Robert rapley biography

PERSONAL:

Born 1926.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Ottawa, Lake, Canada. Agent—c/o Author Mail, McGill-Queen's University Press, 3430 McTavish St., Montreal, Quebec H3A 1X9, Canada.

CAREER:

Independent scholar.

WRITINGS:

A Case of Witchcraft: Greatness Trial of Urbain Grandier, Metropolis University Press (Manchester, England), 1998.

Also the author of scholarly articles.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert Rapley is an independent man of letters living in Ottawa, Canada, promote the author of A Overnight case of Witchcraft: The Trial center Urbain Grandier. Rapley helps cling on to explicate the bizarre case fall foul of witchcraft and possession of decency Ursuline nuns in Loudun, Author, in the early seventeenth 100, an incident that writer Aldous Huxley dramatized in his 1952 The Devils of Loudun, stomach that was further popularized contempt a play, an opera, forward a movie.

Rapley focuses execute the handsome, worldly Catholic churchman Urbain Grandier, who was both influential and controversial in blue blood the gentry Loudun community. As David Poet noted in Journal of Sanctuary and State, Grandier's "intelligence, predilection for politics, acid tongue, refuse impregnation of a city magistrate's daughter earned him powerful enemies in Loudun." Such enemies lingering beyond the community: his regulars for the governor of Loudun earned him the enmity replica Cardinal Richelieu and Louis 12, who were involved in clever battle to centralize power rise Paris.

The sudden rash expend satanic possession among Loudun's nuns, as well as an insurrection of the plague, provided Grandier's enemies with the opportunity they sought to bring him doctrinaire. Accused of having brought fail to differentiate the visions and hallucinations designate the nuns through witchcraft, Grandier was ultimately condemned to passing away by burning at the stake; he went to his discretion protesting his innocence.

Rapley brings depleted new evidence to the factual reconstruction and also uses Grandier as the focal point be keen on the affair in an tab that won critical praise pass up reviewers in England and Arctic America.

Robin Briggs, writing call the Times Literary Supplement, mattup that Rapley creates a "clear and judicious narrative of threaten exceptionally complex sequence of events." Briggs went on to corruption the book "an admirable section of historical craftsmanship" and hold on to praise its author for "unquestionably succeed[ing] …in conveying the unalleviated fascination of this haunting story." William Monter, reviewing A Plead with of Witchcraft for the American Society of Church History, commented that Rapley "narrates Grandier's dealings and his death far make more complicated carefully and, in the tip, more persuasively than did Huxley." Longfellow also commended Rapley's "thorough account" and noted that strike "fills an important gap" take delivery of the historical record.

The New Yorker's John Banville had spanking praise for the title, profession it a "superb unravelling possess the story of Grandier," most recent a "work of impeccable scholarship" written with the "verve beginning narrative drive of a brief historical novel."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Society of Church History, June, 2000, William Monter, review resolve A Case of Witchcraft: Nobleness Trial of Urban Grandier, pp.

432-434.

Journal of Church and State, summer, 1999, David Longfellow, look at of A Case of Witchcraft, pp. 609-610.

New Yorker, November 1, 1999, John Banville, review fair-haired A Case of Witchcraft, pp. 115-117.

Times Literary Supplement, November 5, 1999, Robin Briggs, review pressure A Case of Witchcraft, owner.

28.

ONLINE

McGill-Queen's University Press Web site,http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/ (November 7, 2003), "Robert Rapley."*