Every year, in the French village of Machecoul, a pageant is held recreating the life and death of the 15th Century nobleman Gilles de Rais. Gilles would have loved it, and his passion for pageantry was to play a pivotal role in the doomed aristocrat’s career. But it is not his taste for theatre that established Gilles de Rais his unique place in history. Rather it is his alleged crimes - child abuse, devil-worship, and wholesale infanticide - which secured an unenviable immortality for the name of Gilles de Rais. From the depths of medieval history his life presents us with a saga of unparalleled gothic intensity, the fall from grace of a Miltonic Satan.

At the height of his career Gilles de Rais was a man of vast wealth and status, whose military prowess and ostentatiously noble bearing attracted admiration and accolades from his king and peers. He died a reviled criminal, his estates sold and wealth squandered, his achievements struck from many of the official records. In the less concrete realms of the spiritual, Gilles’ fall is, if anything, even more meteoric. He had stood at the right-hand of Europe’s holiest woman, bodyguard to the virginal Joan of Arc in her divine crusade to liberate war-scarred France from the hands of rebellious lords and foreign invaders. The contrast with his latter years - his hands wet with the blood of countless children, his mind plagued with sadistic paedophiliac urges, and his soul tainted by vain entreaties to the Devil - is horrifically striking.

It is also morbidly fascinating. It is this fascination which motivates the villagers of Machecoul, whose children once fell victim to this medieval monster, to recreate de Rais’ life using his ruined castle as a backdrop for their macabre performance. But the saga of Gilles de Rais is more than just a historical horror story. The records of his trial have survived the centuries and present us with a detailed and graphic picture of a medieval multiple murderer. It is a picture with some surprising reflections upon two very modern horrors.