The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England

Abstract

In early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

Phantoms in and of the Archive: Mary Cudmore’s Encounters with a Ghost in Cork in 1688 and 1689

“…'circulated as enclosures in letters', and cites other examples of the circulation of supernatural accounts in manuscript. 45 That Irish residents participated in archipelago-wide networks that circulated supernatural as well as other news is testified to by the printed letters of Irish correspondents in collections of supernatural stories like those of Glanville and Baxter: for example, two letters describing a haunting in Belfast (mentioned below) made it into the latter's Certainty of the world of spirits. Some surviving pamphlets from the later 1680s, published in London but drawn from correspondence from Ireland, also detailed events that were seen as extraordinary or ominous.…”