The Devils of Loudun

En savoir plus sur le livre

In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and successful seducer and priest of the parish of Loudun, was burned at the stake. He had been found guilty of causing the possession of a Prioress and her nuns by devils. Despite extreme torture he had refused to confess and four years after his death the hapless nuns were still "possessed", as was the Jesuit brought in to exorcise them. The events which led to Grandier’s horrible death began with a practical joke... or perhaps with the unhappy custom which forced women to enter the convent when what obsessed them was not the love of God, but the need for the love of a man. This is the most astonishing case of mass "possession" in history. It has all the elements of the most daring modern bestsellers: sexual frankness, malice, superstition, pain, revenge. But in Huxley's hands this is no mere recounting of sensational events. Working from contemporary sources he builds up a complete picture not only of the events at Loudun, but also of the very nature of witchcraft and possession. "I find myself captivated by the range of Mr Huxley's knowledge and his even more extraordinary intelligence" --SUNDAY TIMES Front cover shows a detail from a fifteenth-century painting by Thierry Bouts entitled: The Torments of the Damned. Musée du Louvre, on loan to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.