Demonic Possession and Symptoms of Furor

The most obvious place to begin an investigation of demons and mental ill­ness in miracle stories is with the condition most commonly associated with behavioural disorders in religious texts: demonic possession.

One twelfth-century hagiographer with a fondness for recording incidents of demonic possession is the Norwich monk, Thomas of Monmouth. Thomas’s Miraculi Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis describes the miraculous cures of pilgrims visiting the tomb of the contemporary boy-martyr, William of Norwich, and includes five cases of possession. One of these is an example typical of the generic form. It features Ebrard the Fisher who, ‘vexed by an unclean spirit’ (immundo vexatus spiritu), is dragged to William’s tomb with his hands tied and his feet locked in iron shackles?⁴ The narrative includes a heart-stopping moment in which Ebrard’s hands accidently come loose and the possessed man ‘savagely tore with teeth and nails all whom he could touch’.^{[661] [662] [663] [664] However, Ebrard’s bonds are soon re-tied, and all is made safe. Ebrard is said to have spent the night beside William’s tomb in the cathedral church, ceaselessly uttering nonsense and blasphemies, until around dawn when he falls asleep and is miraculously cured?6}

The figure of the raging demoniac had populated saints’ lives and miracle stories since the time of Augustine, although the twelfth-century laity may have been more familiar with the Gospel archetype on which the hagio- graphical model was based?⁷ Like the Gerasene demoniac of Mark’s gospel (Mk.

In the Gospels and early western hagiography, possessed behaviour is usu­ally attributed to unclean spirits rather than to illness?⁸ By the twelfth century, however, something rather interesting seems to be happening to the demonic stereotype: it begins to acquire a more pronounced medical gloss. This process can be discerned in a second of Thomas’s stories concerning a woman named Sieldeware who was brought by her friends to William’s shrine at Norwich. Many of the details are reminiscent of the Ebrard story. Sieldeware, too, is described as being possessed by an evil spirit and is dragged, struggling, into the cathedral where she also makes a bid to escape. At the tomb the raging woman tears at her bonds, drums her feet on the ground, and fills the church with nonsensical cries. There is, however, one major difference from the previ­ous story: Thomas of Monmouth informs us that this particular demoniac is suffering from insania. Unlike Ebrard, Sieldeware is not simply the victim of a malicious spirit, she is a sufferer of illness as well.^[665]

Insania is by far the commonest form of mental abnormality identified by name in the narratives in the present survey. The word derives from the Latin translation of the Greek word mania, a condition originally encompassing many different types of mental disturbance. Although insania refers to a range of irrational behaviours in miracle accounts, the term is most frequently asso­ciated with excessive uncontrollability and dissociative behaviour: symptoms which later health professionals would refer to as ‘manic’, and as resulting from an imbalance of yellow bile.^[666]

Another frequently occurring term, closely associated with insania in the texts, isfuror, and this appears in a third example from the miracula of William of Norwich.

Furor seems to have emerged as a medical term in the Roman period, when it was used either as an alternative to, or to denote a more severe form of, insania.2³ Outside the medical corpus, however, furor (fury) had connotations of great passion, anger and bloodlust. Cicero, for example, considered furor to be a moral failing of the soul against which the good Stoic should strive?⁴ In classical literature, furor was also the form of madness sent by the gods, often diametrically opposed to pietas. Fittingly, for Christian purposes, thefuriosus— one possessed by ‘fury’—implied a person punished by the gods, with mad­ness, for their sins. It is likely that the classical spirits of retribution, the Furies, evolved into Christian body-and-soul hijacking demons in medieval hagiog­raphy. In this respect, it is entirely apt that sinners in miracle collections are often struck down with furor after incurring God’s wrath by committing ‘reli­gious’ offences such as apostasy and sacrilege.^{[667] [668] [669] In short, the dramatic, heroic, moral and religious associations of the pseudo-medical term furor must have made it an exceptionally appealing choice for medieval hagiographers whose miracle accounts were governed by a strong religious and moral rationale.}

Thomas of Monmouth, then, occasionally embellished his stories of demonic possession by adding a subtle medical twist to the basic Gospel tem­plate.

The medicalization of possession stories, exemplified in Thomas of Monmouth’s miracle collection, seems to be especially prominent from the middle of the twelfth century. Medical terms are sometimes tacked, often somewhat clumsily, onto more conventional narratives such as in the Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, a lenghy collection dated to c.1177 and popu­larly attributed to Reginald of Duram. Here, the hagiographer concludes some of his possession stories with the formula ‘he was freed from the demon’ but then adds, as if for good measure, ‘and from insania.’^[670] Other hagiographers at this time present demonic possession notjust as a type of madness, but also as a secondary condition brought on by mental illness. The author of the Liber Eliensis, for example, explains what happens to Richard, a visitor to Ely. For want of ‘mental nourishment’ (victus mentibus), Richard incurs a bout of insanity (vesania mentis), which in turn causes him to become ‘a complete demoniac’ (totus demoniacus)?^[671] This effectively hints at a natural, rather than a supernatural, aetiology for possession.