Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland by Martha McGill (review)

The perception of Scotland as a haven of superstition, where myths and outmoded beliefs in such things as witches and fairies held sway for much longer than was seemly, is a powerful and longstanding stereotype. Even today, the shadow of James MacPherson's Ossian (1760) and the legacy of Romanticism affect comprehensions of Scotland as a peculiarly haunted land, the natural abode of ghosts and spirits.

Various accounts and compendiums of Scottish ghost stories, collected and compiled over the last two centuries, are reasonably accessible, but critical analyses of such tales are in short supply. Hence, this new study is most welcome as there is little by way of sensible discussion on the historical role of ghosts in a Scottish context thus far. In this respect, McGill's work has laid a foundation stone upon which to build, not unlike Jean-Claude Schmitt did for medieval European ghost beliefs or Gillian Bennett for twentieth-century memorates (personal belief narratives) of ghostly encounters, though, curiously McGill does not make much of these previous important works within her own study. This neglect may, in part, be explained by the timeframe of the book—focusing largely on the period from 1685 to 1832—between the publication of George Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered and the death of Sir Walter Scott.

The decision to curtail her study within the parameters of Scotland's Enlightenment era has been partly dictated by the availability of sources and commentary on the subject as there was, as others (including myself) have discovered, a rise in interest in the supernatural from the later seventeenth century onwards. But it is an interesting time span for other reasons also, not least for the assumption that the period is associated with the rise of rationalism. That ghosts and other tales of terror should thrive in the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" might initially seem antithetical but McGill's book contributes to a growing body of evidence that reveals how a more nuanced understanding of the supernatural developed during Scotland's "long eighteenth century" (2).

"Ghosts," McGill argues, "never had a fixed identity" (15). Rather, they "inhabited a broader range of imagined worlds" (16). Moreover, ghost narratives reflect contemporary concerns about religion, mortality, and identity. Therefore, in order to establish the various ways in which ghosts were understood and utilized, McGill draws on a range of fictional and nonfictional sources, including works of philosophy and theology; church and court records; various periodicals and printed pamphlets; and novels, poems, and dramatic plays, as well as traditional ballads and folk materials collected by antiquarians and folklorists.

A particular strength of this book is that it is supremely well organized, laying out a coherent pathway that leads the reader down a trail of discovery as to the changing nature of ghost beliefs over time. Following some introductory statements on the historiography of ghosts, defining the relevant terminologies, and types of sources consulted, the journey begins in chapter 1, "Medieval and Reformation Ghosts." McGill explains that pre-Reformation ghosts tended to assume corporeal form, as revenant or living corpse, mainly appearing in order to make some moral or theological point, though their precise status was ambiguous and they were sometimes equated with demons. Protestant reformers initially struggled to explain the reality or purpose of ghosts, for they had eradicated the theory of purgatory (extolled by Catholicism), an intermediate state of existence wherein the dead might linger. Yet ghosts could not be denied outright as there was biblical evidence for their existence. James VI's Daemonologie (1597) offered a compelling solution, which was to consider all such apparitions and spirits as emanations of the Devil. The demonization of ghosts and apparitions, no doubt reinforced by the persecuting culture that arose during the time of the witch-hunts, held sway until at least the late seventeenth century when ghosts might have also been viewed as indicators of divine providence.

Chapter 2, "Evangelising Ghosts," surveys the...