Maleficence

If you embark upon a ghost tour of Old Quebec, you might hear the fabled history of Barbe Hallay, remembered for her unfortunate encounters with witches and demons. Though her possession is mythologized in the dimly lit back alleys of Place Royale, few scholarly publications exist on her life. Who was Barbe Hallay, and why is her story so often recounted by actors in face paint and period dress? What, exactly, was demonic possession, and how was it treated in the seventeenth century?

The historian Mairi Cowan began thinking about such questions several years ago, while on vacation to Quebec City, where she read a contemporary account of demonic infestation in New France written by an Ursuline nun named Marie de l’Incarnation. “I was hooked. Riveted,” Cowan explains in The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada. “One might even say (if one were thinking in technical terms of demonology) obsessed.” The result of that...