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

for a German public, while Levinas’s commentary revived curiosity at a time “où la Recherche risquait de tomber dans l’oubli” (152). In a subtle essay on Bataille (#3), Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield finds that “[a]u dialogue critique [...] s’ajoute l’écho secret mais insistant d’un intertexte” (58) through which Bataille’s thought on sacrifice and literature is transformed. Elsewhere intertexts point in opposite directions; although he sternly contradicts Proust in La nausée, Sartre’s “acharnement” (115) suggests a deep ambivalence and uninterrupted engagement. One of many reflections prompted by this superb collection is the degree to which a writer celebrated for style and derided for narcissism was ultimately esteemed by moral philosophers for his ethics, in particular for fostering self-knowledge and empathy among his readers. As Inge Crosman Wimmers’s elegant essay on Ricœur (#12) concludes, even the portrayal of characters has an effect: “cet esprit de famille nous implique dans une morale dirigée contre l’indifférence” (250). University at Buffalo (NY) Maureen Jameson CHESTERS, TIMOTHY. Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-959980-6. Pp. 283. $110. In his compelling study of the representation of ghosts in late Renaissance France, Chesters moves deftly from the antique and Christian origins of early modern conceptions of the yet unstable notion of ghosts, to the ways in which Catholic and Protestant polemicists qualify the ghost to legitimate their respective religious positions. Such concerns make up part one of the book, with the second and third sections serving to delimit the tenuous borders between religious and secular discourses, with a focus on the status of the ghost in learned (i.e., juridical, medical, and philosophical) discourses in part two, and the ways in which the ghost is shaped and deployed in literary narratives—or narratives read as literature —in part three. Throughout, Chesters keeps in mind questions related to the contexts of production and reception of ghost stories. In part one, Chesters follows the evolution of representations of ghosts and their function in Catholic discourse pre- and post-Reformation. Initially centered on distrust of female prophecy and the perceived need to reassert male clerical authority in the late Middle Ages, Catholic discussion about ghosts shifted with the Reformation toward the need to defend the doctrine of purgatory, whose inhabitants frequently returned from the dead to request aid from those who survived them in order to facilitate their reception into paradise. Protestants like Jean Calvin and Ludwig Lavater attacked the idea of purgatory, and they viewed stories about the return of the dead as so many clerical hoaxes and diabolical deceptions. Catholic writers such as Noël Taillepied were then forced to defend the ties of the living with the community of the dead as a matter of reasserting Catholic doctrine in the face of Protestant attacks. Parts two and three highlight the importance of ghost narratives within the context of secular writing. Here, Chesters complicates the Catholic position with respect to ghosts, for juridical writers of Catholic background tended to view such apparitions as diabolical, in line with juridical demonology. However, writers like Pierre Boaistuau and François de Belleforest—both Catholic apologists— pen ghost stories concerned with the fate of the living and not that of the dead in Reviews 567 purgatory. Chesters qualifies their collections of histoires prodigieuses in terms of “the secular ghost-tale anthology” (116). This designation, however, is misleading, since most of the material included in their respective volumes does not consist of ghost stories, although, as Chesters argues, the place of the ghost stories within these anthologies of histoires prodigieuses is not negligible. In the book’s final section , Chesters examines literary manifestations of ghosts in works by Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Ronsard, among others, to consider such issues as the embodiedness or disembodiedness of ghosts, the ability to do violence unto them, and finally, questions of sexuality. Throughout the book, Chesters draws from ancient and Biblical exempla— such as the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the Old Testament account of Saul and Samuel, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—to show how they served as points...