The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

Fuga Satanae: Musique et démonologie à l’aube des temps modernes. By Laurence Wuidar. Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance 150. Geneva: Droz, 2018. [337 pp. 978-2-600-05868-1.]

Reviewed by Catherine Gordon*

1.1 Laurence Wuidar’s Fuga Satanae explores the role of music in the practice of exorcism as revealed in sources written from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. As Wuidar makes clear in her introduction, the sources that form the foundation of her book are manuals on exorcism used by priests and on witchcraft used principally by Church inquisitors. The primary sources in several languages from all parts of Europe that the author references, however, cover hundreds of years, from the ancients through the seventeenth century. While many books, articles, and essays published in recent years explore subjects related to early modern exorcism, demonology, religion, medicine, witchcraft, or magic, studies that include music in the mix are scarce.^[1] Fuga Satanae is the only study that brings all these subjects together, along with politics and gender, to show how and why music was such an important tool for exorcists. Wuidar does so with great erudition and finesse.

1.2 The first part of the book explores foundational sources on music and demonology, using excerpts from the Bible and writings by Church fathers: David (who healed Saul with his lyre), Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Augustine of Hippo, among others. These writers address music’s power to heal and drive out demons from the body; they also scrutinize the value of music and its ability to bring either disorder to the body, drawing souls to the devil through sensual pleasure, or harmony and order to the body, bringing souls closer to God. Authors, particularly Saint Augustine, were concerned with the pleasure elicited by music: “Listening to the singing of psalms [was] taken up ad libitum by medieval theologians as they questioned the ethics of music, by demonologists in their debates on the effects of music, [and] by music theorists in their praise of the power of music” (77). The works by these authors that address both the benefits and dangers of music were still read and revered during the later Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early Baroque. Treatises on music by theorists Guido d’Arezzo (991–1033) and Juan Gil de Zamora (ca. 1241–ca. 1318), for example, discuss the healing effects of music and its ability to drive away demons. Considerations of music’s sacred functions that pervade these early sources persisted well into the seventeenth century in the hands of authors such as Athanasius Kircher, who also associated music with divine order and harmony in his Musurgia universalis of 1650.

1.3 The second part of Fuga Satanae presents beliefs and theories about the use of music presented in treatises on exorcism. The starting point for practices established between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries is Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus maleficarumby from 1486, which not only underwent many editions to 1650 but also became the model for subsequent treatises through 1700. As Wuidar points out in Chapter 3, many authors of these works indicate that it was possible for “demons, spirits of an intangible nature, [to] take the form of a body by condensation of the air (or air and fire),” while others argued that “[possessed behavior] is only a mental condition… and [sign of] a troubled imagination” (113–14).  Whether in the form of an assumed or possessed body, writers believed that demons could produce sounds of all kinds, often in the voice of the one possessed, and could play instruments as well. “Because [music] informs the outside world about the interiority, the nature and identity of the being, music theorists, doctors, and philosophers studied the timbre of the voice” (119). Exorcists could then distinguish the angelic from the demonic. The identification of demonic sounds was important since the exorcist must be able to discern the difference between one who is ill and one who is possessed.

1.4 Chapter 4 describes what occurs during an exorcism. Once the possession is established, “the key moment of exorcism is built around the dialogue between the exorcist and the devil” (140), much like a theatrical scene performed for an audience. The exorcist makes himself understandable through discursive means and a standardized format, sometimes akin to magical practices. In turn, the devil in the form of the possessed body also resorts to discursive means—even musical sounds—that ranged from the most horrible to the most beautiful with varying degrees of volume, even silence. As described in Chapter 5, music became a primary remedy and took on two functions: ad verba and ad res, the former through singing and reciting the word of God, and the latter through playing instrumental music, which presents ordered sounds that permeate the body through the senses. The image of David’s lyre came to be an allegorical sign of the cross, which gave meaning and value to musical sounds without words. Both functions, then, combine intellectual understanding with pleasure and the corporeal with the spiritual.

1.5 In the third and final section of the book, the author addresses the attempts by confessors and inquisitors to distinguish between good and bad music as well as the line between legitimate and illegitimate exorcism. The misuse of music during exorcism, the superstitious use of music in the liturgy, the boundaries between music therapy, magic, and superstition are also considered here.^[2] The line between music as legitimate remedy (in the hands only of priests) and music as magic and superstition was not always clear. The problem was that “the same means [were] sometimes used by exorcists and by magicians. [How does one] differentiate between invocations, incantations, sacred and demonic music, or between magic amulets and sacred amulets?” (216). Writers tried to be as clear as possible regarding what constituted a legitimate exorcism.

1.6 After addressing musical-astrological exorcisms from De Occulta Philosophia (1533) by Agrippa von Nettesheim and parodies of exorcisms and diabolical hymns in La Demonomanie (1650) by Jean Bodin, Wuidar explores music and witchcraft in Chapter 7. Here she presents stereotypes of witches and warlocks, the “sequence type” of the sabbath, and the diverse forms of professed heresy, including seduction, flying through the air, apostasy, homage to the devil; particular manifestations of banquet, dance, and music; orgies, infanticide, and cannibalism. Music’s role in the practice of witchcraft was especially one of seduction and a full abandonment to sensuous pleasures.

1.7 Wuidar presents an erudite, comprehensive, and unique study. She demonstrates that the examination of music as defined in treatises on demonology identifies “one of the roles of the art of sound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society, complementary to its liturgical or recreational, therapeutic or magical [roles], and it enters into a cluster of medical, philosophical, and theological questions that redraw the place, the status, and the nature of music in the Renaissance” (285). This inquiry is not just about the use of music in religious and medical practices but also music’s role in the interactions between the sensual and spiritual world, the body and the soul, the opacity of matter and transparency of the mind. Wuidar’s Fuga Satanae is a remarkable book, thoroughly researched and well written. It will be of interest to scholars who work on a variety of topics in a number of scholarly endeavors, but particularly for studies related to music as signifier and music used as a discursive tool. As Wuidar points out, “music is considered [in treatises from the period] as a kind of language (it participates therefore in the philosophical and psycho-physiological questions about language, its diversions, or its troubles) and in its emotional dimension [sa dimension sensible] …” (289). It is the efficacy of “musica practica,” Wuidar notes, that serves as a remedy for demonic possession, but the effects of music give rise to questions about the virtue of the sensuous body in controlling evil spirits. Music, properly ordered, was not used for contemplation but rather for healing, as a divine aid, and as an instrument of grace—not just medicine for the body but also celestial medication and a remedy from God.