Demonology on the margins: Robert Du Triez's Les Ruses, finesses et impostures des espritz malins (1563)

Published in Cambrai in 1563, Robert du Triez's Les Ruses, finesses et impostures des espritz malins has good claim to the be the first prose demonology published in French. And yet Les Ruses has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This article offers both an introduction to Du Triez and his text, and some reflections on a blind spot in the historiography of early modern French demonology. Les Ruses might be described as marginal in at least four respects. i) chronology: Du Triez's text appeared some fifteen years before the heyday of vernacular French demonology. ii) geopolitics: an archer in the army of Philip II, Du Triez's allegiances were not to France, but to the Empire, and to the Counter‐Reformation initiatives at the newly founded college at Douai iii) thematics: Les Ruses contains no discussion of witchcraft and the pact. iv) style and tone: the author accords an unusual degree of attention to the question of narrative pleasure. What emerges most powerfully from Les Ruses is that early modern demons were not always so much a matter of what it is we should believe, as the kinds of stories they allow us to tell.