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Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late Medieval Exempla*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Catherine Rider
Catherine Rider*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

One of the ways in which medieval Christians thought about the links between this life and the afterlife was by telling ghost stories – a topic which has attracted the attention of several historians. In these stories, a dead person often appears to a living relative or friend and asks them to give alms or to perform other good works on their behalf, in order to speed up their passage to heaven. The dead person usually appears spontaneously, although sometimes this occurs after relatives have said prayers for them. This paper, however, will examine a group of stories about less spontaneous apparitions. These are stories in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife. They have sometimes been mentioned in studies of medieval ghost stories, but they have not been examined in their own right.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 45: The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul , 2009 , pp. 174 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Julia Crick for commenting on a draft of this paper and to Sophie Page for sharing unpublished work

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