The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada by Mairi Cowan (review)

Reviewed by: The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada by Mairi Cowan Tucker Adkins Mairi Cowan, The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada ( Montréal and Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) In The Possession of Barbe Hallay, Mairi Cowan tells the story of a young domestic servant who writhed under "diabolical tricks" in seventeenth-century New France. This microhistory is the first book-length study of the French Catholic teenager Barbe Hallay, and it uses her experiences as a fascinating lens through which to understand religion and social life in French North America. Cowan, an expert in late medieval and early modern Christianity, argues that by reconstructing Hallay's life and broader environment, we find space to "ask what meaning demonic possession had for historical people, and how it made sense to explain their world" (10). The Possession of Barbe Hallay contends that a careful reading of the protagonist's spiritual travails foregrounds how "spiritual authority and social discipline were bound to anxieties about the precariousness of the colonial project" (11). For Cowan, Hallay offers us a refreshing opportunity to view the theologies, social forces, and politics shaping one corner of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. Across five tightly written chapters, Cowan immerses readers in the life of Barbe Hallay. Beginning with her family's migration from France to colonial New France in 1659 and ending with her burial on June 18, 1696, the book [End Page 253] delivers on its promise to reveal the "texture of everyday moments within grander historical narratives" (153). The daughter of Jean-Baptiste Hallay and Mathurine Vallet, Hallay and her family left the parish of Saint-Julien du Coudray—most likely from La Rochelle aboard the Sacrifice d'Abraham—and settled along the St. Lawrence River. Arriving a century after Jacques Cartier's initial visit, the Hallays lived at the seigneurie of Beauport, an estate just north of Québec City. Importantly, the family came to an anxious French colonial world brimming with a Catholic spirituality in which Jesuit missionaries, Ursuline nuns, and everyday believers readily testified to "demonic appearances" and "saw frightening spectres, heard phantasmal music, and encountered flying stones" (44). Not long after Hallay began working in service of Robert Giffard and Marie Regnouard, the nun Marie de l'Incarnation—a crucial witness and record-keeper in this story—noticed troubling occurrences around the girl, including the terrorizing presence of demonic forces. She admitted that initial exorcism attempts made no difference, as "phantoms were seen, and a drum and flute were heard," and stones "detached themselves from the walls and flew here and there" (47). Hallay also visually perceived demons in the shifting forms of "men, children, beasts and spectres of hell" (48). According to Marie and priest Paul Ragueneau, a Beauport miller and Huguenot named Daniel Vuil engineered the girl's afflictions after she denied his romantic approaches. Before his incarceration and hanging in 1671, Vuil's Catholic accusers asserted that the jilted, clandestine Protestant tortured his would-be partner with malevolent spiritual "tricks" (48). Readers encounter the most intimate accounts of possession when Cowan covers Hallay's treatment at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital and Regnouard estate between 1660 and 1662. In her time at the former she received care from the nun Catherine de Saint-Augustin, whose methods included "sew[ing] Hallay into a sack to cover her from the insistent visitations of a magician who kept himself invisible to all except Hallay" (74). Drawing on three surviving manuscript narratives held at the Archives des Augustines du Monastère de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Québec and the Archives des Jésuites au Canada, Cowan then recounts Marie Regnouard's "efforts to end Barbe Hallay's possession" (103). While caring for Hallay, Regnouard employed the rib bone of the legendary deceased Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf, placing it against the girl's body to evict the demon. In response, the possessor "began once again to agitate Hallay's whole body and cry loudly that he could not tolerate it any longer, that he was burning" (104). Through such careful, pious treatment, Hallay was...

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