Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages

Abstract

The dead are the silent majority in the Church’s history – as they are, indeed, in humanity’s. The life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried and tested certainty, predicated on a soul which survives the death of the body. That raises issues about the nature and structure of the afterlife, its pains and delights. For the late medieval Church, the afterlife raised particular concerns and anxieties, its complex division into heaven, hell, and purgatory promising a future which had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were a major force in religious practice, with death as the threshold to something unknown until experienced.

The vitality of the dead in medieval cultures

“…Robert Swanson, Robert Bartlett, Darren Oldridge, Catherine Rider and Carl Watkins have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge-base in the first decade of the twenty-first century. 32 Chapter Five of Watkins's History and Supernatural Belief in Medieval England (2007), for example, explores how the increasing influence (if not creation) of the idea of purgatory in the twelfth century explains the contrasting, sometimes conflicting ways in which the restless dead were perceived and managed in this era. The idea that the revenant corpse was but a puppet for demonic agency belonged to an older, more conservative mode of religious thought.…”