Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.

... Jacobsen, Grethe, 'Køn og magt i Danmarks senmiddelalder", i "Konge, kirke og samfund: De to øvrighedsmagter i dansk middelalder", dir. par ARNÓSDÓTTIR, Agnes S., INGESMAN, Per og POULSEN, Bjørn, Århus, Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2007. ...

... Jacobsen, Grethe, 'Køn og magt i Danmarks senmiddelalder", i "Konge, kirke og samfund: De to øvrighedsmagter i dansk middelalder", dir. par ARNÓSDÓTTIR, Agnes S., INGESMAN, Per og POULSEN, Bjørn, Århus, Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2007. ...

In this chapter the various levels of experience are scrutinized within the context of interaction with a saint, namely Saint Birgitta of Sweden. The focus lies on a case of a punishment miracle leading to demonic possession and eventually conversion to penance. The chapter combines the analysis of intimate sensorial elements, embodied enculturation, and a production of a cultural script scrutinizing how a model for experiencing was produced in the context of Vadstena Abbey’s miracle recording and later preaching.

What should we learn from another individual’s experience? What kind of narrated experiences become cultural masterplots and genres in different historical contexts? This article introduces an approach to medieval exemplary narratives of conversion that combines narrative theory and comparatist attention to the historical context and forms of narrative experientiality. We take two exempla from the sermon of the feast of the canonization of Saint Birgitta as our test case. The historical specificity of narrative didacticism is further highlighted by comparing medieval exempla with social media-fuelled stories of personal conversion-like transformation that gain representative and normative power in today’s narrative environments. Who are the saints and sinners in today’s social media didacticism? Our narrative-theoretical and comparative analysis focuses on conversion as a replicable model experience and a prototypical element of a shareable narrative. We also pay attention to the dy...

This study is an exploration of lived religion and gender across the Reformation, from the 14th–18th centuries. Combining conceptual development with empirical history, the authors explore these two topics via themes of power, agency, work, family, sainthood and witchcraft. By advancing the theoretical category of ‘experience’, Lived Religion and Gender reveals multiple femininities and masculinities in the intersectional context of lived religion. The authors analyse specific case studies from both medieval and early modern sources, such as secular court records, to tell the stories of both individuals and large social groups. By exploring lived religion and gender on a range of social levels including the domestic sphere, public devotion and spirituality, this study explains how late medieval and early modern people performed both religion and gender in ways that were vastly different from what ideologists have prescribed. Lived Religion and Gender covers a wide geographical area in western Europe including Italy, Scandinavia and Finland, making this study an invaluable resource for scholars and students concerned with the history of religion, the history of gender, the history of the family, as well as medieval and early modern European history. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license and is available here: https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781351003384_oaintroduction.pdf

In this introductory chapter Katajala-Peltomaa & Toivo analyse historiographical changes from the history of popular religion to the history of religion as lived. They lay out the framework and discuss the tradition of studying the history of experience and religion as a cultural and time-bound phenomenon. The chapter introduces three analytical levels, namely everyday experience, experience as a process and experience as a social and societal structure arguing for a situational nature of experience. The three levels of experience are approached via the concepts of cultural scripts, communities, embodiment, materiality and agency. Finally, the introduction explains the structure of the rest of the volume.

Demonic possession exposed the boundaries of normalcy by deviating from it. It was a social phenomenon jeopardizing communal peace and harmony, and communities responded to it with very concrete measures: by searching for a diagnosis and cure and by finding ways to treat the deviant during the affliction. This chapter finds that the depositions to canonization processes point rather to a nuanced, fragmented, and multifaceted negotiation of this phenomenon by the communities involved rather than to a generally accepted cultural concept of demonic possession. Fear, anger, and disgust are among the emotional responses to demonic presence, but possession was not a categorization used to marginalize members of the community who had already been deemed deviant. References to compassion can also be found, indicating an ability to feel empathy for the victims. The possessed were not inevitably ostracized; they were tolerated and finally, after a miraculous delivery, integrated back into soc...

Demons not only caused personal afflictions but were also used within wider societal debates, for example by demonizing political opponents. The sacred, the demonic, and the political were intertwined. This chapter shows how demonic presence played a part in constructing collective identity and enhancing a community’s coherence by reflecting political alliances. In the Italian context, the place of origin of the named tormentors was crucial and possession cases revealed communities’ power struggles. In the North, demonic presence and punishment miracles were politically laden acts which affirmed the position of Saint Birgitta in heavenly and earthly hierarchies. In both contexts, demons served as a means of demonstrating personal and communal subordination to a heavenly intercessor and power-holders associated with the local patron saint. By linking the tormenting spirits with political adversaries, cases of demonic possession became a device for creating collective identity and for...

In late medieval miracle narrations, women formed the majority of victims of demonic possession, even if not an exclusive category. General ideas and theories about both women’s physiology and morality facilitated their labelling as demoniacs. Women’s bodies were deemed to be more open and many normal functions of the female body were considered impure. This chapter’s structure follows the female life course, focusing on corporeality’s links with demonic presence. Menarche, (the loss of) virginity, marriage, pregnancy, and giving birth were closely linked with religiously imbued changes in social position which caused anxiety. The paucity of cases connected to signposts of physical growth and social maturing implies, however, that the link between female corporeality and sexuality and the demonic was not inevitably made in the minds of laity testifying in canonization processes. Instead, demons’ role was to give voice to fears and uncertainties when something went wrong during these...

<p>This chapter shows how demonic possession was conceptualized as a lived experience of religion and argues that the diabolical had many functions within the miraculous. Lived religion as a methodological tool, a way to read the depositions of canonization processes, displays the way lay people used demons (not vice versa) in singling out and dealing with uncertainties in their lives. Religion-as-lived was built upon corporeal experiences; the performative space religion created was made real for the individual and the community by embodied signs and practices. As a fluid rhetorical resource, demons also facilitated a contribution to the construction of society and culture. The differences between lay and clerical spheres were visible when demonic possession involved female sexuality or the position of the clergy. Geographical differences demonstrate the limits of the Church's universalizing discourse and challenge strict categorizations concerning gender, the demonic, and even medieval Europe as a single, coherent unity.</p>

<p>This chapter contextualizes the phenomenon of demonic possession and discusses its medieval interpretations as well as demonstrating its connections to fields of study such as heresy, demonology, and witchcraft. It sets out the main analytical concept of lived religion and shows how demons were integral within it, intersecting cultural, communal, and individual levels. Religion created a performative space and demonic presence was a fluid and multifaceted category within it. This chapter introduces the corpus of source material and methodological elements of canonization processes: the final records were an outcome of collaboration between lay witnesses and the inquisitorial committee, an amalgam of personal choices in the use of rhetoric, communal memories of actual past events, and the demands of canon law and the miracle genre. Therefore, depositions reveal inconsistencies in the universalizing discourse of the Church and manifest local nuances in the way people lived their religion.</p>

This chapter focuses on the reasons given for falling prey to demons; how certain behaviour, acts, and places were dangerous in this respect. The rather down-to-earth and concrete explanations given by the laity are contrasted and compared with the examples given in didactic material. In the lay depositions questions of guilt did not stand out and often no causes for possession were offered; an accidentally swallowed demon may have been a method to exculpate oneself and alleviate the deviance caused by the disturbing symptoms. A generally accepted pattern of causality did not exist since local traditions and cultural and environmental differences played a role in explaining the reasons for demonic presence. Comparative analysis shows, for example, that the spiritual dangers of the wilderness and urban spaces were more emphasized as background reasons in the densely populated urban areas of Northern and Central Italy than in the rural North.

The sacred and the diabolical were binary forces but, for that reason, they were inherently intertwined and even necessary for each other’s existence. The interaction between the sacred and the diabolical was a crucial part of the lived religion of the participants and an essential element in miraculous deliveries from demonic possession. All the participating groups, namely demons, their victims, co-pilgrims, and the clergy, were needed in this process to affirm the cosmological hierarchy. Exorcism rituals do not stand out in the depositions, but clergy could claim an intermediary role in attaining divine grace. Especially, demons’ speech and tribulations and participants’ sensory elements certifying demons’ exit affirmed the powers of the sacred. In the communal negotiations, affirmation of the sanctity of the local intercessor and the sacredness of his or her shrine was the hoped-for outcome of demonic presence.

Child witnesses played a very important role in the Swedish witchcraft cases on 1660s and 1670s. This article analyses how they developed their testimonies/stories in the interplay with the members of the court and with other children. The judicial process, hearings and opinions of the adults had an impact on the children’s stories. However, they were not strong enough to dispel the children’s own interpretations in which they mixed freely different kinds of cultural elements and images.

The roles of popes, saints, and crusaders were inextricably intertwined in the Middle Ages: papal administration was fundamental in the making and promulgating of new saints and in financing crusades, while crusaders used saints as propaganda to back up the authority of popes, and even occasionally ended up being sanctified themselves. Yet, current scholarship rarely treats these three components of medieval faith together. This book remedies that by bringing together scholars to consider the links among the three and the ways that understanding them can help us build a more complete picture of the working of the church and Christianity in the Middle Ages.