Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night

Gripped by savage religious wars, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the late Renaissance in France (c. 1550-1610) was one of the most haunted eras in European history. Although existing studies have attended to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons in the period, they have had little to say of its ghosts. This study combines literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book to consider a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. Taking in prominent literary figures including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, and d'Aubigné, 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.