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Inquisition --- Visionaries --- Holiness --- Discernment of spirits --- Women in the Catholic Church --- Spirits, Discernment of --- Demonology --- Experience (Religion) --- Psychology, Religious --- Holy, The --- Perfection --- Righteousness --- Sanctification --- Persons --- Apparitions --- Visions --- Holy Office --- Autos-da-fé --- History --- Catholic Church --- History of doctrines --- Religious aspects

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Christian spirituality --- anno 1600-1699 --- 248.131.5 --- #GBIB: jesuitica --- Regels over de onderscheiding van de geesten --- Conferences - Meetings --- 248.131.5 Regels over de onderscheiding van de geesten --- Discernment of spirits --- Spirits, Discernment of --- Demonology --- Experience (Religion) --- Psychology, Religious --- History of doctrines

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Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the prehistory of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as a saint infused with the spirit of God and whom to avoid as a demoniac possessed of an unclean spirit. This process of discrimination, known as the discernment of spirits, was central to the religious culture of Western Europe between 1200 and 1500. Since the outward manifestations of benign and malign possession were indistinguishable, a highly ambiguous set of bodily features and behaviors were carefully scrutinized by observers. Attempts to make decisions about individuals who exhibited supernatural powers were complicated by the fact that the most intense exemplars of lay spirituality were women, and the "fragile sex" was deemed especially vulnerable to the snares of the devil. Assessments of women's spirit possessions often oscillated between divine and demonic interpretations. Ultimately, although a few late medieval women visionaries achieved the prestige of canonization, many more were accused of possession by demons. Caciola analyzes a broad array of sources from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts, to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

Christianity --- Religion --- Philosophy & Religion --- Discernment of spirits --- Women in Christianity --- History of doctrines --- History --- Spirits, Discernment of --- Demonology --- Experience (Religion) --- Psychology, Religious --- Christian dogmatics --- anno 500-1499 --- Middle Ages, 600-1500 --- Middle Ages, 500-1500 --- Femmes dans le christianisme --- Discernement des esprits --- Histoire --- Histoire des doctrines

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From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism-popular with women-emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture, women, who had surrendered their souls to divine love, were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. So how then, asks Moshe Sluhovsky, were practitioners of exorcism to distinguish demonic from divine possessions?