Reforming the Dead: The Long-Term Effects of Reformation De-Ritualization on the Returning Dead in England, with a Particular Focus on the Seventeenth Century1

This article focuses on the effects of the Reformation in England on the relationship of the living with the dead of the community, on the perception of the rites of passage surrounding death and, most importantly, on the returning dead. It is argued here that changes wrought by the Reformation, the de-ritualization of death in particular, did not diminish the importance of the act of dying and the separation of the dying person from life, but changed their focus to more worldly concerns, a shift that influenced in turn the perception of the motives and actions of many of the returning dead; spiritual motives became less evident; instead, motives became more worldly and more communal. Rather than managing to distance the dead from the living as intended, the Reformation had in some ways the opposite effect, as can be seen through seventeenth-century anecdotes.