not appear out of the blue; in fact, four important cases can be seen as precedents. The first occurred in 1566 near Laon, in northern France. A sixteen-year-old girl, Nicole Obry, was said to be possessed by as many as thirty devils, primarily by one identified as Beelzebub. For two months, she was exorcised almost daily in front of large crowds on public stages constructed first within the church at Vervins and then at the cathedral of Laon. The principal tool employed by the exorcists was the Eucharist, a technique uncharacteristic of the contemporary procedures of exorcism defined in the Malleus Malejiearum (Sprenger and Kramer, 1486/1968); the exorcists apparently intended to convert the Huguenots, or at least confute them, by demonstrating the Real Presence in the consecrated Host. Certainly, the public dialogues between the exorcists and the demon Beelzebub residing within Nicole Obry vindicated several Catholic practices and beliefs that the Protestants attacked as superstitions: transubstantiation, the veneration of relics, the use of holy water, the signing of the cross, and the power of names (Walker, 1981, p. 23).
