Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23797874 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Timothy Chesters (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Ghost Stories In Late Renaissance France Walking By Night (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599806.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2493133804 |
| ISBN | 9780199599806 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
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. And yet 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. This book 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 (Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné) as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, the book sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.
Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Humanism · Intellectual history · Literature · Modernity · Period (music) · Protestantism · Purgatory · French Literature and Criticism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Renaissance Literature and Culture
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |