The Miracle of Laon: the public exorcisms of Nicole Obry (1565 to 1566)

November 1565, Vervins in Picardy. Nicole Obry was about fifteen or sixteen, recently married and unable to read. Her father was a butcher, her husband a tailor. She was kneeling on her grandfather's grave in the parish church when his spirit appeared and said he was in Purgatory, demanding Masses, alms and pilgrimages. She grew too ill to eat. In time she decided the spirit was a demon.

The Dominican Pierre de la Motte began the exorcisms. Witnesses recorded the signs. She went deaf, blind and mute. She turned rigid, then collapsed limp. She named other people's unconfessed sins. She was said to speak Flemish and other languages she had never learned, and she recoiled violently from the consecrated Host.

She was said to hold 29 or 30 demons, the strongest named Beelzebub, Cerberus and Astaroth. One called itself "Beelzebub, the Prince of the Huguenots," and would leave for no one below the Bishop of Laon. Jean de Bours, the bishop, tried in January 1566 and failed. At the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse, 26 demons were driven out. They were said to flee to Geneva.

From 29 January 1566 the sessions moved to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Laon. Each day she climbed a scaffold beside the quire-screen, and the exorcist ordered "Prince Beelzebub" to speak. Her throat and belly swelled "with incredible deformity." Her head bent back toward her feet, and it took eight to ten men to hold her. Her tongue "hung down to her chin."

Then came the voice, three sounds at once: "the cry of a large pig, the barking of a large dog, and the bellowing of an enraged bull." One by one they fell away, until only the bull remained. As the Host was raised, witnesses said, she was "held in air suspended more than six feet high." Fire and pins meant nothing to her. Only the Host on her lips revived her.

The demons did not leave quietly. As Cerberus went, black smoke and a foul odour came from her mouth. On 8 February 1566, Bishop Jean de Bours faced Beelzebub with the consecrated Host. The last demon left, one account says, "amidst smoke, and lightening, and thunder." Another tells of a black beast leaving her mouth. Her left arm stayed paralysed.

The crowd grew in the telling. Estimates ranged from about 10,000 in Brian Levack's account to Jean Boulaese's "twenty thousand persons" and more than 150,000 in a devotional account of 1884. Protestants called it a staged hoax and demanded Reformed doctors and mixed guards. Louis, Prince of Condé had her imprisoned, but Charles IX ordered her release in August 1566.

D. P. Walker called her "a fraud," yet could not square it with "her really brilliant performances as a demoniac." Levack reads demoniacs as "performers in religious dramas." Others see propaganda: her body as France, the demons as heresy, the Host as proof of the Real Presence.

Guillaume Postel wrote the first account in 1566. His secretary Jean Boulaese built the official one, Le Thrésor, more than 800 pages, published in 1578. Laon Cathedral celebrated 8 February every year until the French Revolution. Historians now set the case beside Loudun and Anneliese Michel.