ABSTRACT
In the 1630s, when Marie de !'Incarnation was beginning to think about establishing an Ursuline mission in Canada, the Ursuline order was gaining notoriety in France in quite another manner. The case of Jeanne des Anges, a nun belonging to the order in Loudun, 40 kilometers southwest of Marie's hometown of Tours, and the prolonged "diabolic possession" of which she was the principal victim, was the most publicized witchcraft episode of its day. Visitors traveled from all over Europe to Loudun to observe the public exorcisms of the nuns and decide for themselves on the authenticity of the case. On 18 August 1634, the Jesuit priest Urbain Grandier was burned alive in the town square after having been convicted of witchcraft in connection with the nuns' possession. His case became a cause celebre among the more progressive and cartesian-minded in France and England, and inspired a flurry of printed works debating this late chapter in the "witch craze" that had infected Europe since the early part of the sixteenth century. 1
Marie de !'Incarnation and Jeanne des Anges met each other on one occasion in 1638. Their encounter was memorable for Marie, as she tells it in her Relation de 1654. Her description seems to sum up the extreme differences in character in the two women, and foretell their contrasting styles of selfpresentation. For a number of years, Marie writes, she was periodically troubled by nightmare visions of the devil, visions that had begun when she first heard about the Loudun possessions. In 1638, she had a conversation about these visions with Jeanne des Anges, who by this time was "cured" and was being held up to the public as a spectacular example of successful dispossession. Marie writes that when she told Jeanne of her visions, Jeanne replied that often the devil had provoked similar dreams in her exorcists.
