The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims

A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski

Narrated by Cynthia Wallace

Available from Audible

Book published by University of Pennsylvania Press

In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last ten months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was attacked by animals, beaten and kidnapped by devils in disguise, and exposed to carnal spectacles; on other nights, she was blessed by saints, even visited by the Virgin Mary. She confessed these strange occurrences to an Augustinian friar known as Jean le Graveur, who recorded them all in vivid detail.

Was Ermine a saint in the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders answers to these questions in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's experiences. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's life in fourteenth-century Reims, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented by translated excerpts from Jean's account, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims brings to life an episode that helped precipitate one of the major clerical controversies of late medieval Europe, revealing surprising truths about the era's conceptions of piety and possession.

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski is Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She is the author of several books, including Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism (1378-1417).

REVIEWS:

“The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims tells the story of an ordinary French peasant, a widow whose harrowing tale illumines many hot-button issues of the late Middle Ages—the Papal Schism, the history of witchcraft, the discernment of spirits, the social construction of mental illness. A near-contemporary of Joan of Arc, Ermine emerges from Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski's pages as a haunting figure that no reader will soon forget.”

—Barbara Newman, Northwestern University