During April 1574, an aspiring London barrister named Robert
Brigges was possessed by Satan. For three weeks, Brigges shouted,
raged, and sobbed; suffered from sensory deprivations; and engaged
in impassioned disputes with his invisible adversary. Although
Brigges's case was considered significant in its time, it is
virtually unknown today, with modern scholars rarely mentioning and
never analyzing it. The case, however, is very unusual--perhaps
unique among English cases--in its first-person, spontaneous,
highly detailed documentation of the afflicted person's experience
and in its sociocultural details. Sands challenges the prevailing
notion that cases of early modern English demon possession occurred
only among the socially impotent.
The manuscript sources of this episode (published here for the
first time) bombard the reader with an accretion of detail that is
never connected to any broad assertion of what really happened,
never connected to any larger historical significance. It is this
connection that Sands's study aims to establish through an analysis
of the cultural context of Brigges's experience. The case affords
us a rare glimpse into the dark, private, unedited side of an
intelligent, articulate, educated, early modern mind. A serious
attempt to understand the workings of that mind requires us to
understand and accept (for the purposes of analysis) the concepts
that furnish it. Only through this approach can we hope to bridge
the cultural gap between that mind and ours--thus experiencing,
even if only momentarily, the common humanity of present and
past.
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