...historical for such beliefs.

Introduction

Historians and folklorists alike have tended to treat the body of material concerning ghosts from the Reformation to the early eighteenth century as displaying a homogeneous set of beliefs. Many studies fail to note that by the Restoration the demonological interpretations, which had previously predominated in England, were losing popularity at the hands of the neoplatonic view of ghosts. Although efforts are taken by scholars to divide elite belief from popular belief, they frequently end up lumping the material together without any regard for the chronology or shifts in belief. Keith Thomas jumps back and forth through the period in his magisterial work, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), suggesting a degree of conformity in post-Reformation beliefs that is not justified by a sustained examination of the material he uses. A similar approach to the material was also taken in another significant study by Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead (1979), who described it as an "unexpectedly consistent body of belief": her generalisations were seriously called into question by Ronald Hutton (Brown 1979, 1; Hutton 1995, 94). It is, however, perhaps too easy to forget that these are the giants on whose shoulders we stand, and many of these works represent the first serious treatments of beliefs about ghosts. More recent examinations have begun to differentiate the shifts that occur throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ronald Finucane's Appearances of the Dead (1982) paid more attention to the distinctions in the seventeenth century, treating post-Reformation beliefs as separate from those of the Baroque. Even Finucane, however, implies a degree of harmony between the different theories that were prevalent during the Restoration without significantly stressing the differences between the neoplatonic theories of Henry More, and the quasi-paracelsan notion of astral spirits, which More attacked (Finucane 1982, 121).

Furthermore, Finucane was one of the first writers to assign a cultural role to the ghost, arguing that ghosts "represent man's inner universe just as his art and poetry do. And as in the case of literary and aesthetic invention, the results cannot be divorced from their social milieu" (Finucane 1982, 1). This perspective has been embraced, to a greater or lesser extent, by recent historians, such as Jean-Claude Schmitt (1998) in his examination of medieval spectres. These authors seem to share the perception that the ghost fulfils a social function, seeing the ghost as reflecting societal attitudes of anxiety, which are personified in the figure of the ghost. While traditions and stories may be shaped to fulfil such functions, as we will argue they were, this is very different from these positions, which deny any source of material separate from what they regard as the dominant cultural trends. There is almost an effective writing out of any form of folk tradition.

Certainly, the material was mediated in many cases, even if this was just a case of being prefaced by the editor's remarks, or positioned within a collection, but their analyses seem to be working on a crude version of David Hufford's cultural source theory, stripping it from any tradition, or continuum of lore, and seeing it as a product of its immediate age (Hufford 1982, 13-14). There are more measured variations of the view of ghosts as an embodiment of the concerns of the living. Peter Marshall, while seeing ghosts as a "manifestation of popular culture," nevertheless still admits that the "meanings of ghostly apparitions were open, hazardous, and uncertain, both at the level of official theology, and among those who actually found themselves confronted in the night with a 'questionable shape'"(Marshall 2002, 234 and 262). At the other end of the spectrum we have Annekatrin Puhle, who has worked on poltergeist and apparitions in the eighteenth century (Puhle 1999). She has attempted to sheer away all cultural accretions to identify the essential function of ghosts. In strongly Structuralist analysis of the various traditions, which we believe risks severe oversimplification, she suggests that: Apparitions carry important information relevant to the here and now, and they connect the reality of time and space with a wider reality which is neither bound to these categories nor does it follow the law of cause and effect. The core of the ghost is this: the messenger-ghost(Puhle 2005, 148). This present study sets out to examine ideas about ghosts in the later seventeenth century as a distinct set of beliefs, albeit one that drew upon earlier theories about apparitions. It will concentrate on elite attitudes to the phenomena, and changes in these attitudes, since it is largely through such sources that accounts of ghosts have filtered through to us. Gillian Bennett's warning about the writers of the Restoration must, however, be borne in mind: The stories were collected from self-selected informants drawn from a limited group of educated, upper-class people known to the collectors and may not have been representative of the "folk" at large ... scholars should be wary of using data from Glanvil, Bovet and Sinclair as evidence of a continuing tradition of ghosts (Bennett 1986, 11). This is partly true, as testified to by James Collins in the publisher's Preface to Saducismus Triumphatus (Glanvill 1681) where he states that the only accounts included in the third part were those that "seemed very well attested and highly credible [to More] ... and such, as rightly understood, contain nothing but what is consonant to right Reason and sound Philosophy" (Glanvill 1681, sig. A3v). It is only through such authors, however, that we have any access to the vast majority of ghost lore from the late seventeenth century, whatever its faults may be; and, however it may have been marshalled to its author's ends, it remains the only significant corpus of such literature. Moreover, it is possible to overstate the case against this fact. Certainly, it was selected in its ability to serve a function, but frequently it appears that the stories are preserved independently of any substantial editorial matter, which features only in the prologue or conclusion, especially in the case of the pamphlet material of this period. For examples of cases that do seem to consist of unedited narratives within an editorial framework, see both A True Relation of the Horrid Ghost of a Woman (Anonymous 1673) and A True and Perfect Account of a Strange and Dreadful Apparition (Pye 1672). It must be stressed, however, that the same stories frequently turn up in collections of such material in a substantially identical form. Pye's narrative was reprinted in...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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