My thesis seeks to address the continuity, change
and the syncreticism of ideas regarding post-mortem existence in the
wake of the Reformation. Prior to reform, the late Medieval world
view of the afterlife was very straightforward. One either went to
Heaven via Purgatory, or straight to Hell. In the exempla literature
of the period, ghosts were seen to provide evidence of the purgatorial
system. However, this doctrine was dismantled by reformers who rejected
Purgatory wholesale. Reformers then put forth a multiplicity of eschatologies
which included various strands of mortalism, none of which allowed
for the possibility that the dead could return to the living. In theory
therefore, the ghost should have disappeared from the mental landscape,
yet it not only survived, but it thrived in Protestant culture.
This raises three key questions which are absolutely
central to this thesis. Firstly: by what mechanisms did commitment
to ghosts continue in lay and elite discourses in early modern England,
when religious authority denied the possibility of their existence?
Secondly: what opportunities were there to incorporate ghosts into
Anglican or wider Protestant belief? Finally: Why would many Protestant
elites want to elide the doctrinal problem of their existence and
assert that ghosts existed? The ghost must have served a purpose in
a way that nothing else could. It is therefore the purpose of the
thesis to examine the shifting role of the ghost in early modern Protestant
England.
University of Sussex
thesis posted on 2023-06-07, by Amanda Jane McKeever
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