The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints (The Middle Ages Series)

Prologue Although the editor chose to entitle the text, Ermine's confessor Jean le Graveur composed __The Visions of Ermine de Reims__. Jean himself refers to Ermine's experiences mostly as adventures (__aventures__). __Adventure__ means literally "things that happen to us," and this term truly captures the happenings in this peculiar text. The word __adventure__ also evokes medieval romances, of course, texts in which realistic and supernatural elements had coexisted for centuries. One only has to think of the Arthurian romances and those dealing with the Holy Grail to understand how a medieval audience may have reacted to the term __aventures__. But in truth, Ermine's experiences were so unusual that both the editor of the __Visions__ and the German scholar Paul Gerhard Schmidt agree that she and what her confessor wrote about her were "unique" in the fourteenth century. No other holy woman, Schmidt states, was frightened at such length and to such an extent as poor Ermine. Indeed, Ermine being battered and mocked by demons ceaselessly for the last ten months of her life (interspersed with a few divinely sent revelations and consolations) is the gist of .the __Visions__. A reader cannot help but ask what the matter was with Ermine. Was she mad? Was she ill? Did she suffer from hallucinations? Frameworks Of course, it is hard to resist the desire to diagnose a case like Ermine's. If I wanted to practice retrospective medicine, I would consult Dr. Sacks and ask him to examine Ermine in the framework of hallucinatory states. Since many of Ermine's experiences involved apparitions and voices just when she was about to or had just gone to sleep, one might be tempted to describe them as "hypnagogic hallucinations," that is, those that occur on the threshold of sleep. Sacks quotes Andreas Mavromatis's 1991 study that tells of a man in 1886 who reported seeing "animals that have no fellows in creation, diabolical looking," thus repeating centuries of visions that fill hagiographical accounts from antiquity to modern times. Mavromatis defines hypnagogia as "the unique state between consciousness and sleep," which has some similarities with "dreams, meditations, trance." Anyone who has studied medieval visions knows how difficult it is to distinguish between these different states. Ariel Glucklich rightly notes that over the centuries "the Church had struggled to distinguish between mystical experience and various forms of 'insanity,' such as epilepsy, possession, humoral imbalance, and others." For quite a long time scholars had accepted the idea, popularized by Gregory Zilboorg in his 1941 __History of Medical Psychology__, that all medieval people considered mental illness a form of diabolic possession and that the only "treatment" was exorcism or even death. Thirty years later Jerome Kroll debunked this idea in a by-now classic article. He showed that most often mentally ill people were seen as such and treated more or less compassionately by the society of their time. He also argued that what we might consider extreme "pathological behavior" today was often accepted as "normal, if possibly peculiar" in the fourteenth century and that what really mattered was the "the determination of whether the behavior was in the service of Christ or in the service of Satan." Jean le Graveur and his superiors were thus aware that the kinds of behavior Ermine exhibited and the ways in which she reported the relentless demonic torments inflicted on her could be considered from a number of different perspectives: Ermine could suffer from demonic possession and/or mental illness or else enjoy a divinely sanctioned state of grace. In late nineteenth-century France, Jean-Martin Charcot, the famous psychiatrist, faced a similar interpretive dilemma. Charcot was treating women whose symptoms and behavior recalled that of their medieval sisters, but as Cristina Mazzoni observes, "With Charcot, then, phenomena that had previously been regarded (though not always without suspicion) as manifestations of the supernatural—be it the divine supernatural, as in the case of mysticism, or the demonic supernatural, as in the case of sorcery or possession by the devil—were systematically reinterpreted with a new and powerful hermeneutic tool: the concept of neurosis and, preeminently, of hysteria." Charcot thus faced the same quandary as Ermine's contemporaries had faced and found the solution in a new definition of hysteria and the invention of what he believed were appropriate treatments. The Plan of This Book

In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last ten months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was attacked by animals, beaten and kidnapped by devils in disguise, and exposed to carnal spectacles; on other nights, she was blessed by saints, even visited by the Virgin Mary. She confessed these strange occurrences to an Augustinian friar known as Jean le Graveur, who recorded them all in vivid detail.

Was Ermine a saint in the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders answers to these questions in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's experiences. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's life in fourteenth-century Reims, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented by translated excerpts from Jean's account, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims brings to life an episode that helped precipitate one of the major clerical controversies of late medieval Europe, revealing surprising truths about the era's conceptions of piety and possession.

In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last ten months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was attacked by animals, beaten and kidnapped by devils in disguise, and exposed to carnal spectacles; on other nights, she was blessed by saints, even visited by the Virgin Mary. She confessed these strange occurrences to an Augustinian friar known as Jean le Graveur, who recorded them all in vivid detail. Was Ermine a saint in the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders answers to these questions in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's experiences. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's life in fourteenth-century Reims, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented by translated excerpts from Jean's account, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims brings to life an episode that helped precipitate one of the major clerical controversies of late medieval Europe, revealing surprising truths about the era's conceptions of piety and possession. In 1395, a poor and illiterate French woman began to experience nightly visions of devils and angels. Was she a saint, a witch, an impostor, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks for answers in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's life and times. In 1395, a poor and illiterate French woman began to experience nightly visions of devils and angels. Was she a saint, a witch, an impostor, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks for answers in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's life and times. Contents 5 Prologue 7 Chapter 1. Ermine and Her World 13 Chapter 2. Ermine and Her Confessor, Jean le Graveur 39 Chapter 3. Ermine’s Piety and Devotional Practices 70 Chapter 4. Ermine and Her Demons 108 Chapter 5. Ermine and the Discernment of Spirits 139 Epilogue 163 Appendix. The Visions of Ermine de Reims 169 Notes 199 Bibliography 227 Index 241 A 241 B 241 C 241 D 242 E 242 F 242 G 242 H 243 I 243 J 243 K 243 L 243 M 243 N 244 O 244 P 244 Q 244 R 244 S 244 T 244 U 244 V 244 W 245 X 245 Y 245 Z 245 Acknowledgments 247