Context

Ghosts:

A nation in flux - 

• King Henry VIII creates the Church of England (Protestantism), splitting from the Catholic Church, In order to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn. 

• England was then officially Protestant BUT Catholicism still lingered and was prosecuted in private devotion and cultural memory. 

• This meant that Elizabethans were spiritually conflicted 

• Catholic rituals were banned however people still had catholic fears and hopes, people lived as protestants publicly but maintained Catholic sympathies privately. 

The three Schools of thought when encountering the ghost - 

Catholic - Ghosts are the spirits of those in purgatory who are allowed to return to earth to seek the help of the faithful to complete a task which brings their souls peace 

“Pierre Le Loyer” (1586) - ‘Souls cannot return to the body…[they] take not a real but a phantasmal body’. A traditional pre-Reformation point of view. 

Protestant - Ghosts were often perceived as demons disguised as friends or relatives to cause harm therefore it advises that those who are possessed by apparitions of spirits should live godly by gluing ‘themselves to fasting, sobriety, and upright and godly living’

Skeptic - Acknowledges the existence of spirits but does not believe that they could take a material form therefore any material apparitions are a manifestation of a melancholic state of mind or the result of knavery.