An Elizabethan Lawyer's Possession by the Devil: The Story of Robert Brigges

During April 1574, an aspiring London barrister named Robert Brigges was possessed by Satan. For three weeks, Brigges shouted, raged, and sobbed; suffered from sensory deprivations; and engaged in impassioned disputes with his invisible adversary. Although Brigges's case was considered significant in its time, it is virtually unknown today, with modern scholars rarely mentioning and never analyzing it.

The case, however, is very unusual--perhaps unique among English cases--in its first-person, spontaneous, highly detailed documentation of the afflicted person's experience and in its sociocultural details. Sands challenges the prevailing notion that cases of early modern English demon possession occurred only among the socially impotent.