Deliverance From Demonic Covenants And Curses

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.

This is a highly original study of possession by demons and their exorcism, which was rife in early modern times, focussing on the place where they were most prevalent, France. Catholics at the time believed that the devil was present everywhere, in the rise of the heretics, in the activities of witches, and even in the bodies of the pious young women.