Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France Walking by Night

by Chesters, Timothy

• ISBN13: 9780199599806
• ISBN10: 0199599807
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550-1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. Although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. Chesters describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the 'haunted house', the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigne, as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity. It will be of interest to any scholar or student working in the field of early modern European history, literature or thought.

Author Biography

Timothy Chesters is Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
A Note on the Text	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Language	p. 2
Texts and Books	p. 6
Genre	p. 10
Apparitions of the Late	p. 13
Ghosts and Religion
A Religions Controversy	p. 21
Ghosts and Purgatory	p. 21
Discretio spirituum and the Medieval Legacy	p. 24
'Try the Spirits': Jean Gerson	p. 24
Mouvements, Marques: Pastoral and Demonological Discernment	p. 29
Narrative Polemic	p. 35
Discretio in Action: Montalembert's Merveilleuse Hystoire (1528)	p. 35
Protestant Responses: The Ghost Hoax	p. 41
Ghosts in the New Testament	p. 51
Walking through Walls: The Locked Room	p. 51
Communing with the Dead: Lazarus and Dives	p. 57
Pastoral Demonology	p. 64
Ludwig Lavater, Trois livres des apparitions des esprits (1571)	p. 66
Author and Text	p. 66
Towards a Pastoral Demonology	p. 72
Job under Siege: Inventing the Haunted House	p. 77
Noël Taillepied, Psichologie, ou Traité de l'apparition das esprits (1588)	p. 83
Author and Text	p. 84
Dialogues with the Dead: Memory and 'oubliance'	p. 87
'Un bon personnage sage et discret': The Return of the Priest	p. 91
Epilogue: Inversion and Symmetry	p. 97
Ghosts Beyond Religion
Beyond Purgatory	p. 103
The Shibboleth	p. 103
Ghosts, Witches, Kings, War: Rereading Samuel and the Woman of Endor	p. 108
Prodigious Histories: Pierre Boaistuau	p. 116
Ghosts and Friendship: François de Belleforest	p. 128
Ghosts and the Stoic: Bénigne Poissenot	p. 136
Spectrology	p. 142
The Birth of the Spectre	p. 144
Ghosts on Trial: Law and the Courtroom	p. 148
Ghosts Abroad: New World/Other World	p. 154
'Science des spectres' or 'conte á plaisir'?	p. 164
Stories
The Show of Violence	p. 175
Suffering Ghosts: Psellus after Trent	p. 176
'Le ulement des diables': Panurge the Diabolist	p. 186
Violence 'outre le Loir': Ghostly Ronsard	p. 194
Revenant Lovers	p. 205
'Revenez qu'on vous revoye', or The Bride of Christ	p. 206
Eurydice, or the Bride of Satan	p. 211
Philinnion Transformed: From Phlegon to Le Loyer	p. 216
Philinnion's Afterlife: François de Rosset	p. 227
The Haunted Widow	p. 234
Discretion's Indiscretions	p. 237
Conclusion: 'Plus je me hante…	p. 247
Bibliography	p. 254
Index	p. 277
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