Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night by Timothy Chesters (review)

Those whom the dead revisit naturally think that ghosts have their own reasons for returning—usually to guide, warn, or punish—with “intents wicked, or charitable,” as Hamlet says. For the historian the tendency has to be reversed, with the living imagining and telling the dead and making them move and speak. Ghosts are always creatures of narratives and materialize out of the ways these are inspired and organized. The variety is great, matching differences between and within cultures and societies, though ghosts cannot help but mirror these and thus make excellent guides to the worlds in which they have appeared. Those in Timothy Chesters’s lively and stylish book appear literally in stories, haunting their way through theological and devotional treatises, biblical commentaries, prodigy books, canards, and the works of Rabelais, Ronsard, and many others. Over time, ghosts migrated more and more from Latin texts to the vernacular, and from being ammunition for the increasingly sterile confessional and pedagogic quarrels of the churches to feeding the literary, more commercial, and even erotic tastes of more secular-minded readers. When this study concludes—with the 1610s—ghost tales were showing early signs of their later development into a discrete genre of fiction. But Chesters is right not to origin-hunt or establish landmarks—let alone think of any existence for ghosts beyond his texts—and the result is a deftly and wittily argued book that is full of fresh insights.