"Mitchell Greenberg explores the significance of fantasies of the body in seventeenth-century France through readings of some of the most intriguing texts of the period.". "In addition to his richly nuanced readings, Greenberg integrates into his argument material from a broad array of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, feminism, epistemology and history. He also points out the implications of his argument for the political, theological, and historical thought of the period, moving effortlessly from witch trials in France to discussions of bodies in Renaissance English literary criticism to the works of Bakhtin, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan."--BOOK JACKET.