Bluebeard, the life and crimes of Gilles de Rais

the long version

Leonard Wolf is a professor of English at San Francisco State University. He annotated "Dracula" and "Frankenstein", and wrote other books. This 1980 book is about the life and crimes of Gilles de Rais in the XV century, the ending decades of the Middle Ages. Bluebeard was a wealthy and cultured noble who fought with Joan of Arc to unite France under Charles VII. Unlike the Bluebeard of popular fiction who murdered his wives, Gilles de Rais committed vile acts against children, mostly young boys. These monstrous crimes were mostly censored from the history books. This book tries to reconstruct Gilles' life from the transcript of his ecclesiastical and secular trials in old books that are unavailable in English. The `Bibliography' has eight pages.