Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society

This is an interesting study of public attitudes toward ghosts in Western Europe from the time of Augustine through the end of the Middle Ages. The focus is mainly on popular ghost stories such as those repeated by Gregory the Great and other writers. Schmitt notes that most of the ghost stories of that time had moral themes designed to change people's behavior and encourage them to be better Catholics. I had hoped for more of an emphasis on medieval philosophy and theology's view of ghosts, but one book cannot accomplish everything. As a history of the "mainstream, popular" ghost in the Middle Ages, this book fills a major gap in scholarly research on ghost stories.

My book arrived exactly how I expected it to...

LOVED THIS!!!

Readers of the "skeptic" literature--"Skeptic" and "Skeptical Inquirer" magazines, e.g.--know that the subject of ghosts and their properties is alive and well in American culture. As is usually the case today, the discussions one reads tend to assume that the issues and supposed explanations are new--there is rarely any hint that there is any scholarly history, certainly before the Victorian era. But there is such a history; it is rich and highly informative IF one can access it. Most of it is in obscure scholarly resources inaccessible to those outside university-enabled on-line resources, and most of it is in languages other than English. For anyone seriously interested in the subject of ghosts, this book, by a prominent French cultural historian of the "Annaliste" school (so-called because they study period "annales," or documents, pertaining to everyday life rather than military or political matters; the best-known French examples are Marc Bloch and Immanuel LeRoy Ladurie; the best-known American is Eugene Genovese, author of "The Political Economy of Slavery"), is a unique window into that history. I recently read a contemporary discussion of why contemporary ghosts typically are wearing clothes (did you ever think about that?!), and it is fascinating to read that this was a subject of lively debate in the Middle Ages. One of the skeptical magazines very recently had an article on "why ghost hunters typically work at night," rather than by day. In this book we learn that ghostly apparitions in dreams were given less credibility than those reported by the fully wakeful, typically in daylight. We learn that at least some ghosts could enter into dialogues with the living, and a few could be sensed by touch. Most interestingly, we learn that the main motivation for the dead to manifest to the living was to solicit "suffrages"--voluntary acts by the living that might buy the deceased's way out of Purgatory. "Suffrages" included having others pray for the dead or pay for Masses to be said for them, as well as donations of wealth or property to the Church and of alms to the poor. Ghosts generally appeared to relatives, friends or associates of the deceased, not strangers, and were especially frequent visitors to abbeys, where an effort would be made to enlist all the living monks in "suffrages." (Apparently both quantity and quality counted.) Almost all ghosts were male, but the living of both sexes were visited--often widows by their late husbands. Occasionally the soul in Purgatory would ask that the person visited see to it that his unpaid debts be remitted--apparently dying with unmet financial obligations condemned one to a posthumous debtor's prison in Purgatory! The organization of the book lends itself to a certain degree of repetitiousness. But it's still a great "read" and contains information not available anywhere else to the lay reader. It has reproductions of 30 medieval representations of ghosts and kindred phenomena, which are very helpful in allowing one to visualize what medieval concepts of ghosts really entailed.

If you like Medieval studies, or ghosts, this is a cool book. You get the feeling that Schmitt had read nearly every Medieval document, and recounts many of their stories. The early writings told mostly stories of large groups of the dead returning at once, say in a festival in a cemetery, which was then always a churchyard (yes, All Souls Day and still with on Halloween). The Tournament of Demons was another reported event. Individualized haunting began to appear more frequently, usually to right a wrong done in a lifetime. Often they were recorded by monks who at times experienced them and others wrote down oral stories of others. Always they emphasized Christian morals. The phantoms in white sheets did not start appearing until much later in the Medieval period. In fact, early appearances often seemed a little like zombies. The book has a wonderful section with color illustrations from the Medieval period. Schmitt's theme is what the beliefs reveal about Medieval society. He admits belief is a tough thing to describe. "There is nothing less fixed and less assured than this activity of believing: the ethnologist who interviews subjects several times in a row, under different circumstances, quickly becomes aware of this." The book's opening line establishes his position on the dead. "The dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them." And as he demonstrates, the living utilize the dead in many ways. "The living therefore made the voice of the dead their own, a voice that, strong with the authority conferred on it by its supernatural origin, reminded them of all the norms of Christianity."

Llibre clàssic.El defecte principal és que desatén pràcticament els casos de revinguts corporals. Manca també, conseqüentment una visió unificadora dels espectres corporals i els eteris.

The introduction starts with this sentence :- ''The dead have no other existence than that which the living imagine for them.''If I had read that before purchase I would have saved my money .