The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims

Abstract

The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims Gail Orgelfinger A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints. By Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. When demons began to torment her in late 1395, Ermine was a middle-aged (48) widow who had moved to Reims from the countryside a decade earlier with her elderly husband in order to find work. About two years after her husband died, she began to undergo not merely “strange,” but horrific and physically abusive visitations from demons. Her confessor, Jean le Graveur, who had urged her to move close to the priory where he served, began at once to record what she told him about these experiences, and later rewrote them as the surviving account. Having begun to explore both the Visions and its cultural background in her 2010 article for Speculum, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski now presents a full-length study of how one woman’s torturous final ten months of life foregrounds “issues of sanctity and mysticism and the politics of late medieval France” (vii). For Ermine’s aventures (so-called by le Graveur) coincide in time with two phenomena that challenged ecclesiastical authority: the Great Papal Schism, and an upsurge in female visionaries. In the Middle Ages, faith allowed for the intersection of the supernatural and natural worlds, but faith was not blind. Recent scholarship on what we now term mental illness, such as Wendy J. Turner’s Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Brepols, 2013), helps us to understand “the dual innocent-guilty image of the mad in the Middle Ages” (23), insanity as a manifestation of intense devotion or guilt for sin. This book eschews such formulaic dichotomies, noting, importantly, that Ermine’s demons have psychological, ideological, and political functions (125). But it does not venture into the literature of madness, even though at one point, a demon actually threatens Ermine: “You will become crazy and will not know anymore where to turn” (49). Blumenfeld-Kosinski does not indulge in anachronistic psychoanalysis; she establishes her reading of medieval vision partly in terms of Oliver Sacks’s recent work on hallucinations and Andreas Mavromatis’s theory of hypnagogia—“the [End Page 127] unique state between consciousness and sleep,” or “waking hallucinations” (ix). Such visions are entirely real to the person undergoing them, and potentially real to those hearing (and writing) about them. Each of the book’s five chapters considers le Graveur’s narrative from a different contextual perspective: “Ermine and Her World”; “Ermine and Her Confessor”; “Ermine’s Piety and Devotional Practices”; “Ermine and Her Demons”; and “Ermine and the Discernment of Spirits.” In each section, Ermine’s story is augmented by copious examples that verify the nature of her visions, yet elucidate their unique character. An English translation of excerpts from the standard edition is appended (Claude Arnaud-Gillet, Entre Dieu et Satan: les visions d’Ermine de Reims, 1997). The first chapter details the “time of crisis” in which Ermine lived: the periodic warfare between England and France, the onset of plague that devastated Reims—and its later recurrence, which killed Ermine— the Great Schism, which resulted in forty years of a divided papacy. Ermine herself was drawn to the hermit Jean de Varennes, who preached against the Avignon pope (and therefore, by association, against the French monarchy), demonstrating both interest in and understanding of the intersection of religion and politics that was often reflected in her demons’ exhortations to disbelieve and disobey le Graveur. Here we also learn about the constrictions of widowhood, and the emulation of enclosed female sanctity her confessor imposed upon Ermine. Chapter 2 analyzes the unusual relationship between Ermine and le Graveur, who provided her with a small room so that she could more easily follow his program for her spiritual development. Although her situation resembled that of an anchoress, she was apparently free to come and go as she pleased. Many female mystics were similarly taken under the wings of male mentors, some who recorded their spiritual journeys. Ermine’s demons often tempted her—unsuccessfully—to renounce her trust in her confessor. Jean le Graveur was careful to protect Ermine’s (and his own...