The Devils of Loudun (Classic History Series) - Softcover
In THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN, readers will find a fantastic and absorbing story and will also see Aldous Huxley's penetrating and comprehensive mind working at its highest power. It is the story of the most astonishing case of mass possession in history.Starting as a practical joke in a small Ursuline convent in central France in the 1620s, it throve on malice and female fantasies and grew to involve Cardinal Richelieu himself. It culminated in the trial, torture and judicial murder of the local priest, Urbain Grandier, a clerical rake whose arrogance and excesses had made him bitter enemies, for having caused the possession of the Prioress and nuns by sorcery. It is a case study of mass hysteria that has many parallels in modern society.
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Review:
"Huxley has reconstructed with skill, learning and horror one of the most appalling incidents in the history of witch-hunting during its seventeenth-century heyday. The Devils of Loudun is fascinating, erudite, and instinct with intellectual vitality" (Times Literary Supplement)
"Huxley's analysis of motive, his exposition of the unconscious causes of behaviour, his exposure of the perversions to which religious emotion is subject, his discursions on the witch cult, on mass hysteria, on sexual eccentricity have the brilliance that all his writing has had from the very beginning" (Spectator)
"One of Huxley's best books" (Guardian)
"His masterpiece, and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a 17th-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive ...Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious" (Washington Post)
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"Huxley's analysis of motive, his exposition of the unconscious causes of behaviour, his exposure of the perversions to which religious emotion is subject, his discursions on the witch cult, on mass hysteria, on sexual eccentricity have the brilliance that all his writing has had from the very beginning" (Spectator)
"One of Huxley's best books" (Guardian)
"His masterpiece, and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a 17th-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive ...Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious" (Washington Post)
Huxley tells the strange true story of mass demonic possession and sexual hysteria which took place in the small town of Loudun in France, in the 1600s
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- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0141390573
- ISBN 13 9780141390574
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages384
- Rating
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The Devils of Loudun (Classic History Series)
Published by
Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom, London
(2001)
ISBN 10: 0141390573
ISBN 13: 9780141390574
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Urbain Grandier, parson of the French town of Loudun, was tortured and burned at the stake in 1634. He was accused of being in league with the Devil and seducing an entire convent of nuns, in what is the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Charming, handsome, dandyish and promiscuous, as soon as Grandier arrived in Loudun it became clear that he took more than a pastoral interest in his female parishioners. His reputation for arousing extraordinary sexual passions in the townswomen spread to the Prioress of the local convent, Sister Jeanne, who became obsessed with the "delicious monster". Soon all the nuns were gripped by fits and convulsions, falling into frenzied orgies of lustful depravity that attracted tourists from all over France. But was Grandier really the sorcerer responsible for their possession, or was it a political frame-up from Cardinal Richelieu down, to get this arrogant, womanizing priest out of the way? Aldous Huxley's account, which was made into a salacious film by Ken Russell, is full of details of witchcraft, gruesone exorcisms and the superstitions of an age haunted by devils. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR001862037
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