The Real Presence of Mary: Eucharistic Disbelief and the Limits of Orthodoxy in Fourteenth-Century France

Abstract

On July 15, 1318, a twenty-six-year-old laywoman named Aude Fauré was called before the Inquisition tribunal at the diocesan seat of Pamiers in southern France and immediately confessed to having temporarily doubted both the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood; her doubt, she explained, had been cured by intervention from the Blessed Virgin. Less than a month later, Aude abjured her errors by the usual formula and was sentenced to a series of pilgrimages and fasts stretching over the next three years. Aude's multiple confessions, along with depositions from her family, friends, and neighbors, take up a mere six folio pages in the famously detailedRegisterkept by Bishop Jacques Fournier, head of the Pamiers tribunal, and preserved in the Vatican Library after Fournier became Pope Benedict XII. This relatively quick-moving and insignificant case seems unrelated to the best-known activity of Fournier's tribunal, namely, the extinction of the last vestiges of Occitan Catharism. Yet Aude's case has gleaned several mentions in recent historiographic works, and these mentions are striking for their focus on the protagonist's psyche: she has been variously diagnosed as hypersensitive, neurotic, masochistic, morbid, hysterical, obsessive, afflicted with atheism, prone to fantasy, tormented by guilt, suffering from postpartum depression, and simply deviant.