Counsel And Command in Early Modern English Thought

In 1993 in the state of Victoria, Australia, four people went on trial for the manslaughter of a woman, Joan Vollmer. The four accused said she had died during their attempts to control and expel violent devils, which they claimed had taken over her body. To defend this use of force against ‘demonic’ resistance, the counsel for the accused referred the court to a seventeenth-century account of authorised Catholic exorcisms in France. The account was written in 1635 by a young English Anglican playwright, Thomas Killigrew, who had travelled to France with a Catholic friend to visit the town of Loudun, in Poitou.