The Many Lives of Raleigh’s Ghost: Reframing Atheism and the Afterlife in Early Stuart Britain

In an essay on early modern “Stoics, Neoplatonists, Atheists, and Politicians,” Brian W. Ogilvie presents the 1613 treatise On Providence by the Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623) as “a classical time-warp” (762). Originally printed in Antwerp by Plantin as De Providentia Numinis et Animi Immortalitate libri duo versus Atheos et Politicos, the treatise addresses the rise of contemporary forms of atheism by lifting arguments from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum and Livy’s Natural History, thus resurrecting for seventeenth-century Catholic readers the two-thousand-year-old philosophical debate between Stoics and Epicureans: a “time-warp,” indeed. But even more “peculiar” and “odd” in Ogilvie’s view (762) is the form taken by the treatise in its English translation, published in 1631 by the presses of a Continental English Jesuit college (most probably at Saint-Omer) under the title Raleigh his Ghost. Or a feigned apparition of Syr VValter Rawleigh to a friend of his, for the translating into English, the booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man) entituled, De prouidentia numinis, & animi immortalitate: written against atheists, and polititians of these dayes (Figure 1).

While Ogilvie could not but notice the strangeness of the title,¹ he does not, however, comment on the cultural, temporal, or linguistic and material forms of reframing that are effected in the title page, which presents the translation under the prominent tutelage of the most English figure of Sir Walter Raleigh, and addresses it to the “atheists, and polititians of these dayes” (emphasis mine).² Yet, as recent research on early modern paratexts, or liminal features of translated books, has demonstrated, the “thresholds” (Genette) of the printed translation play a crucial role, both in fashioning the material features of the book and in determining—or, sometimes also, destabilizing—the interpretive codes that shape its reception.³

Figure 1.

Raleigh his Ghost… Translated by A.B. (1631), title page. Furness Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

In the case at hand, the translator—who remains unnamed, providing only the initials A.B.—and his printer show great awareness of the framing potential of the paratext, exploiting the full range of possible uses. If one is to adopt Guyda Armstrong’s distinction between authorial (here, translatorial, or, more generally, discursive), visual, and organizational paratexts (“Paratexts and their Functions” 41–42), the fiction of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ghost is operative at all levels. In terms of discursive strategies, it offers the diegetic framework of the whole treatise. Not only is the name of the “feigned apparition” conjured twice on the title page, but it occupies the liminal space usually attributed to the translator’s prefatory comments. Instead of the expected dedication, or address to the reader by the translator or printer, the book opens on a note by “the Apparition to his Friend,” signed “The Ghost of Sir W. Raleigh” (sig. *3r). In it, the ghost requests, as announced on the title page, that his “friend” translate Lessius’s treatise, but as a personal “favour,” so that his own name may be cleared of the accusations of atheism which he claims were “most unjustly” cast upon him when he was still alive: “therefore my humble, and earnest request is, that thou wouldst take the paines to translate the said treatise into English; and let the Title beare my Name, that so the Readers, may acknowledge it, as done by my solicitation” (sigs. *2v-3r). Even when the translator regains his rights in the address to the reader that follows the “Apparition,” the customary apologies on the translation are directed, not to the author (nor to the reader, as is often the case), but to the ghost: “for if I have offended any, it must be Syr Walter himselfe” (sig. *4v).

While taking pride of place at the discursive level, since it provides the title, motive, and occasion for the translation, the “apparition” also dominates the book visually. “Rawleigh’s Ghost” is printed in large font...