Timothy Chesters

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'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. It will be of interest to any scholar or student working in the field of early modern European history, literature or thought.

Walking by Night

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France

Kathryn Banks

This book investigates how writers and readers of Renaissance literature deployed ‘kinesic intelligence’, a combination of pre-reflective bodily response and reflective interpretation. Through analyses of authors including Petrarch, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, the book explores how embodied cognition, historical context, and literary style interact to generate and shape responses to texts. It suggests that what was reborn in the Renaissance was partly a critical sense of the capacities and complexities of bodily movement. The linguistic ingenuity of humanism set bodies in motion in complex and paradoxical ways. Writers engaged anew with the embodied grounding of language, prompting readers to deploy sensorimotor attunement. Actors shaped their bodies according to kinesic intelligence molded by theatrical experience and skill, provoking audiences to respond to their most subtle movements. An approach grounded in kinesic intelligence enables us to re-examine metaphor, rhetoric, ethics, gender, and violence. The book will appeal to scholars and students of English, French, and Italian Renaissance literature and to researchers in the cognitive humanities, cognitive sciences, and theatre studies.

Exploring Kinesic Intelligence

Movement in Renaissance Literature

This book describes the ideological, intellectual, and literary role of ghost stories in early modern French culture. The sixteenth century in France witnessed a fundamental change in the way ghost stories were conceived. In medieval culture, ghost narratives had served as ideological instruments for Church teaching: they fostered a bringing together of the communities of the living and the dead. With the advent of Reformation, however, this view of ghosts cameunder strain. Alongside religious ghost narratives there began to emerge a whole series of stories written from rival perspectives (legal, medical, anthropological, and literary)¾ a body of writinglargely ignored by modern scholarship. This book provides a survey of this writing, within which we begin to recognise elements of modern ghost stories: the narrative setting of the 'haunted house', embodied revenants, and titillating stories of sex with the dead. In so doing it provides a new glimpse into the beliefs, fears and desires of a deeply troubled age.

Timothy Chesters

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