Preface

Summary

The emergence of the ‘ghost story’ as a distinct genre is a relatively recent literary development. Medieval accounts of supernatural events were different in both style and function from those of modern times, and many of the stories I have brought together in this anthology were products of the encounter between the Church's teaching and vernacular belief which characterised much of the culture of the Middle Ages. The book does not of course contain all the medieval texts which refer to ghosts and apparitions: such a collection would not only be unwieldy but repetitive, since many of the accounts which are modelled on hagiographical episodes closely resemble each other. It does, however, bring together a number of texts which are significant in that they indicate various aspects of medieval belief about the possibility of traffic across the mysterious border between the living and the dead. They are drawn from an extremely wide range of source material, from chronicle histories to Icelandic sagas, and the reasons which may have led the medieval writers to record them were as varied as the sources themselves. I hope the stories will prove useful as indications of some of the preoccupations and reference points (what today might be called the ‘agenda’) of the medieval mind.

The definition of a ghostly occurrence which I have used as a criterion in the selection of these texts is a broad one. For the most part, the ghosts which walk through this anthology are the departed spirits of ordinary, rather than extraordinary, people. In other words, they are not saints, although in the case of monastic writings, the stories are often closely modelled on hagiographical accounts of saints’ miraculous doings. These ghosts are spirits, or ‘undead’ corporeal presences, which come back across the border between the dead and the living and re-visit in an imploring or menacing fashion the communities where they once dwelt. They are not spirits glimpsed in revelatory visions of the afterlife, as in the Irish account of St Patrick's Purgatory or in the Divine Comedy of Dante. Not all of these medieval ghost stories take as their subjects the spirits of the departed.