Moshe Sluhovsky Research Articles

Review: Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present, edited by Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Christian Wiese

Review: Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present, edited by Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Christian Wiese

Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present ed. by Irene Aue-Ben-David et al.

Reviewed by: Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present ed. by Irene Aue-Ben-David et al. Darrell Jodock Jews and Protestants: From the Reformation to the Present. Edited by Irene Aue-Ben-David, Aya Elyada, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Christian Wiese. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020. viii + 280 pp. In recent years, Luther's harsh teachings against the Jews have received a good deal of attention, as have Nazi appeals to Luther and the response(s) of the church in Germany. Less attention has been given to Protestant-Jewish relations from the Reformation to the present. Drawing on lectures from a conference in Israel in 2017, this book endeavors to fill this gap. Its thirteen essays, written by scholars from Germany, Israel, England, Canada, the United States, and the Czech Republic, examine developments from the Reformation and post-Reformation era, the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nazi years, and the decades following the Holocaust. Although the book does not offer a unified narrative, the articles are arranged chronologically and convey a sense of historical development. It has a helpful introduction and benefits from a detailed index. One valuable feature is that, in addition to Protestant views of Judaism, the book discusses Jewish attitudes toward the Reformation and how those attitudes changed. The opening chapter, for example, examines "The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern German Jewry." The Jewish community, it argues, was not isolated. It absorbed changes in communal organization and educational priorities, while at the same time resisting those influences that conflicted with its communal and historical concerns. The next chapter observes that Jews focused on Luther's earlier (1523) view [End Page 104] of the Jews and appreciated how the Protestant movement reduced the power of Roman Catholicism. They found affinity with the Protestants' rejection of (what both perceived as) worship of the saints. In the nineteenth century there was a tendency among German Jews to view Luther as a forerunner of the Enlightenment and its tolerance. Among Protestants, "only in the 1830s, following the first modern edition of Luther's writings, did Luther's anti-Jewish writings gain renewed attention" (7). Later, during the Second Reich, Luther came to be viewed as the German national hero who mobilized his people against their enemies. A more völkisch-racist understanding of German-ness emerged. The goal of integration was replaced by more sharply drawn lines of separation. The diversity of topics and approaches makes identifying a single theme difficult, but one clear impression is the complexity of attitudes. So, for example, the clergy who wrote articles in American Protestant periodicals in 1938 "fought against anti-Semitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without slipping into the language of enduring anti-Jewish prejudices" (227) and not without giving their primary concern to the persecution of Christians. One of the more interesting topics in the book is its discussion of the Pietists. They tended to follow Luther's earlier approach, which Professors Sluhovsky and Elyada characterize in the book's introduction as instructing "Jews kindly and carefully in Scripture, according to its 'true Christian' (namely Lutheran) understanding," and allowing "the Jewish minority to integrate into Christian society, as a means of exposing them to Christian belief and way of life" (4). In order to approach Jews effectively, the Pietists "equipped their evangelists with knowledge of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture" (92). This prompted them to do what had not often happened among Christians earlier: they paid attention to lived Judaism, including its culture and languages and its diversity. They wrote reports regarding their encounters. One discovery was the extensive poverty among the Jews. This prompted the Pietists to advocate for improved civil and economic opportunities for the Jews as well as defending them against libel. The Pietists also translated the Bible into Yiddish, as a kind of "scripture alone" for Jews. Previous translations were [End Page 105] available but were overly literal and included a lot of Midrashim. Although the Pietists regarded Christianity to be superior to Judaism, they "proposed a non-supercessionist [sic] understanding of the Jews," most often perceiving them "as a people carrying a special mission" (102). Jewish leaders...

Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. Moshe Sluhovsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xii + 216 pp. $45.

Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. Moshe Sluhovsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xii + 216 pp. $45.

Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. By Moshe Sluhovsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xi + 215 pp. $45.00 hardcover.

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Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe ed. by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Tamar Herzig

Reviewed by: Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe ed. by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Tamar Herzig Maria Ivanova Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig. (New York: Palgrave, an imprint of Macmillan. 2015. Pp. xii, 250. $100.00. ISBN 978-1-137-44748-7.) Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “The Mouth of Truth,” adorning the cover of the book under review, depicts an adulterous wife at court who escapes perjury by devising a clever plan. Having asked her lover to dress as a Fool, she puts her hand in the mouth of a lion’s statue—the early-modern “lie detector”—and simultaneously touches her disguised lover, claiming that she has never touched anyone except her husband and that Fool. In July 2015, the earlier version of this painting was sold at Sotheby’s for the record sum of $14.3 million. Yet the monetary value [End Page 834] of this artistic exploration of ambiguity surrounding seemingly truthful utterances is only secondary to the ever-growing academic and public interest in the phenomena of dissimulation and lies, reticence and evasion, to the interplay between concealment and transparency, as well as their impact on our social, political, and religious life. The impeccably chosen visual imagery for the cover predisposes the reader to engage in conversation about a fascinating subject of simulation (pretense, feigning, deceit) and dissimulation (concealment) in the early-modern era—the age, as Jorge Flores puts it, of “fake science and alchemical fraud, of forgers and swindlers, of tricks and lies, of blurred lines between the real and imagined, true and false” (p. 184). Edited by prominent Israeli historians Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig, this volume assembles twelve essays, originating in a 2012 international conference held in Tel Aviv. The essays are incredibly well put together and can be read as a cohesive whole. An extensive bibliography at the end is a valuable addition. This book explores techniques and strategies of dissimulation within all social strata: professional beggars (Moshe Sluhovsky), common folk, artisans (Monica Martinat), diplomats (Giorgio Rota), academics (Vincenzo Lavenia), and philosophers (Giorgio Caravale). It also covers an impressive time period: from the examination of the discourse on religious falsity in the fifteenth century (Michael D. Bailey) to the narratives of feigned sanctity in the eighteenth century (Adelisa Malena). Special emphasis is put on the problem of questioning and establishing authenticity—of holiness manifested in stigmata (Tamar Herzig) or of demonic possession (Guido Dall’Olio). The question of identity—“mixed,” “hybrid,” “multifaceted”—is placed in the forefront. Acknowledging an undeniable rapport between the proclivity to engage in certain shady and ambiguous activities—“personal propensity towards secrecy” (p. 166)—and deceit, the authors do not fall into the trap of reducing this whole gamut of motivations to deceive to a psychological portrait of an individual. Indeed, one of the book’s great achievements is an inclusive interpretation of possible motives for dissimulation. Although some (usually, lower classes) had to practice dissimulation to survive or adjust “to satisfy the ideological requirements of authorities” (p. 76), contributors to the volume also present an alternative, nonexpedient interpretation of dissimulation. In this perspective, dissimulation is a specific “way of thinking” (p. 36), often accompanied by a “complete rethinking of . . . religious choices” (p. 53). In other words, the very character of theological ideas of early-modern literati, as well as fluidity in their literary self-fashioning and self-representation, brought about their concealment practices. Dissimulation and Deceit dismantles the rigid framework of the binary approach to dissimulation, based on the oppositions “truth versus lie” or “moral versus immoral.” Readers will be pushed “to discover how much more aggressive than all impostors put together were those attempting to impose a single truth and a pure unmixed identity on every person among their contemporaries” (p. 7). [End Page 835] This volume is a true milestone in tracing, mapping, and conceptualizing the culture of lying and dissimulation in the premodern era. It ranks in importance with works by Delio Cantimori, Carlo Ginzburg, Perez Zagorin, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, and Jon Snyder and goes further by introducing new names of dissemblers and opening new research perspectives. This seminal book will...

The Global Reach of the Inquisition and the Global Reach of the Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione

The Global Reach of the Inquisition and the Global Reach of the Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione by Moshe Sluhovsky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Comparative Inquisitions

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent (review)

Reviewed by: The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent Moshe Sluhovsky The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent. By Jeffrey R. Watt. [Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe, Vol. 12.] (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 300. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-580-46298-3.) In 1636, a group of Poor Clares in the convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi, Italy, became possessed by demons. Their travails lasted until 1639, when the last possessed nun recovered. In his monograph The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent, Jeffrey R. Watt offers a microhistorical analysis of this case. Using the records of the investigation and the uniquely rich archives of the Inquisition of Modena, Watt recounts meticulously every stage in the unfolding of the case, from the first outburst of illness among two laywomen in the service of one of the nuns to the waning of the possessions once the Holy Office reached the conclusion that the alleged possession was nothing but feminine imagination running wild. Along the way he introduces a large cast of characters—elite and servant nuns, the ducal family of Modena, a confessor who very likely solicited sex in the confessional and who might have used spells to bewitch some nuns, obedient and intransigent exorcists, and skeptical Inquisitors. Watt tells a complex story of tensions between rival factions of nuns; plausible cases of clerical misconduct by a former confessor; and a range of accusations of witchcraft, love magic, and widespread social and sexual laxities. His descriptions are lively and bring to life both the mundane routines and the dramatic events that shaped the nuns’ lives during the 1630s. [End Page 581] Watt draws on the large body of existing literature on convent life, witchcraft, love magic, and demonic possession in early-modern Europe. Too large, perhaps, as he uses English cases to assert some of his arguments and repeatedly conflates maleficium with love magic and with diabolic possession without distinguishing sufficiently among these different phenomena. There is no denying that in some cases maleficium caused possession or that the use of love magic at times brought about accusations of witchcraft. But Italian Inquisitors, more often than not, differentiated among these occurrences. In fact, as Watt documents, the Inquisition, even in the Carpi case, was careful not to rush to judgment and not to conflate witchcraft with demonic possession. While Watt’s book is meticulous in his retelling of the case, it is less convincing when it comes to the “why.” Why did the Clarisses become possessed in 1636 rather than before or after? Why did the Franciscans believe the nuns’ accusations against a fellow nun and against Angelo Bellacappa, the priest who had served as their confessor until November 1636? Why did the Holy Office in Modena and Rome order repeatedly to end the investigation and the exorcism and explicitly accused the exorcists themselves of increasing, rather than decreasing the sisters’ fantasies and misery? “Whys” are important in all historical research, and nowhere are they as crucial as when dealing with stories of witchcraft and demonic possession. Witchcraft accusations created their own spiral dynamics, in which additional suspicions were added to original ones, people’s recollections were construed to fit previous rumors and memories, and, once labeled as a witch, an accuser was very likely to be accused by other members of the community. Similarly, in eruptions of demonic possession in religious communities, sisters imitated behaviors of possessed sisters, anxieties grew, and the stories told by nuns were likely to become more elaborate and scandalous. As Watt takes us through the detailed testimonies, he often forgets to remind us of the unreliability of this huge body of stories. Unlike in a modern trial, each additional testimony does not strengthen the case (for either the defense or the prosecution), but should be viewed as one more variation on the same basic story. Thus, for example, based on the nuns’ tales of sexual temptation and solicitation, Watt finds Bellacappa guilty. “Dismissing all accusations as mere fabrications would require that dozens of nuns fabricated and recounted under...

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (review)

Reviewed by: Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism Kisha Tracy Moshe Sluhovsky. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 384. ISBN: 9780226762821. US $45.00 (cloth). Moshe Sluhovsky’s Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism examines possession, mysticism, and the—typically female—body through the lens of changes in Catholicism in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, primarily France, Spain, and Italy. Demonstrating a knowledge of a wide range of primary records detailing what he identifies as varying degrees of possession, Sluhovsky also reveals a command of the previous critical approaches to this subject, employing them but not allowing his own work to be restricted by their weaknesses. Instead of focusing on purely psychological, anthropological, and sociological models of explaining either demonic or divine possession, this work analyzes specific cases, relating them to the evolution of Catholic belief and the anxieties between the Church and those who practiced a more interiorized system of spirituality. The introduction to Believe Not Every Spirit, although occasionally difficult to follow, is effective in how it outlines the methodology and framework of the study. In particular, it defines how this work seeks to accomplish something different with a topic that has been researched extensively. Sluhovsky states that the three subjects of the book are the changing roles of exorcism, the definition of discernment methods, and the influence of mysticism. He convincingly argues that possession in early modern France, Italy, and Spain was unique and should be examined independently, with minimal interference from modern interpretation, which he seeks to do by reading “descriptions of possession straightforwardly, as [End Page 262] objective descriptions of events that took place as they are represented,” and by “taking the possessed women’s demonic fears and their spiritual hopes seriously” (10). The Church was concerned with devising systems for validating or condemning the spirits invading human bodies and souls, but these practices, called discernment, were far from uniform, creating debate among all interested parties concerning the right of the individual to diagnose him-or herself. Sluhovsky approaches the concepts of demonic and divine possession as interrelated, identifying the act of discernment of possessing spirits as equally significant as the act of possession itself. In the first chapter, Sluhovsky makes a distinction between possession of the body and possession of the soul. Before the early modern period, demonic spirits were perceived as attacking the body, a “mundane” occurrence, as he calls it, that could often be cured easily through the remedy of exorcism. Sluhovsky asserts that later, in the early modern era, possession became a matter of the soul, a reaction to the interiorization of spirituality exemplified by the mystic tradition. He does avoid here the error of absolutes and does not argue that perception changed completely from one century to the next. Rather, he points out that the trend seemed to change and that more possessions appeared to be attributed to the soul rather than the body, indicating the influence of the interiorized spirituality followed by practitioners of mysticism, which Sluhovsky groups into the broad categories of pre-Quietists and Quietists. Sluhovsky clearly discusses the anxieties of the Church concerning both mystics and possession. There was a distinct concern with individuals, especially women, being able to interpret their own religious experiences. This concept of the Church suspecting mystics is not a new claim. What is interesting about Sluhovsky’s discussion is that he emphasizes that the mystics themselves were wary of their own experiences and worried that they might mistake demonic temptation for divine encounter. They often believed that they were prime targets of the devil, incurring his wrath by devoting their lives to the pursuit of a one-on-one relationship with God. These concerns made discernment a primary focus. Yet the question becomes: What are the distinguishing signs separating diabolic and divine possessing spirits? And, additionally, who were qualified to be authorities of both discernment and exorcism? The answers to these difficult questions were the subject of much theological debate. In this undefined space, opportunities developed for individuals to step into new roles. In particular, [End...

Review: Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007; 384 pp.; 9780226762821, £28.50/$45.00 (hbk)

Review: Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007; 384 pp.; 9780226762821, £28.50/$45.00 (hbk)

Moshe Sluhovsky. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism

Moshe Sluhovsky. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (review)

Reviewed by: Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism Alison Weber Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. By Moshe Sluhovsky. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2007. Pp. x, 374. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-226-76282-1.) In this fascinating and well-written study, Moshe Sluhovsky explores how early-modern Catholics struggled to create a reliable, probative method for reading supernatural signs in human bodies and actions. Were beatific ecstasies, visions, and voices gifts from God? Or were they deceptions of the devil, wont, as St. Paul warned, to disguise himself as an angel of light? Were demonic torments signs of sinfulness or spiritual progress? Drawing on extensive sources primarily from Spain, France, and Italy, Sluhovsky posits a close correlation between the diffusion and democratization of mysticism and the increasingly frequent determination that possessing spirits—especially in cases involving women—were demonic rather than divine. Part 1 addresses changes in the practice of exorcism that occurred in the early-modern period. At the end of the Middle Ages, demonic possession was a catchall term for various afflictions that failed to respond to medical cures, and exorcism was a common healing technique practiced by laity and clergy alike. There was no standard rite, nor was there agreement as to whether exorcism worked ex opere operato (by virtue of the rite itself) or ex opere operantis (by virtue of the exorcist’s divine gift). The sixteenth century, however, witnessed an explosion of treatises on exorcism and the discernment of spirits. What made the sixteenth century the Golden Age of possession? Previous scholars have argued that the printing press made it possible for Catholics to utilize dramatic stories of successful exorcisms in the propaganda war against Protestantism. Sluhovsky identifies another crucial factor—the “spiritualization of possession,” that is, the notion that possession can take place in the soul as well as in the body. As exorcists consequently acquired new importance as interpreters of souls, the Church moved to standardize the rite and exclude lay practitioners, a campaign that culminated in the Roman Rite of 1614. Although these efforts were part of the broader post-Tridentine program of clarifying the boundaries between the sacred and profane, Sluhovsky posits another concern: the growing anxiety over lay misappropriations of beliefs, practices, and rituals. [End Page 367] In part 2, Sluhovsky provides a lucid account of the nonsynchronous schools of Catholic interior spirituality. He groups various movements (recogimiento, dejamiento, Alumbradismo, orthodox Carmelite spirituality, Pelagianism, Molinism, and Salesian spirituality, among others) under the umbrella terms of pre-Quietism and, following Molinos’s condemnation in 1685, Quietism. Although these terms are burdened with connotations of sexual excess, there is no denying the usefulness of a comprehensive rubric for orthodox and heterodox forms of mysticism. A main argument of this section is that early modern Catholics established an increasingly close correspondence between the effects of mystical contemplation and diabolic possession. Many feared that the quieting of senses, memory, and will during contemplation could leave the soul susceptible to demonic assaults, as evil spirits rushed to fill the void in consciousness with libidinous suggestions and blasphemous ideas. Such fears were compounded by the belief that spiritually advanced souls aroused the particular ire of the devil. It is not surprising, therefore, that pre-Quietists and Quietists were accused of sexual improprieties. Sluhovsky declines to enter into a debate over whether the alleged debaucheries actually took place; his concern, rather, is with the theological anxieties that motivated such allegations. Part 3 addresses Catholic efforts to develop an infallible method of discernment—efforts that ultimately failed. Sluhovsky does an admirable job of analyzing influential texts from a vast corpus. From Gerson to Bossuet, he shows, the literature of discernment deployed misogynistic topoi—defining women as mentally inferior to men, more sensual, devious, and more easily deceived by the devil. According to Sluhovsky, however, this mistrust of feminine spirituality reached a peak in the late-seventeenth century, when a majority of women were judged as deluded, impostors, or possessed. Nevertheless, certain extraordinary women—notably Teresa of Ávila and Jeanne de Chantal—overcame criticism and even succeeded in practicing the art of discernment within...

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. By Moshe Sluhovsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. x+374. $45.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBelieve Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. By Moshe Sluhovsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. x+374. $45.00.Susan RosaSusan RosaNortheastern Illinois University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 81, Number 1March 2009European Childhood in the Twentieth Century Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/598709 Views: 9Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (review)

Reviewed by: Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism Nancy Caciola Moshe Sluhovsky . Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. x + 374. Meticulously researched and thoughtfully composed, Believe Not Every Spirit investigates the nexus of demonic possession, ecstatic mysticism, and spiritual discernment in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, Spain, and Italy. At the same time, the book is also a study of bodies and of gender constructs in early modern Europe, for each of these nominally "spiritual" phenomena was, of course, manifested in fully embodied ways—usually in a body that was female. Hence, the book sets an ambitious agenda, but it succeeds admirably in tracing the interconnected evolutions of these constructs. In the Introduction, Sluhovsky writes, "in an ideal world, each page in the central chapters of this book . . . would have been divided into three columns, one devoted to exorcism, one to discernment, and one to mysticism. This synoptic configuration would have given the inherent interconnectedness of the three narratives a visual and a spatial representation" (p. 9). Wisely rejecting such a laborious presentation as unworkable, Sluhovsky instead divided his text into sequential, rather than simultaneous, parts. Each of the subsections presents its own chronological narrative for the theme under consideration, with later sections inscribing their own trajectories upon the ones presented earlier. The effect is a slow, yet effective, buildup of information, [End Page 227] analyses, and ideas. Yet, Sluhovsky's first organizational impulse was an apt one, for his themes are both deeply intertwined and intrinsically co-evolutionary. Extricating these topics from one another has the benefit of achieving greater clarity for the twenty-first-century reader, but comes at the cost of losing precisely that sense of indeterminacy that propelled the debate over the discernment of spirits, bodies, possession, and mysticism in the early modern period. Sluhovsky, ever-conscious of this paradox, navigates admirably between the authorial obligation to guide the reader through the material, and the imperative of honoring its inchoate and emergent character. As he writes, he wishes not to translate possession for the benefit of the modern reader, but to "resucitat[e] . . . its otherness and its humanness" (p. 10). Part 1, containing three chapters dedicated to demonic possession and exorcism, takes issue with current historiography by emphasizing the predictable, even boring, frequency with which such phenomena occurred in the early modern centuries. Aside from a few propagandistic texts describing particularly extreme demoniacs and their dramatic confrontations with exorcists, the vast majority of possessions were unremarkable occurrences that appear in the textual record as "trivial," "banal," and "mundane." I found this to be a fascinating recontextualization, insofar as it emphasizes the ubiquity of the supernatural during this time period—though I wonder whether Sluhovsky perhaps overcorrects in this instance. Possession, however common, could still be wrenching for the victim and her family, although exorcisms must often have provided a diversion for crowds of spectators in an age when entertainment and public action were largely overlapping categories. These are minor quibbles, however. Over time, Sluhovsky goes on to suggest, possession was increasingly "spiritualized." By this he means that the location of the possessing spirit was, with ever greater frequency, identified as inhabiting the soul rather than the body. By the seventeenth century, "the 'spiritualized' form of diabolic possession dominated exorcismal and other theological writings on the topic" (p. 31). Exorcism, meanwhile, evolved from being a quotidian healing event enacted by a wide variety of practitioners using diverse methods, to a regulated and prescribed ritual after the publication of the Roman Rite in 1614. From this point, suggests Sluhovsky, the further evolution of exorcism over the course of the seventeenth century was toward its use as a probative rite in cases of disputed spiritual inspiration, for the spiritualization of demonic possession inevitably tended toward a conflation of demonic with mystical experience, which likewise took place within the soul. The second part of the book takes up this thread by addressing mysticism, the "positive" counterpart to the demoniac's "negative" form of spiritual [End Page 228] seizure. Here, Chapters 4 and 5 recount major developments in the forms of spirituality...

Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism – By Moshe Sluhovsky

Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism – By Moshe Sluhovsky

Moshe Sluhovsky. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism

Moshe Sluhovsky. <i>Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism</i>

Believe not every spirit: possession, mysticism &amp; discernment in early modern Catholicism

From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism - popular with women - emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture women who had surrendered their souls to divine love were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. So how then, asks Moshe Sluhovsky, were practitioners of exorcism to distinguish demonic from divine possessions? Drawing on unexplored accounts of mystical schools and spiritual techniques, testimonies of the possessed, and exorcism manuals, Believe Not Every Spirit examines how early modern Europeans dealt with this dilemma. The personal experiences of practitioners, Sluhovsky shows, trumped theological knowledge. Worried that this could lead to a rejection of Catholic rituals, the church reshaped the meaning and practices of exorcism, transforming this healing rite into a means of spiritual interrogation. In its efforts to distinguish between good and evil, the church developed important new explanatory frameworks for the relations between body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and the natural and supernatural.

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. By Moshe Sluhovsky

Believe Not Every Spirit is a sprawling, energetic, deeply researched book, one that glides happily to and fro among salacious tidbits and big historiographical assertions, one that addresses twenty-first century feminist concerns while simultaneously embedding itself in Catholic Reformation theological debates. The chronological scope is substantial, starting early in the fifteenth century and ending late in the seventeenth. The geographic range is equally expansive, focusing on Italy, France, and Spain but extending into the Low Countries and Germany. Throughout Early Modern Continental Western Europe, wherever distrusted or unwelcome spirits appeared and left a documentary record, there is Moshe Sluhovsky to take their measure. If wealth of detail counted as scientific verification, then we would indeed have no doubts about just how ubiquitously spirits intervened in people's daily lives, especially people who were female and enclosed in convents. But whether the hundreds of individual possessions and dozens of collective supernatural experiences for which the author provides endnotes, or the thousands of spiritual encounters alluded to even if not specifically documented, amount to a lot or a little is hard to say. In simple arithmetic terminology, we know the numerator of incidents, perhaps with a margin of error around tenfold, but we have no idea of a proper denominator: all people, mostly women, primarily nuns, people where the Inquisition was powerful.

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism

MOSHE SLUHOVSKY Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 384 pp. $45. Reviewed by Stephanie Thompson LundeenThe aim of Moshe Sluhovsky's Believe Not Every Spirit is ambitious: to reorient the study of demonic possession and exorcism away from its connection to witchcraft and toward certain forms of early modern Catholic spirituality. Sluhovsky argues that possession, mysticism, and the discernment of spirits were an interrelated triad of phenomena that gained particular prominence in Spain, Italy, and France between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The turmoil these phenomena raised was only to be resolved by the adoption of a Roman rite for exorcism in 1614 and by a retreat from extreme practices of contemplative meditation among religious and lay practitioners. To make his case, Sluhovsky marshals an impressive cast, consisting of hundreds of theologians, mystics, cloistered and uncloistered religious, Inquisitors, charlatans, and common folk. The sheer breadth and scope of his work is its most impressive characteristic, though it is simultaneously its most problematic.According to Sluhovsky, demonic possession, previously considered a relatively minor problem, became a site for political and theological theater in the religious turmoil of early modern Europe. In 1526, for example, at the convent of Saint-Pierre in Lyon, France, the demon possessing Anthoinette de Grollee announced his allegiance to Calvinism and identified Geneva as his home. Possession also became a means for probing interiority and bringing women under tighter ecclesiastical control. The growing practice of contemplative mysticism among women, both lay and religious, peaked in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy and in the following century in France. This practice represented a serious challenge to clerical authority by promoting direct contact with the divine that could, and did, lead to the rejection of outward forms of piety, including even the sacraments. Eager to discount this strand of mysticism, theologians hastened to ascribe the ecstasies and prophecies of such women to the devil. Their cause was aided by some of the mystics themselves, who would admit to submitting to demonic possession as part of their progress toward contemplative union with God. A new theology of possession as occurring not only within the body but also, or even exclusively, within the soul promoted this potential conflation.The similarity between divine and demonic possession, Sluhovsky asserts, precipitated a theological crisis in discernment. Several prominent theologians of the period sought to establish a means to determine definitively the signs of the demonic, only to end, repeatedly, by admitting that there was no sure means. Experience and the recognition of discernment as a charismatic gift were, they concluded, the exorcist's best tools. Because of this admission, and of the failure of the learned establishment to set a definitive test, women enjoyed a de facto participation in the discernment of spirits.Sluhovsky's careful inclusion of such women-the late-medieval lay exorcists, the Mother Superiors whose letters offered advice on discernment, the mystics like Teresa of Avila who remained above reproach, the lay Italian mystics with their followers-balances his heavy reliance on clerical writings. These clerical texts, ranging from practical guides on exorcism to theological inquiries into discernment to Inquisitorial records, often display an authoritarian, even skeptical attitude toward mystical women. Indeed, several are forthrightly misogynistic, connecting demonic possession to female weakness, both physical and mental. As Sluhovsky notes, this literature would seem to preclude the reality of any degree of female empowerment, and so the inclusion of these active women serves to expose the limits of the clerical view. Even so, Sluhovsky sees the facts of early modern exorcism as instantiating the misogynistic rhetoric of possession. …

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, &amp; Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism by Moshe Sluhovsky (review)

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, &amp; Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism by Moshe Sluhovsky (review)

Communicating with the Spirits (review)

Reviewed by: Communicating with the Spirits Michael D. Bailey Gábo Klaniczayr and Éva Pócs, eds., in collaboration with Eszter Csonka-Takács. Communicating with the Spirits, Demons, Spirits, Witches 1. Buda-pest and New York: Central European University Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 295. This is the first in a series of three planned volumes containing essays presented at a conference on “Demons, Spirits, and Witches” held in Buda-pest in 1999. While this volume offers essays dealing with demonic possession, visionary experiences, trance states, and shamanism, future volumes (the [End Page 257] contents of which are listed) will focus on demonology, both elite and popular, and on witchcraft. In all, forty-three articles will be published. As is typical with conference proceedings, indeed with essay collections of any sort, the articles in this volume vary considerably in their focus, and in the depth and breadth of their coverage. The most extended contribution is that of Éva Pócs, who seems to have exercised editor’s privilege and expanded her essay to sixty-eight pages. Most of the other articles, however, appear to have been revised only slightly, if at all, beyond their original forms as conference papers. Many are only ten to twelve pages long. In terms of coverage, Pócs’s article spans several periods, but focuses on East-Central Europe. Of the other ten essays, five focus on medieval Europe, three on the early modern period, one on the modern, and one is essentially ahistorical. The authors come from several different disciplines, including history, literary studies, and folklore, although only one article really makes an issue of its particular disciplinary approach. Almost all of the articles are worthwhile. Because of their typically short length, however, few can do more than offer preliminary insights or pose interesting questions. Nancy Caciola introduces the notion that medieval concepts of demonic possession presented demons as physical presences occupying various spaces within the body. In the years since the original 1999 conference, she has actually worked out this argument to much greater extent in other article and monograph publications, which she cites here. Renata Mikolajczyk presents the demonological thought of the medieval Silesian scholar Witelo. While some of his natural interpretations for demonic activity are intriguing, she herself admits that most of his thought was not extraordinary but drew on standard demonological notions. She does not have space, however, to develop these issues fully. Moshe Sluhovsky examines ideas of demonic possession in early modern Catholic countries. His main conclusion is that problems of discernment continued unresolved from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. Sophie Houdard, examining visionary activity in seventeenth-century France, indicates that these problems persisted, but that in this period visionary activity as a whole was coming under greater suspicion. Regardless of whether visions were supposedly divine or demonic, all such experiences were now more frequently regarded as fake. Éva Pócs closes out the section on demonic possession by presenting a long survey of categories of possession phenomena and what she calls “possession systems”—the social and cultural forms that possession experiences took in Central Europe over an extended span of time. She argues for these effectively, but also cautions that her results are only preliminary. The next section of the volume, on “Contacts with the Other World,” [End Page 258] begins with an excellent article by Wolfgang Behringer, in which he argues that late-medieval Waldensian heretics became associated with witchcraft because their holy men (and women) claimed to possess the ability to be in contact with the dead, as well as having other supernatural powers. The argument is necessarily more suggestive than conclusive, but sheds useful light on the otherwise odd association of Waldensians with witchcraft. This is followed by a short article on “thanotopic aspects of the Irish Sidhe” by Tok Thompson. Here he asserts that Irish fairy-beliefs are rooted in archaic notions of communication with the dead, since the Sidhe are associated with Neolithic burial mounds. At the end of his paper, however, he admits that he has not actually established the central linkages on which his argument hinges (pp. 200–201); instead he refers readers to his unpublished master...