The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski

In 1384, a bad and illiterate peasant girl named Ermine moved to town of Reims together with her aged husband. Her period was once afflicted through struggle, plague, and schism in the Catholic Church, and Ermine may simply have slipped unobserved in the course of the cracks of historical past. After the lack of her husband, even though, issues took a impressive yet scary flip. For the final ten months of her existence, Ermine used to be stricken by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was once attacked through animals, overwhelmed and abducted by way of devils in hide, and uncovered to carnal spectacles; on different nights, she was once blessed via saints, even visited via the Virgin Mary. She confessed those unusual occurrences to an Augustinian friar often called Jean le Graveur, who recorded all of them in shiny detail.

Was Ermine a saint within the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders solutions to those questions within the old and theological context of this bothered woman's reports. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's existence in fourteenth-century Reims, her courting together with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her said encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented via translated excerpts from Jean's account, The unusual Case of Ermine de Reims brings to existence an episode that helped precipitate one of many significant clerical controversies of overdue medieval Europe, revealing unbelievable truths concerning the era's conceptions of piety and possession.