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Abstract
This paper examines beliefs about ghosts from 1650 to 1700 as an area in its own right, as distinct from, albeit related to, earlier post-reformation beliefs. It particularly considers the approach of anti-sadducean writers to ghosts and spirits, and seeks to explore the historical context for such beliefs.
Introduction
Historians and folklorists alike have tended to treat the body of material concerning ghosts from the Reformation to the early eighteenth century as displaying a homogeneous set of beliefs. Many studies fail to note that by the Restoration the demonological interpretations, which had previously predominated in England, were losing popularity at the hands of the neoplatonic view of ghosts. Although efforts are taken by scholars to divide elite belief from popular belief, they frequently end up lumping the material together without any regard for the chronology or shifts in belief. Keith Thomas jumps back and forth through the period in his magisterial work, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), suggesting a degree of conformity in post-Reformation beliefs that is not justified by a sustained examination of the material he uses. A similar approach to the material was also taken in another significant study by Théo Brown, The Fate of the Dead (1979), who described it as an "unexpectedly consistent body of belief": her generalisations were seriously called into question by Ronald Hutton (Brown 1979,1; Hutton 1995, 94). It is, however, perhaps too easy to forget that these are the giants on whose shoulders we stand, and many of these works represent the first serious treatments of beliefs about ghosts. More recent examinations have begun to differentiate the shifts that occur throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ronald Finucane's Appearances of the Dead (1982) paid more attention to the distinctions in the seventeenth century, treating post-Reformation beliefs as separate from those of the Baroque. Even Finucane, however, implies a degree of harmony between the different theories that were prevalent during the Restoration without significantly stressing the differences between the neoplatonic theories of Henry More, and the quasi-paracelsan notion of astral spirits, which More attacked (Finucane 1982, 121).
Furthermore, Finucane was one of the first writers to assign a cultural role to the ghost, arguing that ghosts "represent man's inner universe just as his art...