Séance organisée par l’université Paris Cité (LARCA)

17h30-19h (Paris time)

Lieu: Maison de la recherche Sorbonne Université, 28 rue Serpente (75006), amphi Molinié, D035 / also via Zoom: please write to our secretary, Mathilde Alazraki, for the link (mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr) 

In 1587 Noël Taillepied, a Franciscan friar, undertakes to write a treatise about apparitions, which he chooses to entitle Psichologie in order to rehabilitate the belief in purgatory, and consequently in the return of the souls of the deceased against the growing reformed heresy that reduces all apparitions to angels or devils and claims that miracles have ceased. But the book seems to have been published in a hurry and its publication coincides with the peak in the activity of the Holy League in Paris. Beyond mere curiosity of discovering yet another early modern treatise on the supernatural, editing Psichologie aims at unravelling Taillepied’s plagiarising techniques, his close interactions with the Parisian printers, and his possible implication in the League militancy.

Pierre Kapitaniak is professor of Early Modern British Civilisation at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. He works on Elizabethan drama as well as on the conception, perception and representation of supernatural phenomena from the 16^th to the 18^th century. He published Spectres, Ombres et fantômes : Discours et représentations dramatiques en Angleterre (Honoré Champion, 2008), and co-edited Fictions du diable : démonologie et littérature (Droz, 2007). He translated into French and edited Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch/ La sorcière (Classiques Garnier, 2012). He is also engaged with Jean Migrenne in a long-term project of translating early modern demonological treatises, and has already published James VI’s Démonologie (Jérôme Millon, 2010) and Reginald Scot’s La sorcellerie démystifiée (Millon, 2015). He is currently preparing the edition of Noël Taillepied’s Psichologie (1588).

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