Ghosts in the Middle Ages

Ghosts in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226738871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.

Ghosts in the Middle Ages

Ghosts in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226738871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.

Ghosts in the Middle Ages

Ghosts in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226738888
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Using many different medieval texts, Schmitt examines medieval religious culture and the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts, asking who returned, to whom, from where, in what form, and why. Through this vivid study, we can see the ways in which the dead and the living related to each other. Schmitt focuses on everyday ghosts - recently departed ordinary people who were a part of the complex social world of the living. Schmitt argues that beliefs and the imaginary depend above all on the structures and functioning of society and culture, and he shows how the Christian culture of the Middle Ages enlarged the notion of ghosts and created many opportunities for the dead to appear. Schmitt also points out that the church happily proliferated ghost stories as a way to promote the liturgy of the dead, to develop pious sentiments among parishioners, and to solicit alms on behalf of a relative or friend's salvation.

Medieval Ghost Stories

Medieval Ghost Stories PDF Author: Andrew Joynes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843832690
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"Medieval Ghost Stories" is a collection of ghostly occurrences from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries; they have been found in monastic chronicles and preaching manuals, in sagas and heroic poetry, and in medieval romances. In a religious age, the tales bore a peculiar freight of spooks and spirituality which can still make hair stand on end; unfailingly, these stories give a fascinating and moving glimpse into the medieval mind. Look only at the accounts of Richard Rowntree's stillborn child, glimpsed by his father tangled in swaddling clothes on the road to Santiago, or the sly habits of water sprites resting as goblets and golden rings on the surface of the river, just out of reach...

Afterlives

Afterlives PDF Author: Nancy Mandeville Caciola
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

The Penguin Book of the Undead

The Penguin Book of the Undead PDF Author: Scott G. Bruce
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143107682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The walking dead from 15 centuries haunt this compendium of ghostly visitations through the ages, exploring the history of our fascination with zombies and other restless souls. Since ancient times, accounts of supernatural activity have mystified us. Ghost stories as we know them did not develop until the late nineteenth century, but the restless dead haunted the premodern imagination in many forms, as recorded in historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters. The Penguin Book of the Undead teems with roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by packs of barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, evil spirits emerging from burning carcasses in the form of crows, and zombies with pestilential breath. Spanning from the Hebrew scriptures to the Roman Empire, the Scandinavian sagas to medieval Europe, the Protestant Reformation to the Renaissance, this beguiling array of accounts charts our relationship with spirits and apparitions, wraiths and demons over fifteen hundred years, showing the evolution in our thinking about the ability of dead souls to return to the realm of the living—and to warn us about what awaits us in the afterlife. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings

The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings PDF Author: Dan Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1801101302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 73

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Book Description
A chilling medieval ghost story, first written by a 15th-century monk and now retold by historian Dan Jones.

Discerning Spirits

Discerning Spirits PDF Author: Nancy Mandeville Caciola
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the prehistory of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as a saint infused with the spirit of God and whom to avoid as a demoniac possessed of an unclean spirit. This process of discrimination, known as the discernment of spirits, was central to the religious culture of Western Europe between 1200 and 1500.Since the outward manifestations of benign and malign possession were indistinguishable, a highly ambiguous set of bodily features and behaviors were carefully scrutinized by observers. Attempts to make decisions about individuals who exhibited supernatural powers were complicated by the fact that the most intense exemplars of lay spirituality were women, and the "fragile sex" was deemed especially vulnerable to the snares of the devil. Assessments of women's spirit possessions often oscillated between divine and demonic interpretations. Ultimately, although a few late medieval women visionaries achieved the prestige of canonization, many more were accused of possession by demons.Caciola analyzes a broad array of sources from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts, to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland

Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland PDF Author: Martha McGill
Publisher: Scottish Historical Review Mon
ISBN: 9781783273621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An examination of how and why Scotland gained its reputation for the supernatural, and how belief continued to flourish in a supposed Age of Enlightenment. SHORTLISTED for the Katharine Briggs Award 2019 Scotland is famed for being a haunted nation, "whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry". Medieval Scots told stories of restless souls and walking corpses, but after the 1560Reformation, witches and demons became the focal point for explorations of the supernatural. Ghosts re-emerged in scholarly discussion in the late seventeenth century, often in the guise of religious propagandists. As time went on, physicians increasingly reframed ghosts as the conjurations of disturbed minds, but gothic and romantic literature revelled in the emotive power of the returning dead; they were placed against a backdrop of ancient monasteries, castles and mouldering ruins, and authors such as Robert Burns, James Hogg and Walter Scott drew on the macabre to colour their depictions of Scottish life. Meanwhile, folk culture used apparitions to talk about morality and mortality. Focusing on the period from 1685 to 1830, this book provides the first academic study of the history of Scottish ghosts. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and examining beliefs across the social spectrum, it shows howghost stories achieved a new prominence in a period that is more usually associated with the rise of rationalism. In exploring perceptions of ghosts, it also reflects on understandings of death and the afterlife; the constructionof national identity; and the impact of the Enlightenment. MARTHA MCGILL completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

Ghosts -- Or the (Nearly) Invisible

Ghosts -- Or the (Nearly) Invisible PDF Author: Maria Fleischhack
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631665664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This collection of articles looks at ghost stories ranging from the Middle Ages to contemporary movies from different perspectives, both interdisciplinary and international. Spectral phenomena from Antarctic literature to Haitian Voodoo, Russian poetry to Irish novels are discussed in relation to their places in history and the media.

Death in Medieval Europe

Death in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Joelle Rollo-Koster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315466848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the middle ages. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland and Spain. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.