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

272 Reviews understanding to struggle with the contradictions of Richard's rule, and the mysteries of fourteenth-century beliefs and value-systems, than to impose on him labels which he and his fellows would have found incomprehensible and insignificant. It is the achievement of Saul's book that its account of Richard II's distinctive historical context is so rich and varicoloured as to keep us probing for better and more profound understandings not just of an individual, but of his whole world. Philippa Maddern Department ofHistory The University of Western Australi Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xiii, 290; 30 colour illustrations; R.R.P. US$33.00, £26.50. Gore Vidal recounts Eleanor Roosevelt's opinion of Queen Wilhelmina's spiritualistic communing with those w h o have passed on: 'Since we're going to be dead such a long time anyway it's rather a waste of time chatting with all them before w e get there'. In the Middle Ages, it was precisely because 'we're going to be dead such a long time' that many people sought as much information as possible on what to expect, 'before w e get there'. Ghost tales came to be one of the prime sources of such precious knowledge. Jean-Claude Schmitt is one of a number of French historians connected with the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris, including Jacques Le Goff, J. Baschet, J. Chiffoleau, Claude Carozzi, Claude Lecouteux and others, w h o in recent years have vastly expanded our understanding of the relations of the living and the dead in medieval society. In this lucid and lively book, originally published as Les Revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la societe medievale, Gallimard, 1994, Sc ranges widely across the Latin literature of medieval Europe from the fifth century to the end of the fifteenth. H e traces the increase in reports of appearances of what he calls 'everyday ghosts' (as opposed to appearances of dead saints) from the turn of the first millennium, and 273 their manifold uses until their partial absorption in the macabre, five hundred years later. His book is aptly described as 'a contribution to a sodal history of the imaginary' (p. 10), as w e nowadays translate the rather more expansive French I'imaginaire. Schmitt rightly emphasises the networks of social relations which enmesh medieval ghosts' appearances; these are rarely random: particular spirits usually appear to individual people at significant times and in particular places for specific reasons. A n d w e k n o w of such encounters only because they prompted the interest of others, family and neighbours, the local priest, clerics w h o undertook to write the accounts which survive. These might be collected for the edification of local monastics, as in the early fourteenth-century versions of local oral reports assembled by a Cistercian m o n k of Byland in Yorkshire; or presented to the Pope, as is the LTominican Johannes Gobi's account of the ghost of Gui de Corvo in 1324-25; or circulated in collections of exempla used for preaching to the laity. Ghosts returned for various reasons: to seek suffrages, or some other assistance—the restitution of stolen property, say—in order to liberate them from purgatory; to forewarn sinners of their imminent death; to fulfil a pledge to a friend or relative to reveal themselves after death; and, occasionally, to terrify a local populace by physical attack, or even to inflict death. They appeared to relations both natural and spiritual, to spouses and other immediate kin, to fellow members of households, monastic communities, local parishes, and confraternities. A s Schmitt observes, the duty of remembering the dead, which was incumbent on such relations, w a s intended to free the soul from its purgatorial dependence on the alms of the living, so that the deceased could finally be released into the oblivion of heaven. Schmitt is careful to avoid simple assertions of 'belief and pays due attention to the form, genre, manner...