Timothy Chesters’ Walking By Night: Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France is not written with folklorists in mind, but its clarity of purpose ensures that a wide range of audiences will be interested in his findings. The book bears the marks of the disciplinary requirements of a doctoral thesis, with firmly delineated dates (1546-1641) and a clear sense of the fields Chesters is writing for: intellectual and literary history, and the history of the book.
There is a real value to the history of the book approach. Chesters articulates the ways that specific writers, such as Rabelais and Montaigne, but also lesser-known demonologists, such as Ludwig Lavater and Pierre le Loyer, grappled with the place and meaning of ghosts not just in religious debates, but also in their understandings of friendship, politics, and love. He does so through close attention to how these writers chose to publish their works, and how successive editions were adapted, disseminated, and received: fundamental methodologies for historians of the book.
Of many interesting findings, perhaps the most central to Chesters’ book is the idea of “pastoral demonology” that he introduces in the first part of the book. Chesters coins this term for the ways that early-modern demonologists, such as the Protestant Ludwig Lavater, seized on ghosts as a method of regulating “lay domestic space” (16, 64-99). This leads Chesters to suggest that Lavater may even be the “inventor of the haunted house” (80), a claim he quickly qualifies by pointing out that Lavater uses no such term, and that the “haunted homestead” also had an ancient precedent (80-1). What Chesters seems to be driving at is that Lavater’s writings changed the habitual setting of ghost narratives from “the churchyard or the convent” to the household, “experienced from the inside” (80-1). Such a move was an important part of the Reformation, displacing the authority of the priesthood in favor of a personal responsibility concerning faith and godly behaviour (83).
How did Catholic writers react to this frontal attack on the ideas underpinning the reality of Purgatory? Through a reading of Noël Taillepied’s Psichologie, ou traité de l’apparition des esprits, Chesters suggests the Catholic response was “one of restatement and retrenchment” (86), which aimed to replace the priest as the figure of authority over ghostly apparitions. But Chesters also notices a more interesting element of Taillepied’s response: it is largely plagiarised from Lavater’s own work. Catholic and Protestant writings on ghosts are not really different, but symmetrical (99), leading Chesters into the second section of his book, which emphasizes the importance of ghosts beyond religious concerns.
Indeed, Chesters’ list of the different areas where vernacular discussions of ghosts sprung up is impressive, although he chooses to focus on the collections of titillating narratives called histoires prodigieuses [wondrous tales] or histoires tragiques [tragic tales] through which “the ghost story [began] to enjoy a certain narrative autonomy” (117), and which were published by Pierre Boaistuau and his successors. Once again, the strengths of Chesters’ interest in the history of the book are apparent, with some interesting reflections on the differences in aim and scope of Boaistuau’s works and the later Quatre livres des spectres by Pierre Le Loyer (142-172). Chesters draws particular attention to the way that Le Loyer’s book, which he calls “the leading vernacular digest of ancient and modern ghostlore” of the sixteenth century, situates its ghosts within a legal context. Rather than only treating Le Loyer as an author, Chesters shows how a reader such as the Parisian diarist Pierre de L’Estoile read and understood Le Loyer’s work (168-172).
Later chapters include an important contribution to understandings of the role of violence and embodiment in ghost narratives (175-204), and the figure of the revenant lover (205-246). These final chapters will be of interest to folklorists, but may leave them asking a fundamental question about Chesters’ approach: what is gained by deliberately treating the literary history of ghosts separately from vernacular traditions? Writing about Phlegon of Tralles’ tale of Philinnion and Machates, Chesters evokes, for the first and last time, the Aarne-Thompson index of tale-types (218). Would his book not have benefited from a better use of the other tools of comparative folkloristics? Treating ghosts as a subject fit for writers and readers is undoubtedly important, but Chesters deliberately turns a blind eye to the conversations that were happening between oral and print cultures at this time. Towards the end of the book, Chesters reveals that a fundamental question behind his study is “What drove the circulation of ghost stories in late Renaissance France?” (249). The book as a whole provides interesting answers from the point of view of learned culture, but this broad question probably demands a broader set of methodologies, more akin to Jean-Claude Schmitt’s ground-breaking study of medieval ghosts as a meeting point of vernacular and learned traditions. Chesters’ book, by contrast, is for intellectual and literary historians, and is ultimately likely to appeal to them more than to folklorists.
Work Cited
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1994. Les Revenants: Les Vivants et les Morts dans la Société Medieval. Paris: Gallimard.
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[Review length: 843 words • Review posted on September 26, 2012]