Spectral Discourse and the Protestant Uncanny in Jacobean England

Abstract

This article explores the evolution and function of ghost discourse in Jacobean England, a period marked by religious upheaval, political tension, and theatrical innovation. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, official doctrine in England rejected the existence of purgatory and denied that the dead could return to the realm of the living. Yet popular belief and dramatic literature remained haunted—both figuratively and literally—by restless spirits. Ghosts in this period operated not merely as narrative devices or superstitious holdovers but as discursive sites where questions of religious authority, metaphysical uncertainty, and national identity were negotiated.

Drawing on demonological treatises such as Ludwig Lavater’s De Spectris and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, alongside plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, and Webster, the article argues that ghosts served as theologically charged and politically volatile figures. These specters reflected tensions between Protestant theology and lingering Catholic sentiment, between emerging empirical rationalism and deep-rooted supernaturalism. On stage and in popular imagination, the ghost became a liminal figure—both symptom and critique of a culture wrestling with the instability of its own spiritual foundations. By investigating the ghost's transformation across theology, drama, and folklore, this study contributes to a broader understanding of the "Protestant uncanny" and the cultural logic of haunting in early modern England.

Why Ghosts? Why Now?

The Jacobean era—stretching roughly from the accession of James I in 1603 to his death in 1625—was a time of profound spiritual and political anxiety in England. The nation had only recently emerged from the throes of religious revolution. The Protestant Reformation had officially dismantled the machinery of Catholic ritual, doctrine, and afterlife cosmology, yet its psychological and cultural aftershocks lingered. Central among these was the status of the dead: Where did they go? Could they return? Should they be believed if they did?

Ghosts, therefore, were not a mere literary flourish or gothic entertainment; they were a cultural preoccupation with serious theological and political implications. The ghost discourse of Jacobean England must be understood within this interstitial space—between dogma and doubt, orthodoxy and folk tradition, the pulpit and the stage. It is here that ghosts speak not only to the plot but to the soul of the age.

The era saw an explosion of ghost appearances in drama—Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi—as well as the proliferation of printed sermons, pamphlets, and treatises that either denied the reality of ghosts or cautiously admitted the possibility of demonic impersonations. The stage, newly empowered by the popular commercial theatre, became a major arena for working through cultural ambivalence about the supernatural. Dramatic ghosts tended to be morally ambiguous, often appearing without clear theological authorization. Was the ghost of King Hamlet a tormented soul or a lying demon? Was the apparition a signal from divine justice or a symptom of madness?

Such questions were not merely dramatic—they mirrored real theological debates. Protestant theology, particularly in its Calvinist expressions, denied that the souls of the departed could return to earth. Yet the persistence of ghost stories, and their popularity among all classes of English society, suggests a deep cultural unease with the finality of this doctrine. Ghosts offered a way to talk about injustice, unresolved sin, and betrayal in a register that circumvented direct political or theological confrontation.

Jacobean ghost discourse, then, was not simply a residue of medieval superstition but a crucial tool for navigating the epistemic uncertainty of an age caught between revelation and reason. It was a period haunted not just by the dead but by questions about what could be known, what could be believed, and who had the authority to determine either.

Reformation and the Denial of the Dead

The Protestant Reformation did not merely contest papal authority or sacramental theology; it initiated a full ontological reorganization of the invisible world. Central to this upheaval was the displacement of the dead—the literal and symbolic eviction of souls from purgatory, pilgrimage sites, and intercessory rituals. In Jacobean England, this theological shift had been officially codified through the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), particularly Article XXII, which denounced “the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory” as “a fond thing vainly invented.” In this doctrinal framework, the dead were consigned irrevocably to heaven or hell, with no possibility of return, no intercession, no liminal status. And yet, English culture remained saturated with figures who walked, knocked, and spoke from beyond the grave.

Prior to the Reformation, the theology of ghosts in England had been firmly embedded within the Catholic sacramental economy. Ghosts were often interpreted as souls in purgatory, seeking aid from the living—usually in the form of masses, prayers, or alms—to hasten their journey to heaven. This view, deeply pastoral, cast ghostly visitations as moments of mutual intercession: the living and the dead in a kind of devotional reciprocity. After the Reformation, such interactions became heretical. To believe that the dead could appear—or that they could be helped by the living—was to implicitly affirm a Catholic soteriology.

In place of this system, Protestant theology substituted a more austere eschatology: the soul departs instantly at death, judged and fixed in its eternal destiny. Within this schema, ghost stories could no longer be accommodated as the work of dead human souls. Instead, they were typically interpreted through one of three Protestant lenses:

Demonic deception: The most common explanation advanced by Reformed theologians was that ghosts were in fact devils in disguise, taking the form of deceased persons to tempt the living into error, despair, or idolatry. This view was popularized in England by Ludwig Lavater’s De Spectris (1569), which, in its English translation (Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght, 1572), became a touchstone for Protestant demonology. Lavater acknowledged the sheer volume of ghost reports but insisted that none could be attributed to actual souls of the dead. Instead, demons were seen as exploiting human weakness and fear, masquerading as familiar spirits to sow confusion.

Psychological or natural causes: Building on humanist skepticism and early scientific rationalism, some Protestant thinkers—most notably Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)—proposed that ghost sightings were the result of melancholy, hallucination, optical illusions, or dreams. Scot denounced belief in ghosts and witches alike as the result of fraud and foolishness, a view that placed him at odds with both popular belief and the more theologically cautious stance of James I.

Providential symbolism: A third, more nuanced approach allowed for the possibility that God might permit a spiritual manifestation under extraordinary circumstances—not as the return of a human soul, but as a providential sign or warning. This view was less common and carried the risk of blurring theological lines, but it occasionally appeared in sermons or chronicles describing unusual events with moral significance. Even in this interpretation, however, the spirit was not the deceased themselves but rather a didactic figure sent by God or manipulated by Satan.

These interpretations did not, however, eliminate ghost belief. Instead, they reframed and constrained it within new theological and epistemological boundaries. The persistent popularity of ghost narratives—among both the illiterate and the educated—suggests a profound cultural dissonance between doctrine and experience. The disavowal of purgatory may have been enforced by ecclesiastical authority, but it left behind a vacuum in which traditional anxieties about death and injustice still found expression.

Moreover, these Protestant interpretations were not merely speculative but had pastoral consequences. Ghost stories that might once have occasioned masses or pilgrimages were now understood as spiritual threats, requiring prayer, scripture, and in some cases, formal exorcism. Ministers were tasked not with comforting the dead but with correcting the living. The ghost became not a plea for help but a test of faithfulness to correct doctrine.

What emerged, then, was a paradox: the Reformation had evicted the dead from the cosmological system, but it could not exorcise the culture’s need for haunting. Theologically disenfranchised, the ghost returned in new, often more dangerous forms—no longer a soul in need but a demon in disguise, a psychological delusion, or a dark mirror of society's unspoken fears.

Jacobean Drama: Stage as Séance

If Protestant theology sought to lock the dead in place—banished to their eternal reward or damnation with no visitation privileges—Jacobean drama pried the door open again. On the public stage, ghosts refused to remain silent. They rose from crypts, stalked castle battlements, whispered in bedrooms, and shrieked in courts. But their appearances were never straightforward. The drama of the Jacobean era absorbed the theological tensions of its time, staging ghosts not as simple plot devices, but as emblems of metaphysical instability, moral ambivalence, and epistemological crisis. In the hands of playwrights like Shakespeare, Middleton, and Webster, the ghost became a site of contested meaning—a specter whose presence simultaneously invoked the supernatural and challenged the audience to interpret it.

The most canonical and complex example is Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600), a tragedy constructed around the appearance and meaning of a ghost. The ghost of King Hamlet appears in full armor to the watchmen and later to Prince Hamlet, demanding revenge for his murder. Yet the ghost’s identity remains ambiguous. Is it truly the spirit of Hamlet’s father? Or is it a demonic imposter sent to damn Hamlet’s soul by inciting murder? The prince himself voices this doubt in Act II: “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil: and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape.” The ghost’s demand for vengeance seems both morally righteous and spiritually perilous.

Theologically, this is a minefield. The ghost speaks of purgatorial suffering—“I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night”—yet purgatory was a doctrine officially denied by the Church of England. Shakespeare’s ghost thus becomes a Catholic revenant walking the stage of a Protestant nation. His very presence dramatizes the doctrinal uncertainty of the age, leaving both character and audience caught between irreconcilable beliefs. Moreover, his silence in the bedroom scene (when Hamlet confronts his mother) raises further doubts: is he real, visible only to Hamlet? Is he figment, temptation, trauma?

Other playwrights exploited the ghost with more abandon. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), often attributed to Thomas Middleton (though also associated with Cyril Tourneur), the ghost of the protagonist’s fiancée—raped and murdered years before—haunts the plot in absentia, embodied not in a spectral form but in Vindice’s obsessive pursuit of vengeance. Here, the ghost is psychological, a trauma so powerful it manifests through the revenger’s own decay into the very corruption he seeks to punish. By the end of the play, revenge becomes indistinguishable from self-damnation—a tragic echo of Hamlet’s dilemma, stripped of its theological subtlety and plunged into Jacobean nihilism.

In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614), the ghostly is not confined to literal spirits. Instead, death itself takes on ghostly dimensions, haunting the stage through madness, prophecy, and theatricality. When Bosola reports a vision of the Duchess and her children walking, “methought I saw her laughing,” the ghostly becomes metaphorical—an image of innocence corrupted, the past intruding into the violent present. The play’s famous echo scene, in which voices repeat the Duchess’s words, functions as an auditory haunting: memory as ghost, grief as possession. The Duchess herself, noble and martyred, becomes a kind of sainted ghost by the end—testifying to a higher moral order even as her killers remain unpunished.

Across these plays, the ghost is never reducible to a single function. Sometimes it is a moral arbiter, sometimes a psychological wound, sometimes an epistemological snare. Its presence on stage refuses closure. The ghost is always calling for something—revenge, justice, attention—but what it demands and what it means are rarely clear. It speaks from beyond, but its voice is always ventriloquized through living characters, actors, playwrights, and audiences who must decide what kind of reality it represents.

These theatrical ghosts are, crucially, not confined to the superstitious fringes of popular culture. They appear in the most sophisticated literary productions of the era, voiced in blank verse and positioned at the heart of courtly tragedies. They function as vehicles for exploring philosophical and theological uncertainty. In the Protestant world, where ghosts should not exist, they nevertheless persist—on stage, in imagination, and in discourse—as troubling evidence of a world more porous and haunted than official doctrine allowed.

In this way, the Jacobean stage becomes a kind of séance chamber, where ghosts are conjured not by necromancy but by dramatic art. And the audience becomes complicit: not merely spectators, but interpreters, charged with deciding whether these apparitions are true, false, or tragically in-between.

Demonology and Skepticism: Competing Explanations

If the Jacobean stage reanimated the ghost in a variety of narrative guises, the printed page became a battleground for explaining—debunking, spiritualizing, or condemning—such apparitions. The theological rejection of purgatory had rendered traditional ghost lore doctrinally inadmissible, but the phenomenon of ghost sightings and hauntings persisted in the culture, demanding explanation. The result was a proliferation of demonological treatises, skeptical essays, and official proclamations that struggled to define what, if anything, these "spirits" truly were. In the process, ghost discourse came to reflect not only theological positions, but also broader epistemological shifts toward empirical observation and early science.

👿 Ghosts as Demonic Deceivers: Orthodox Protestant Demonology

The most prominent Protestant explanation for ghostly apparitions was demonic impersonation. According to this view, widely accepted in ecclesiastical circles and popularized through works like Ludwig Lavater’s De Spectris, the dead could not return—but the Devil could easily simulate them. Demons, it was argued, could take on the shape, voice, and habits of the deceased in order to lead the living into error. These impersonations were not arbitrary; they targeted the vulnerable, the superstitious, and the morally lax. In Lavater’s model, ghost sightings functioned less as supernatural events and more as spiritual tests. To believe in a ghost was to risk damnation through doctrinal deviation.

This view was reinforced in England by church leaders who framed hauntings as traps laid by Satan to resurrect Catholic error—particularly belief in purgatory and the intercession of saints. Official sermons warned against necromancy and “conjuring,” practices increasingly associated not just with witchcraft, but with Catholicism itself. The ghost thus became a politico-theological scapegoat, a reminder of England’s Reformation victories and its vulnerability to backsliding.

🧠 Ghosts as Human Delusions: Rationalist Skepticism

Against this backdrop of spiritual warfare, a very different voice emerged: Reginald Scot, whose Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) was one of the first English works to openly mock and dismantle belief in supernatural spirits. Scot argued that ghosts, witches, and magical phenomena were all products of deception, imagination, or mental illness. He identified dream states, melancholy, fraud, and poor education as key sources of ghost belief. Not only were ghosts not real—to believe in them was to reveal one’s ignorance or to be prey to manipulation by corrupt clergy.

Scot’s skepticism was rooted in a humanist tradition that sought to purify religion of superstition. While his book was a sensation, it was also controversial. James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) directly attacked Scot in his own treatise, Daemonologie (1597), accusing him of undermining divine truth and giving comfort to witches and skeptics alike.

James’s Daemonologie offered a middle road between Lavater's orthodoxy and Scot’s rationalism. While affirming the existence of demons, witches, and spiritual warfare, James attempted to rationalize these beliefs within a coherent framework of Christian cosmology. For James, ghosts were usually devils, but their appearance could be understood as part of divine providence or punishment—not merely folk fantasy.

🔬 Toward Empirical Ghosts: The Proto-Scientific Gaze

Though the empirical science of the 17th century had not yet produced a framework for studying ghosts as "phenomena," the seeds of such thinking were germinating. The skeptical tradition of Scot would eventually evolve into a more methodical curiosity about unexplained events. Physicians, natural philosophers, and later, members of groups like the Royal Society would begin to categorize, record, and examine reports of supernatural occurrences—not as metaphysical certainties or demonic illusions, but as anomalous experiences potentially tied to natural causes.

By the mid-17th century, a shift was underway: instead of asking what ghosts were, some thinkers began to ask how people perceived them. This marked the beginning of a transition from theological polemic to psychological and physiological inquiry—though such efforts remained marginal in Jacobean England. In the Jacobean period proper, theology still set the terms.

⚖️ Ghosts on Trial: Law, Testimony, and Evidence

Ghost discourse also spilled into the courtroom. Testimonies involving apparitions—especially in cases of murder or inheritance disputes—were treated with suspicion but not automatically dismissed. Legal records occasionally note the appearance of a ghostly figure that “revealed” the location of a body or pointed to a hidden will. While courts rarely accepted such evidence at face value, the persistence of such stories reveals how entangled ghost belief was with systems of justice, memory, and truth. Even when formally inadmissible, the ghost retained rhetorical and narrative force within legal proceedings.

In sum, Jacobean ghost discourse unfolded across multiple registers—orthodox, skeptical, judicial, and theatrical—each offering a different answer to the question of how the dead might speak. And these answers were rarely stable. Even those who condemned ghosts as devilish or delusional could not fully deny the cultural power of the haunting figure. Whether as warning, trick, hallucination, or metaphor, the ghost insisted on its presence, demanding interpretation from all who encountered it.

Political Hauntings: Succession, Sovereignty, and the Unquiet Dead

In Jacobean England, the ghost was not merely a figure of private grief or theological concern—it was also a profoundly political entity. Ghosts on stage, in pamphlets, and in popular lore were frequently invoked to signal political betrayal, dynastic rupture, or national anxiety. Their presence implied unresolved injustice and the failure of earthly powers to secure moral order. In a monarchy newly inherited by the House of Stuart—and still shadowed by the memory of Elizabeth I—specters became potent emblems of a past that refused to stay buried.

The most immediate political concern in early Jacobean England was the issue of succession. Elizabeth I had died childless in 1603 after a long reign that defined an era. Her successor, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England, uniting the crowns but not the kingdoms. This dynastic transition, while largely peaceful in practice, was symbolically fraught. The Tudor legacy, Protestant identity, and national myths of “Gloriana” and victory over the Spanish Armada loomed large. In such a context, ghosts often appeared as emissaries of the old order, troubling the stability of the new.

Consider again Hamlet, a play first performed in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign but whose popularity continued under James. The ghost of the murdered king sets the entire tragedy in motion, and his reappearance is often read as an allegory of political illegitimacy and usurpation. Claudius, the reigning king, has not only taken the crown and the queen but has covered his crime in false ceremony. The ghost’s demand for revenge is also a demand for truth—for an act of political reckoning that Hamlet, paralyzed by conscience and theological uncertainty, can barely deliver. The ghost thus articulates the anxiety that royal succession might be based not on divine providence, but on corruption and murder.

Ghosts also appeared as symbols of national trauma, particularly in response to Catholic threats and internal treason. The most infamous example was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators, led by Guy Fawkes, sought to destroy the Houses of Parliament and assassinate James I. The aftermath of the plot saw an explosion of ghost-laden propaganda. Pamphlets and sermons evoked images of the martyred Protestant dead rising in moral triumph, while the spectral threat of “Popish” treason haunted the national consciousness. These were not literal ghosts, perhaps, but rhetorical phantoms—figures deployed to shape collective memory and justify repression.

In the theatre, these anxieties took flesh. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, the court is a cesspool of lechery and power games, haunted not by a specific ghost but by the sense of violated justice that animates Vindice. His dead beloved is never seen, yet she dominates the action—a martyr whose absence condemns the corrupt regime. In such plays, ghosts symbolize the failure of lawful order. They cry out for a justice that the state is unwilling or unable to provide.

In The Duchess of Malfi, Webster stages a political haunting of a different kind. The Duchess is murdered not because she breaks the law, but because she threatens the patriarchal and dynastic control her brothers wish to maintain. Her ghostly echoes, and Bosola’s haunted guilt, suggest that tyranny cannot silence truth forever. Even when the state kills the body, the memory—the haunting—persists.

This idea of the ghost as the voice of suppressed truth had wide appeal in a nation increasingly caught between royal absolutism and emergent ideas of conscience, law, and resistance. James I promoted divine right monarchy and centralized authority; yet English political culture remained deeply sensitive to the idea of illegitimate power. Ghosts provided a way to express these anxieties without explicit rebellion. A murdered king might be fictional, but his ghost could still whisper subversion.

Even in local folklore and balladry, ghosts functioned politically. Stories circulated of dead soldiers returning to denounce commanders, or murdered commoners appearing in dreams to demand justice. These tales were not simply entertainment—they were moral indictments, often aimed at elites who appeared above the law. In this sense, ghost stories were a form of vernacular resistance, dramatizing the ethical failures of the powerful in ways that avoided open sedition.

Thus, Jacobean ghosts were political in both content and function. They exposed the cracks in the public order, embodied anxieties about legitimacy, and offered a means to critique systems of power from beyond the grave. Whether on the stage or in the pulpit, ghosts were more than remnants of the past—they were agents of reckoning.

Succession, Sovereignty, and the Unquiet Dead

Popular Belief and Folklore

While the pulpit and the stage shaped elite narratives around ghosts—infused with theology, politics, and moral ambiguity—the broader English populace held fast to a rich and vivid tapestry of vernacular ghost belief. These stories thrived not in courtly tragedies or theological treatises, but in parish lore, tavern gossip, household tales, and local ballads. Here, the ghost was neither demonic imposter nor psychological metaphor—it was real, visible, sometimes talkative, and very often local. These grassroots hauntings reveal a side of Jacobean England where Protestant doctrine had not eradicated belief in the supernatural but rather coexisted with—or was bypassed by—a deeper, older folkloric logic.

The rural landscape of England in the early 17th century was populated with tales of fetches (death omens), corpse candles, headless horsemen, white ladies, and haunted crossroads. The ghost in these stories was not necessarily malicious or diabolical, but frequently mournful, bound to place, or caught in moral ambiguity. Often, the ghost sought to reveal the location of a hidden will, confess a murder, warn of impending danger, or demand the return of stolen property. In such tales, haunting functioned as a kind of moral ledger, a system of posthumous justice where the dead took it upon themselves to settle unresolved debts.

This vision of the ghost as moral agent stood at odds with the official Protestant theology, which rejected all such visitations as devilish illusions. Yet despite repeated efforts by the Church of England to catechize the population against ghost belief—including homilies and parish instruction—the popular fascination persisted. The spectral remained embedded in the rhythms of daily life: a creaking floorboard at midnight, a deathbed vision, a dog howling at an empty chair. People continued to leave lights burning for the dead, to knock softly on coffins to “wake the spirit,” or to avoid cemeteries after sundown. In such customs, pagan, Catholic, and Protestant strands interwove, forming a deeply syncretic popular religion.

Ballads and pamphlets also played a key role in shaping and transmitting these beliefs. The broadside ballad, cheaply printed and widely circulated, often included tales of ghostly encounters with strong moral or didactic themes: tales of drunkards who returned to warn the living, unwed mothers who walked at night, or greedy landlords tormented by the spirits of their tenants. These works, while dramatic, were not fictional in tone—they claimed to report true events, often “attested” by neighbors or clergymen. The ghost became a participatory cultural figure, reinforcing moral codes in communities with limited access to formal justice.

One particularly illustrative genre was the revenant narrative: the dead returning not to frighten but to bear witness. In some stories, the ghost of a murder victim appeared in dreams to multiple witnesses, directing them to shallow graves or bloodstained tools. These tales blurred the line between legal testimony and supernatural intervention, and were occasionally referenced in actual court proceedings—though rarely admitted as formal evidence.

Importantly, many of these stories centered on female ghosts, often wronged women whose deaths had been covered up or dismissed. The persistence of the “weeping woman” motif in English folklore—be it the white lady, the murdered bride, or the abandoned mother—indicates a cultural space where ghost belief provided a voice for the otherwise socially silenced. These spectral women became emblems of injustice, their haunting a refusal to be erased.

In sum, the world "below the stage" was not a secular one—it was saturated with the invisible, peopled with ghosts who interacted with the living in complex, local, and intimate ways. While theologians wrote about demons and playwrights summoned tragic apparitions, the common folk lived among spirits, acknowledging their presence in daily rituals, night-time fears, and community memory. In this realm, the Reformation was incomplete. The ghost had not been exorcised—it had simply changed costume, slipping between doctrine and tradition, speaking in the accents of the village rather than the cathedral.

The Protestant Uncanny

In Jacobean England, the ghost was not extinguished by the Reformation—it was transformed, refracted through new theological, political, and cultural prisms. Its medieval identity as a soul from purgatory, seeking aid or forgiveness, gave way to a far more unstable and polyvalent figure. The ghost became a problem, one that official doctrine could not fully suppress and dramatic imagination refused to abandon. Whether as demonic masquerade, political reckoning, psychological trauma, or folkloric messenger, the ghost haunted a society caught between competing systems of truth.

This spectral instability—this refusal to settle on a fixed interpretation—marks what might be called the Protestant uncanny: a condition in which suppressed doctrines and forbidden beliefs re-emerge in new forms, unrecognizable yet disturbingly familiar. In a Protestant world that denied the intercession of saints, the reality of purgatory, and the permeability of the veil between life and death, the ghost functioned as a revenant not only of the dead, but of banned cosmologies. It dramatized what had been lost or exiled—the sense that the dead might still care, still speak, still act.

And this drama was not confined to the stage. It played out in pulpits, courtrooms, households, and fields. The same culture that rehearsed Calvinist doctrine each Sunday could thrill to tales of spectral visitations by night. The same monarch who wrote Daemonologie commissioned Macbeth. The same city that built its identity on Protestant triumph was still crisscrossed with ghost walks and legends.

What makes the Jacobean ghost distinctive is precisely this cultural contradiction—this tension between the theological effort to silence the dead and the imaginative compulsion to listen to them. The ghost becomes the perfect emblem of an age in which certainty was proclaimed but doubt was deeply felt. It gave form to the inexpressible: injustice, betrayal, the failure of memory, the wounds of conscience. The ghost stood at the threshold of what could be said and what must be repressed, a figure of resistance in an age of conformity.

Ultimately, Jacobean ghost discourse is not simply about spirits—it is about authority: who gets to speak, who gets to be believed, who has the right to interpret reality. The dead, in all their disturbing mutability, disrupted these hierarchies. Whether as devils or dreams, conscience or critique, they refused to stay buried.

To study these ghosts is therefore not to indulge in superstition, but to uncover the spiritual and political anxieties of a nation in transition—a nation haunted not only by the sins of the past, but by the uncertainties of its own reforms. Jacobean England may have declared itself Protestant, but its ghosts never quite got the memo.

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