Boo...

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society - Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Why hello historical monograph. I carved out time to do a quick read (not quite a skim, but close) of this very scholarly work over the last few days. It exercised the muscles I developed in grad school the first time around, when I was reading at least 1000 pages weekly of history, philosophy, primary texts, etc. I was so good at reading for content and argument then. But in the intervening years, those skills have waned quite a bit.

But not so much that I couldn't get into the text. Schmitt is exploring the role of ghosts in medieval culture, primarily how they (or rather the way people talked about them) evolved. The church played a primary role, of course, but there was some amount of room for older traditions of the dead. Anyway, there was a lot of souls stuck in purgatory, asking those still living to do something (pray, make financial arrangements) to better their lot in the afterlife. And somehow there was a tie-in to the tradition of charivari, which was more typically related to marriages that threatened society in some way (widowers taking young wives, widows remarrying unexpectedly, cuckolding). But the point is clearly that ghosts exist because of the function they serve for the living.

As a fan of the social construction of pretty much everything, I am down with this. And it's convincing. And yet, as a believer in ghosts - or at my most skeptical, an agnostic - I find myself working facing a bit of a quandary. If ghosts manifest in response to social expectations and constructions, can they still have an objective reality? I vote yes, although I can't imagine Schmitt agrees with me.