Abstract
This piece explores the phenomenon of ghosts in early modern England to highlight the strength of the premodern imagination as a tool for conceptualising the future. Ghosts can be viewed as an imaginative resource to fulfil social obligations or to express hopes and fears. There is a strong emotional element here. For people living in both the premodern and modern world, ghosts could (and can) be a way in which emotions became externally embodied, either in a sense of a presence, or in a more tangible form. As such, this piece explores the links between supernatural belief, strong emotions and the imagination of multiple futures.
This piece seeks to contemplate some of the ways in which we can examine how the premodern imagination was a key tool in reshaping and reimagining the future. It does so by looking at what I will call the ‘spectral imagination’; that is, the ways in which early modern men and women thought about the actions of those who had died and returned as ghosts. Although the study of ghosts as a universal phenomenon across time and place is an important vein of study, this essay takes a more historical approach and looks at ghosts within a specific place and time: post-Reformation England.1 In a post-Reformation world ghosts should have been dismissed as mere delusions of the Devil, but, despite this, there was still space for ghosts in premodern England, and people routinely reported seeing their departed relatives or friends reappear after death. In returning from death to right wrongs, ghosts allowed those who viewed them to reimagine the future as a more just place. In this way, ghosts can be viewed as a ‘flexible imaginative resource’ that men and women could draw on to express their hopes and fears, and to fulfil social obligations.2 There is a strong emotional element here, with ghosts often soothing wounds, whether physical or emotional. The spectral imagination allowed men and women to have some control over their lives, to experience a sense of closure after death, and to imaginatively reshape their futures.
Anders Schinkel has explored the idea that imagination was (and is) a key way in which both premodern and modern men and women conceptualised the future. Schinkel offers a reworking of Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of expectation and experience, a theory that argues that the difference between modern and premodern mentality is that for modern men and women expectation and experience are separated. Schinkel nuances this theory by stressing the similarities between the two periods. He introduces imagination as a third category of historical analysis, one which is essential in forming the connection between expectation and experience.3 Schinkel agrees that expectation and experience are always connected, but says how closely they connect will be dependent on the strength of an individual’s imagination.4 Imagination is needed to have any expectations at all, and to distinguish the future from the past.5 Schinkel offers a crucial corrective to Kosselleck’s sometimes static description of history: in all periods, he argues, expectation and experience are linked by imagination. So far I agree. But Schinkel also claims that the imagination, while crucial in creating expectations of the future, was much weaker in the minds of premoderns.6
The early modern spectral imagination offers something of a challenge to this assertion. While it certainly bridges the gap between experience and expectation – in that if one has experienced stories of ghosts and accepts that they are a reality then one is much more likely to expect that a ghost will appear – it also shows a huge capacity to imagine a different future. So while I agree with Schinkel’s points, in this short essay I would like to suggest that the early modern supernatural helps to highlight the strength of the premodern imagination.
There is an obvious psychological argument to be made for the links between emotion and imagination when it comes to ghost stories. Most would say that people imagine ghosts as an emotional response to the death of a loved one; as a way to come to terms with that death and have a sense of ‘closure’.7 Modern accounts of ghosts tend to be less tangible than early modern ones. People will say that they felt the sense of a presence, or a physical pressure, or change in the air. Often there is an associated emotion, such as a sense of sadness or calm.8 We might think here of Jacques Derrida’s much-contested concept of ‘hauntology’, interpreted broadly as a lingering sense of a present that fails to materialise.9 For most modern readers, ghosts live firmly in the realms of the imagination. But we would be wrong to dismiss their power on that basis. While many may associate ‘imagination’ with the creative faculty, in a more general sense, the term ‘refers to the capacity of the mind to form images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses and to evoke their relations with one another’.10 Of course, for those who witnessed them, ghosts were absolutely present to the senses, visually, aurally and even olfactorily. The early modern spectral imagination was strong enough to conjure up physical proof of the imagined. Ghosts and apparitions could, and often did, leave physical proof of their presence, such as footsteps, ruined furniture, a lingering smell of brimstone or a physical sensation of touch. For those who experienced them, these apparitions were just as real as physical objects. And for those who study the history of mentalities, as Albrecht Classen reminds us, these apparitions of the mind are ‘just as concrete’, as they reflect the concepts of the individual’s mind.11
The intangibility common to many modern ghost experiences is less common in premodern narratives. We do have early modern examples of ghosts or apparitions appearing to people after death and, in doing so, evoking a sense of peace or calm.12 These, though, are rare in printed sources. Ghosts were not predominantly imagined as comforting presences in the early modern world. And ghosts were not at all shy about taking physical form. Quite often the spectral imagination was powered by fear, greed, spite or a desire for vengeance. Ghosts most commonly appeared, in the shape they appeared in life, to settle disputes over wills, to counsel their children or to bring their murderers to justice.13 For those witnessing them, this sense of purpose and justice (powered by divine providence) was crucial and an expected part of the ghostly narrative. On 8 September 1705, for example, Mrs Veal spent a pleasant afternoon conversing with her old friend Mrs Bargrave. She told her she wanted to speak to her before going on a journey. She made sure to repair their friendship (which had been somewhat neglected) and also charged Mrs Bargrave to write a letter to her brother to distribute her belongings. It was only later that Mrs Bargrave learnt that Mrs Veal had died the previous day.14 For Mrs Veal, her ghostly visit was all about putting her affairs in order.15 We also have similar examples of unfinished business in cases in which ghosts returned from the dead to reveal their murderers. In 1679, for instance, William Carter conspired to have his brother murdered by highwaymen.16 He was not discovered until his brother’s ghost appeared and showed his still-bleeding wounds. This providential act led to William’s full confession. There is a clear functional purpose for ghost narratives. But this functional purpose is also one charged with emotion. As Keith Thomas observed more than fifty years ago, ghosts helped to personify people’s hopes and fears, and could also be a ‘useful sanction’ for social norms.17
Ghosts seldom came back with an emotionless directive. Instead, their requests were often presented with a strong sense of urgency, often underpinned by an implied sadness or distress. One ghost, who was murdered in Northamptonshire ‘two hundred sixty and seven years, nine weeks, and two days ago’, was very ‘joyful’ and ‘contented’ once his affairs were set in order.18 The ability for ghosts to act in the world and to have real, tangible effects, means that we should see them as an imaginative resource capable of impacting the future lives of those who imagined them. Returning to Schinkel’s premodern conception of time, we see that ghosts allowed early moderns to imagine a different future. This imagining was grounded in experience (ghosts were a possible reality) but was able to be used to change the future from its expected trajectory; that is, an unavenged death, or a lost inheritance.
A pamphlet published in London at the end of the seventeenth century demonstrates this point. The pamphlet describes three ghosts: one was murdered on the orders of her former employer after he slept with her and she became pregnant; one was a widow who died while staying with relatives and then came back to help settle her father’s will; and the last was a woman who appeared twice as tall as a normal woman, groaning and shrieking. This ghost had no clear mission, but it was suspected that she was attempting to unearth a murder.19 The first of these stories is the most detailed. Mr Roberts, the pregnant maid’s former employer, hired Mark Sharp, a coalminer, to murder his former lover with a pick and throw her body into a pit. Sharp did this but couldn’t wash the blood from his clothes, so he hid his stockings and his shoes, as well as the murder weapon, in a nearby bush. Four days later, the murdered woman returned as a ghost to a miller she had known in life. She told him what had happened, showed him her bleeding wounds, and employed him to fetch a Justice of the Peace. After some hesitation (and a second ghostly visit, this time more ‘dreadful’) the miller agreed. The JP gathered the Head Constable and other reputable men and, on going to the pit, discovered the body, the pick and the bloodstained clothes. Later, when the case was heard in court, the judge, who was apparently sceptical of apparitions, was going to acquit; until, that is, an apparition of a naked child appeared in the court and forced the judge and jury to reconsider. According to the pamphlet record, both Mr Roberts and Mark Sharp were executed for their crime.20 In this story, the ghost of the dead woman has been able to seek justice for how she were treated, both in life and in death, and the wrongdoers were publicly shamed and punished.
The story of the ghostly return of the murdered maid who has been betrayed twice over by her former employer leaves the reader with a sense of the strength of divine providence and that murder (and the other betrayals the pamphlet describes) will be found out. The ghost here is, in some ways, providence manifest, a reading that shows the power of the imagination in allowing premodern men and women a way of interacting with a preordained supernatural world over which they have no real control. The fact that the ghost is female is part of a broader trend in ghostly narratives. For women, ghostly appearances could act as a way for them to seek the justice they were refused in life.21 The ghost of a woman could also be given more authority than a living woman, as the ghost could be acting under divine instructions. Ghost stories could also privilege female-only interactions, such as in the above example of Mrs Veal and Mrs Bargrave. A few female ghosts in early modern London drew huge crowds: Mrs Adkins, a former midwife, appeared as a terrifying, fire-belching ghost to reveal the dead bodies of two babies, and Mrs Mabell appeared to her relative Mrs Harvey to reveal buried treasure.22 The premodern ability to imagine the ghosts of former friends and neighbours and then to act on postmortem instructions demonstrates the power of the early modern imagination. As Schinkel has argued, imagination was (and is) a crucial bridge between experience and expectation. Here the imagined ghosts have real impact on the world – the bones of two children are dug up and displayed for the community to mourn, and an inheritance is challenged after the buried treasure is revealed. In this way, imagination also grants people a measure of control over their own lives and, especially in cases of female ghosts, acts as a way of challenging power relations.23 The combination of death and divine providence could give women the power to be heard, to challenge power relations, and in doing so, have tangible effects in the world.
So, why focus on ghosts as a way to better understand the links between imagination and emotion? For people living in both the premodern and modern world, ghosts could (and can) be a way in which emotions became externally embodied, either in a sense of a presence, or in a more tangible form. Although some modern people do claim to see ghosts, this was much more common, and much more accepted, in the premodern world. When studying a world in which ghosts were believed to be a real possibility, we can see how the spectral imagination allowed people to manifest their fears and anxieties about the future. Ghosts also allow us to study the different ways in which imagination worked in the past versus in the present. As Schinkel argues, imagination was and is a crucial link between experience and expectation. But an imagination that can conjure up tangible proof of a spiritual world, and then use that proof to change the course of the future, surely should not be viewed as weaker than our present capacity.
The idea of ghosts as universal is a large field, especially in anthropology. For two recent overviews, see Christine S. VanPool and Todd L. VanPool, An Anthropological Study of Spirits (Cham: Springer, 2023); and Byron J. Good, Andrea Chiovenda, and Sadeq Rahimi, ‘The Anthropology of Being Haunted: On the Emergence of an Anthropological Hauntology,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 51 (2022): 437–53.
Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2007), 21.
Anders Schinkel, ‘Imagination as a Category of History: An Essay Concerning Koselleck’s Concepts of Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont,’ History and Theory 44 (2005): 42–54.
Schinkel, ‘Imagination as a Category of History,’ 47.
Schinkel, ‘Imagination as a Category of History,’ 48.
Schinkel, ‘Imagination as a Category of History,’ 48.
For a discussion of grief as a spectral presence, see Alex Broom and Michelle Peterie, ‘Troubling Grief: Spectrality, Temporality, Refusal, Catharsis,’ The Sociological Review 72, no. 5 (2024): 1018–37.
See, for example, Ashley Barnwell, ‘Feeling Kindred: Sensory Encounters with Immaterial Inheritance,’ in Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions, ed. Katie Barclay et al. (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).
Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997), ix.
Albrecht Classen, ‘Imagination, Fantasy, Otherness, and Monstrosity in the Modern World: New Approaches to Cultural-Historical and Anthropological Epistemology. Also an Introduction,’ in Imagination, Fantasy, Otherness, and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), 1–230 (13).
See, for example, the apparition of a dove which appeared over the deathbed of the children of a godly Protestant: A True Relation of an Apparition in the Likenesse of a Bird with a white brest (London, 1641).
For early work on the ‘functionalist’ interpretation of early modern ghost narratives, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1991), 711–24.
Daniel Defoe, A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal, The next Day after Her Death (London, 1706).
For a detailed discussion of this ghost story see Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, chap. 3.
Strange and Wonderful News from Lincolnshire (London, 1679).
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 717.
The Rest-less Ghost: Or, Wonderful News from Northamptonshire and Southwark (London, 1674), 5, 8.
A Faithful and True Account of an Apparition or Ghost in the Shape of a Prodigious Tall Woman Dres’d up all in White (London, 1697).
A Faithful and True Account of an Apparition or Ghost, 4–5.
For more on the links between gender, justice, and ghosts, see Laura Gowing, ‘The Haunting of Susan Lay: Servants and Mistresses in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Gender and History 14, no. 2 (2002): 183–201; Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England,’ The Historical Journal 63, no. 2 (2020): 339–59; and Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, 91.
Great News from Middle-Row in Holbourn: Or a True Relation of a Dreadful Ghost ([London], 1679); The Female Ghost (London, 1705).
For more on the links between ghosts and power dynamics, see Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10–11.
