21 CHAPTER 2 ‘Like a Madd Dogge’: Demonic Animals and Animal Demoniacs in Early Modern English Possession Narratives Brendan C. Walsh In the demonic possession narratives of the early modern period, animals played a central role. During the 1574 possession of Robert Brigges, one of the earliest recorded cases in Reformed Protestant England, a black dog stalked the ‘demoniac’ (the possessed individual) through the streets of London. Brigges, a wealthy lawyer, frst encountered this creature, an ‘uglye dogge, shaggey heare, of a darke fuskey colour, bet- weine blacke and redd’, one morning as he journeyed into Southwark on business (‘Master Brigges Temptation’, sig.H.7). In this narrative, the black dog was the Devil incarnate, a visual metaphor of Brigges’s pos- session by demonic forces. In other early modern accounts, demoniacs embodied animalistic behaviour in their demonic performances. One young demoniac by the name of Alexander Nyndge was described in a 1573 pamphlet as looking ‘much like the picture of the Devil in a play, with an horrible roaring voice, sounding Hell-hound’ (Nyndge 1615, © The Author(s) 2020 R. Heholt and M. Edmundson (eds.), Gothic Animals, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_2 B. C. Walsh (*) University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: b.walsh2@uq.edu.au