"Veronica and her devils. Jesuits, exorcism and medicine in Nineteenth Century Rome"

In December 1834, a small group gathered in a house near the Ghetto in Rome. A Jesuit father and a brother, along with a physician, entered the apartment where a famous family of artists lived, and surrounded the bed where a young woman aged 19 layed-down. Her name was Veronica, and she was affected by symptoms that her family and social environment had defined as demonic possession. From that day of December, for six months, exorcists and doctors visited the young girl every day. What was at stake was not only her deliverance from the devil, but the very identity of the Society of Jesus, restored twenty years before, and the capability of medicine to heal both bodies and souls. The research was carried out starting from the documentation stored in the General Archives of the Society of Jesus in Rome (ARSI), and led its author not only to an investigation of the case, but also to question the nature of historical writing and the very nature of the discipline. The supposed demonic crises of Veronica provoked many other crises. After all, "Deviltries are at once symptoms and transitional solutions. The 'diabolical crisis' has a double significance: it reveals the imbalance of a culture, and it accelerates the process of its mutation. It is not merely an object of historical curiosity. It is the confrontation (one among others, though more visible than others) of a society with the certainties it is losing, and those it is attempting to acquire" (M. de Certeau, The possession at Loudun).

Fernanda Alfieri is a researcher at the University of Bologna and on leave Fellow of the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, Fondazione Bruno Kessler. She was Invited scholar at the Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Perth and Melbourne nodes) and the Institute for European Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo, and Visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Gefühle Geschichte, Berlin. Among her publications: Nella camera degli sposi. Tomás Sánchez, il matrimonio, la sessualità (secoli XVI-XVII), Bologna, il Mulino, 2010; Veronica e il diavolo. Storia di un esorcismo a Roma, Torino, Einaudi, 2021; with T. Jinno, Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Perspectives from Europe and Japan, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2021.

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