“Is This Sara, or the Devil That Speaketh These Words?”: Sounding Out Women as Demoniacs in Sixteenth-Century England

Abstract

In the premodern Christian world, the ongoing celestial battle between God and Satan produced calamitous earthly manifestations. An especially grievous form of the devil’s many perils was demonic possession, where an incorporeal demon, or even the devil himself, would enter and seize control of the body of its host, a demoniac. This was typically accompanied by a series of diabolical markers, at the epicenter of which were the demoniac’s senses—disturbing visions of hell, the burning touch of sacred objects, the choking smell of brimstone or the unnatural taste of strange objects seemingly voided from the demoniac’s stomach. It is the sense of hearing, in particular, that this essay addresses. Hearing is a physiological constant for most, but it is a sense that historians have not usually privileged in reconstructions of possession and exorcism. There are obvious starting points should somebody wish to do so: the demoniac’s agonized