Old Book Hunter #9

The Loudun affair — the Ursuline convent's claimed possessions and the 1634 burning of parish priest Urbain Grandier — is one of the most notorious witchcraft prosecutions of early modern France, and Aubin's account is the foundational sceptical treatment, arguing the possessions were feigned and Grandier the victim of a conspiracy reaching to Richelieu. First published in Amsterdam in 1693 by Abraham Wolfgang under the title Histoire des diables de Loudun, the text was reissued through the eighteenth century; this 1716 Amsterdam printing carries the more polemical Cruels effets de la vengeance du cardinal de Richelieu title at the head.

Bekker's De Betoverde Weereld (1691) applied Cartesian metaphysics to the question of spirits, attacking belief in sorcery and diabolical possession and questioning the devil's very existence; the scandal it caused led to his deposition from the Dutch Reformed ministry, and it is regarded as one of the most controversial books of the early Enlightenment. This 1694 Amsterdam set is the first French edition, the vehicle by which the argument reached the wider francophone republic of letters.

Clamorgan's wolf-hunting treatise is the standard early-modern French text on the subject, mixing natural history of the wolf with practical instruction on dogs, nets and traps, and it was printed from 1566 onward as a separately-titled appendix to Estienne and Liébault's L'Agriculture et maison rustique rather than as a freestanding book. Its reputation rests substantially on the in-text woodcuts of traps, snares and hunting scenes, which dealer descriptions of the 1583, 1597 and 1602 printings record as fourteen large blocks.

Before there were ghost stories, there were ghost manuals. Noël Taillepied, a Capuchin friar of Pontoise, set out to answer a question his parishioners actually asked: when something walks at night, is it a soul from Purgatory, a demon in disguise, or a trick of melancholy? His Traité, first published in 1588, sorts apparitions into kinds. It catalogues the strange signs said to come before the deaths of great men, such as tolling bells, lights and voices, and it tells the faithful how to respond. It stands with Le Loyer’s Discours des spectres as one of the founding French texts on ghosts. Montague Summers thought enough of it to translate it into English in 1933 as A Treatise of Ghosts. This copy adds a bonus: it’s bound with François Poupart’s later dissertation on the apparition at Saint-Maur, a famous French haunting. A ghost book bound with a ghost case.

Defoe's anonymous 1726 Political History of the Devil is the opening volume of his late trilogy on the supernatural, followed by A System of Magick (1726) and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), and dealer and scholarly descriptions treat it as a key statement of his views on the devil — satirical, sceptical of a literal hell, and increasingly read as a gloss on the supernatural elements in his fiction. Standard bibliographies record it (Furbank & Owens 228; Moore 480), and it was later reissued under the title The History of the Devil.