The Trial of Gilles de Rais

Georges Bataille presents the case of the most infamous villain of the Middle Ages: Gilles de Rais. Fascinated with the depths of human experience — the meeting points of sexuality, violence, ritual, spirituality, and death — Bataille examines with dispassionate clarity the legendary crimes, trials and confessions of this grotesque and still horrifying 15th-century child-murderer, sadist, alchemist, necrophile and practitioner of the Black Arts.

“This book about the notorious 15th-century serial killer of young children, written by France’s famous connoisseur of transgression — the man the surrealist Andre Breton labeled an ‘excremental philosopher’ — represents a marriage not made in heaven, perhaps, but surely nowhere on this earth . . . the fact is that The Trial of Gilles de Rais gives us Bataille at his most accessible — he had been trained as a medievalist librarian, after all — and is probably, taken in its entirety, the best thing now available in English on one of the most bizarre figures in European history.” — New York Times Book Review