Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages

Abstract

The dead are the silent majority in the Church’s history – as they are, indeed, in humanity’s. The life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried and tested certainty, predicated on a soul which survives the death of the body. That raises issues about the nature and structure of the afterlife, its pains and delights. For the late medieval Church, the afterlife raised particular concerns and anxieties, its complex division into heaven, hell, and purgatory promising a future which had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were a major force in religious practice, with death as the threshold to something unknown until experienced.

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