Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France is a revision of Chesters’s 2005 dissertation The Ghost in France: Theory and Narrative (1546–1614), a title that is more representative of the book’s many strengths and the biases lurking behind his disciplinary training. Beginning with the development of ghost stories as a distinct literary type, although he emphasizes that they do not become a “discrete genre” until the late eighteenth century (1), Chesters traces how accounts about apparitions, revenants, and other ghosts reflect and are influenced by intellectual and cultural movements during France’s civil wars.

Chesters’s introduction is a model for how to handle all the ambiguities involved in the academic study of ghosts. He immediately notes that there is no clear equivalent for ghost in sixteenth-century French, but he is able to arrive at a compromise that retains sufficient analytical clarity while allowing him to exploit the slipperiness of premodern sensibility. His materials are vernacular printed texts, but he excludes theater and poetry. The latter decision he explains as a product of his purpose “to chart changes in late Renaissance ghost narrative against the background of sixteenth-century thinking about ghosts and apparitions” (11). Ancient models so influenced theater and poetry that these texts would distort an appreciation of “sixteenth-century thinking.” His Renaissance runs from Rabelais (1546) to Rosset (1614) and contains a striking division between things religious and things that are not, as reflected in his tripartite organization: “Ghosts and Religion,” “Ghosts beyond Religion,” and “Stories.”

Not surprisingly, given this introduction, his analysis and description throughout the book are quite clear and often insightful. The latter is especially important, because he uses some materials that are well known to people who work on apparitions or demonology, such as Lavater, Le Loyer, and Taillepied. Beginning with a treatment of late medieval discernment of spirits, central to understanding Reformation theologians’ approaches to ghosts, Chesters portrays ghost stories in light of debates over purgatory (a natural fit) and sources of Christian tradition. Arguing for what he terms a “pastoral demonology,” Chesters gingerly distances ghost from the witch trials and demonological tradition, while showing how they also fit within a growing fascination for natural wonders and “prodigies.” Building from Le Loyer’s “science of specters,” Chesters traces attempts to make ghosts “objects of learning” (172) and the effects of such movements on the narrative patterns of ghost stories. Linking themes of physicality, loss, and location to ghosts, Chesters provides beautiful translations of difficult passages while building a case for the increased popularity and visibility of ghosts in early modern French literature.

Chesters is persuasive and a pleasure to read, but I questioned some of his assumptions, particularly in parts 1 and 2 of this book. Most of these questions arose from what appear to be rhetorical strategies and disciplinary divisions. From his introduction, Chesters is clear that he approaches his texts as ghost stories — as literature and, implicitly, as fictions. In that sense, while far from belittling his authors, he distances himself from many of them who, I would argue, had much more complex and even contradictory attitudes toward ghosts. In so doing, he loses a wonderful opportunity to compare various accounts of the same ghost story across genres, something he otherwise does very well as long as the account remains within vernacular printed (not plays or poetry) texts. His treatment of Montalembert would have benefited from such an approach. Chesters also overstates the separation between religious and secular readings of ghosts in his book’s organization and introduction, which seems especially odd since Chesters himself argues for a more blended perspective when interpreting certain authors. Such binaries also appear in his treatment of confessions. They are Catholic and Calvinist with little in between; even Lavater, overemphasized in a book on Renaissance France, is treated as representative of a Calvinist approach. I would also argue that the emphasis on ghosts’ physicality remains longer than Chesters suggests, enduring well into the seventeenth century in more popular literature.

Many of these points are, however, the quibbles of a specialist and should not be taken as condemnations of an impressive book. In particular, I commend Chesters for tackling many authors in his analysis of genre rather than just four to five representative ones. His integration of publishers’ concerns into his analysis is also a welcome shift from treatments that tend to treat the production of ghost stories as divorced from commerce. In addition, I appreciated his focus on ghost stories’ social and intellectual contexts and their contributions to forming such contexts; I agree that ghosts are transforming in the seventeenth century, although my reasons might differ. Such critiques as I offer here are designed to push him beyond valuable disciplinary and genre-based analyses and to consider that at least some early modern readers believed ghosts were real.