16th-century and Renaissance Literature

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.

As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunting had from ancient times served to define a culturally approved mode of masculinity as heroic, pursuant, and goal-oriented, where success was measured by the achievement of the objectives set: the capture and killing of prey. When applied to love, on the other hand, hunting was inflected quite differently. At first glance, the basic scenario of a male subject pursuing elusive quarry over which he ultimately comes to assert control might seem to epitomise the dynamic of the sexual chase, yet when poets invoke the hunt in an amorous context, this most obvious manifestation of the metaphor is not the one they put to use. On the contrary, in lyric poetry and romance, the hunt metaphor serves to demote or destabilise the masculine subject in some way. The huntsman is routinely a figure of failure: for all his efforts, he either fails to catch what he pursues, catches the wrong thing, ends up being caught by others, or runs round in circles chasing himself. His failure is measured precisely as a shortfall from the cultural ideal. The metaphor of the hunt thus opens up possibilities for exploring definitions of masculinity that deviate from culturally approved models of mastery and power. It shows how limited those models are and offers examples of alternative and counter-cultural versions of a masculine subjectivity that radically query patriarchal stereotypes of gender and class.

To call something ‘monstrous’ in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale; by the late seventeenth century ‘monstrous’ is more likely to denote hidden intentions, unspoken desires. Several shifts are at work in this word history, as in what Shakespeare's Othello terms the ‘mighty magic’ of stories about monsters. These shifts can be described in a number of ways. The clearest and most compelling is the migration of monsters from natural history to moral philosophy, from the margins of maps to a central role in the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. A (richly illustrated) meditation on monsters of various descriptions, from natural phenomena to members of the same human family, this study offers a new account of the place of monsters in the early modern imagination. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call ‘thick descriptions’ of context. This study relates the peculiar questions and insights proposed by literary writing to those produced by historians of science, of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of printing, philosophy, natural history, and medicine. At its centre are readings of major works of early modern French literature — from Rabelais to Racine, from the 1540s to the early 1690s — in which monsters do meaningful work. From these focal points, digressions are undertaken through the archives of the history of medicine as of politics, the visual representation of monsters, and the reception of classical antiquity. Each new chapter establishes the contours of the intellectual context within which change takes place, and so leads us to better understand the issues and questions raised throughout. Charting a process of sustained and distinctive transformation, this book seeks to understand the cultural work performed by monsters in early modern Europe: monsters in books, in paintings, onstage, and in the street; in the study, as in the state, and the self.