Early Modern Ghosts: Proceedings of the Conference held at St John's College, Durham, on 24th March 2001

Folklore, April, 2005 by Jacqueline Simpson

Early Modern Ghosts: Proceedings of the Conference held at St John's College, Durham, on 24th March 2001. Edited by John Newton. Durham: Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies, University of Durham, 2002. 138 pp. No price information available (hbk). ISBN 0-9531-3001-0

The first four papers in this collection are concerned with literary texts, from drama and poetry of the period, and although they have a bearing on the fundamental question of the effect of Protestantism upon belief in ghosts, they do not directly concern the folklorist. The most closely relevant is Anna Linton's account of certain German Lutheran poems intended as religious instruction for bereaved parents, in which the dead child is represented as speaking to them in edifying terms. This, she shows, is a rhetorical device, with no implication that the dead can actually communicate.

The second section opens with John Newton's survey of three "readings" that seventeenth-century commentators could apply to the narrative of an apparition resembling a dead person: demonic counterfeit, human trickery, or actual ghost. The contemporary records occasionally give glimpses of beliefs and actions at the popular level among all the learned debate: a bishop in 1564 complaining that "everyone" in Blackburn believes a young man claiming to have spoken with a ghost, for "these things be so common here"; or Lavatar remarking that it is quite usual for "young men merrily disposed" to trick fellow-guests at inns by hiding under their beds or pulling the bedclothes off with cords, "and so counterfeiting themselves to be spirits." Protestants also alleged that Catholic priests and monks created fake ghosts.

Jo Bath explores the confusions and compromises in popular belief after the official abolition of Purgatory in Anglican doctrine. The main purpose ascribed to ghosts was no longer religious admonition, but the righting of wrongs; the concepts of "devil" and "ghost" could blend, especially where poltergeist activity occurred, and house-fairies and boggarts might also be drawn into the mix, as people struggled "to reconcile the irreconcilable and understand tales which could not be pinned with certainty to any one theological perspective."

Belinda Lewis examines a similar topic, the relationship between belief in ghosts and the concept of Providence. She too finds popular religion to be eclectic in combining fragments of old Catholic traditions with an Anglican framework; the concept of the ghost, she argues, fulfilled important functions (e.g. deterring murder and fraud), which could not be lightly discarded, and which would be destroyed if every apparition were construed as a deceitful demon.

Peter Marshall's paper is a close study of testimony concerning the apparitions of Old Mother Leakey at Minehead in 1634-7, which were investigated by a group of magistrates; they concluded that it was "an imposture, device, and fraud, for some particular ends"--the ghost's main message was that a certain gold chain, currently in the possession of her daughter in Ireland, belonged rightfully to her son in Minehead. Nevertheless, the accounts of witnesses in the case give insight into popular beliefs and the conflicts between various possible interpretations.

This group of papers picks up themes set out in Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Theo Brown's The Fate of the Dead (1979), showing how these can be traced in individual cases. The book is a useful addition to the corpus of studies on Early Modern religious and folkloric beliefs.

Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore Society