PERRAULT, Francois.

by Francois Perrault

£3,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition of this rare and most interesting work on demonology in general with a highly unusual second part recounting the author s personal experience of a haunting, or poltergeist, in which he and his household were subject to a series of unremitting attacks from an evil spirit; the work was written by Perrault (or Perreaud) in 1613 but not published until 1653, when he was already 81 years old. It was translated into English and German and reprinted several times. The Demonologie was not written as a free standing treatise. Its significance therefore derives from its being a preface to L Antidemon de Macon, a highly personal account of an extended haunting which Perreaud explains by referring to maleficent magic. After describing the poltergeist activity at length, he then informs the reader that some people thought the trouble lay with his wife s maid who was already suspected of being a witch and came from a suspect family. .. His favoured explanation, however, involves a third person altogether. The previous owner (of the house) had had to be dispossessed by judicial judgement in order to make way for the Perreauds, and naturally she was resentful ... Perreaud tells us she was discovered one day kneeling beneath the chimney calling upon the devil to do harm to him and his family. Perreaud s experience, then, reluctantly published so long after the event, provides us with a reminder of seventeenth-century Protestant attitudes towards preternatural phenomena. L Antide

• Binding: Hardcover

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