Grant, 'Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories', (original) (raw)
Related papers
Young, The Ghosts of Medieval Yorkshire: The Zombies, Shape-Changers and Ghouls of Byland Abbey.PDF
The editor had two aims in producing this book on the Byland supernatural tales. First, he wanted to bring together the 1922 edition of the Latin by M.R. James and the associated 1924 translation by Grant so that they could be read side by side. Because of the sheer bulk of footnotes it has not been possible to do a facing translation in the conventional manner. Rather short extracts from the English have been placed with the relevant Latin under them on each page. Second, there has been an attempt to give some overview of the literature particularly as it relates to details in the twelve tales: many details are difficult to understand, and some are impenetrable (at least to the present writer). This literature is represented in the footnotes with a simple surname pointing to the final bibliography. All of Grant’s and James’ footnotes have been included even though some of James’ are effectively redundant.
Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire and the Mystifying Phenomenon
A Case Study, 2024
This article records an unusual occurrence that is supposed to have taken place at Byland Abbey, in North Yorkshire in 1290. The story first came to light in 1953 and is so unbelievable to be true. After investigations, in 1956 the story was exposed to be a hoax, just a joke by perpetrators. This is a case study was researched in 2024
Folklore, 2023
Folk legends of brave clergymen confronting terrifying apparitions in fields and houses can be heard all throughout rural England. Situated in the early modern period, these tales establish the archetype of the 'conjuring parson' and perpetuate the spiritual tradition of 'ghost-laying': the exorcism of ghosts. Clerical ghost-laying, however, is a spiritual tradition without a well-founded historical or theological precedent. The few extant sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literary depictions of this practice are largely satirical or polemical in nature. Tales of early modern clergymen exorcising restless spirits actually originate from the pens of Victorian authors who developed the sensationalist folkloric exploits of conjuring parsons to fulfil their own literary or political agendas. Through a comparison of early modern and Victorian literary accounts-focusing on the Botathen Ghost haunting-this article illustrates that the genre of clerical ghost-laying lacks any substantial claim to historical, literary, or theological legitimacy.
Ghosts in English and Irish Literature
The aim of the thesis is to analyze the presence of ghosts and supernatural elements in literature. More specifically, the focus is centered on three works in English literature, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw as well as upon the works of the Irish author William Butler Yeats and his two plays The Dreaming of the Bones and At the Hawk’s Well.
The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story
2017
The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.
Ghosts: Of Writing, at Windows, in Mirrors, on Moors
Animal Visions, 2019
The Emily ghost who haunts the afterlife of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights cannot be extricated from the moor and all its inhabitants, human and nonhuman. This emplaced revenant is drawn from Brontë's life, yet conflated with the Cathy ghost of the novel, creating an apparition that combines fiction, place and biography. Three of the adaptations I work with playfully pick up this fabrication, test its weight and craft it to their purposes. In Anne Carson's poem "Obsession", the speaker evokes an Emily ghost who haunts her experience of destructive love. In Jane Urquhart's novel Changing Heaven, the Emily ghost takes on Cathy's tempestuous lilt and the biography of Brontë's life, including Emily's preferred companion, the dog known as Keeper. In the novel Four Dreamers and Emily, Stevie Davies depicts an Emily ghost who, waif-like at first, becomes womanly when she visits the bedside of a devotee who cites her work from memory. She then electrifyingly reappears to him on the moors, accompanied by Keeper. In the texts that I consider, only the latter of these three ghosts bears any resemblance to the popular manifestations of this ghost, caustically dismissed by Brontë scholar Lucinda Miller, as part of an overblown myth of a 'windblown waif wafting across the moors' (2005, 186). However, each of these works reinforce the idea that Emily, like Cathy, felt a close affinity with the moor.
Spenser's Groaning Ghosts, Feb.
Conference paper (SCSC), 2022
Spenser's Groaning Ghosts In Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt declares that the "ghosts who cry out in [Thomas] More's Supplication of Souls, for fear that they are being forgotten, the ghosts who are assigned to oblivion by skeptics and reassigned to Hell in the writing of the triumphant Protestants.. .do not altogether vanish. Instead they turn up on stage" (151). I would add that neither do they altogether fall silent-hence the title of this paper. While ghosts might not "turn up" in Spenser in as spectacular a fashion as do Hamlet Senior, Banquo, Don Andrea, and the 4 dozen other ghosts cast in the drama of the period, they do turn up quite frequently. The Spenser Concordance lists 55 occurrences of ghost or ghosts in Spenser's oeuvre, 38 of those in the FQ. When you add in the dozens of references to "ghastly" figures and to "sprites," occasionally in this period almost synonymous with ghosts, the FQ becomes even more heavily populated with the disembodied and the newly-or very-nearly-dead-a fact that might surprise us, given Spenser's largely Protestant aims, the official Protestant view that Purgatory was a fiction, and the more or less official Protestant contention that, if they were not completely fraudulent, nothing more than jugglers' tricks, ghosts were demons sent by Satan or angels sent from God. Supplicating ghosts crying out for relief from purgatorial pains simply did not exist. And yet, ghosts periodically furnish an indistinct but nonetheless insistent thrum in the soundscape of The Faerie Queene.
Murdie review of Ghostology.pdf
Ghostology: The Art of the Ghost Hunter by Steve Parsons. Foreword by Ann Winsper. White Crow Books, Hove. £12.99 ISBN-13: 978- 1910121726