For Kathryn A. Edwards, Halloween is the time she usually receives calls from reporters desperate for information about ghosts and other apparitions of the spirit world.
Edwards is an associate professor of history at USC trained as a mainline social, economic, and intellectual historian whose specialty is European history from 1400 to 1700. On the surface, that would make her an unlikely source for information about one of the most popular holidays in modern America.
But ever since 1990 when she was researching her dissertation in a small library in eastern France and came upon a nondescript bound manuscript titled The History of the Appearance of a Spirit (1628), she’s been pursuing a gold mine of scholarship about the spirit world from as far back as the 15th century that has provided her with noteworthy rewards.
“The more I study this, the more I’m finding things,” said Edwards, adding that her ghost scholarship, which is just one part of her overall research interests, has been a fascinating way of getting at a slice of European social, religious, and intellectual life that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
“By using ghosts as a focus, I get to play with what happened after the Black Death, I get to play with the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment and with debates about modernity. It keeps me focused and interested, clearly others are interested in it that I never expected would be, and I find it fascinating.”
Edwards is the editor, contributor and translator of the recently published Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Folklore and Traditional Belief in Early Modern Europe (16th Century Essays and Studies, Kirksville, Mo.), a collection of 14 contributions by noted academicians. She’s also taught a popular culture course at USC that examined ghosts, werewolves, alchemy, astrology, charms, and witch trials and has been a participant in a Folger Shakespeare Library Institute weekly seminar in Washington, D.C. examining society and the supernatural in early modern Europe.
During this school year, she is a Senior National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Folger where she is researching and beginning work on the first of a two-volume series on the history of beliefs about ghosts. The first volume, tentatively titled, Living with Ghosts: The Dead in European Society from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, will be followed by Ghosts, Science, and Modernity: The Dead in European Society from the Enlightenment to World War II.
She’s also using her time at the Folger to finish revising Visitations: The Haunting of an Early Modern Town, which is a case study of The History of the Appearance of a Spirit (1628), the French library book that launched her ghost scholarship.
A “down and dirty” definition of a ghost is a spirit or some manifestation of a dead person coming back to earth, said Edwards. The word "spirit" denotes some sort of image, and "manifestation" often refers to things like noises or objects moving in a kind of appearance.
“One of the things I’m discovering is that the idea of what a ghost is changes historically, which will make my life more awkward as I do more research,” she said. She added that ghosts also are culturally constructed, with societies often making spirits in their own image.
So are ghosts real, or are they a figment of people’s imagination?
Edwards tends to believe that if enough people share a common imagination and a common outlook about something it could be real, but she has no way of proving or disproving the actual existence of ghosts.
“What we have are lots of ways of proving that people believe a ghost appeared and there is no question that people believe in ghosts and hauntings,” she said. “What we don’t have is any way of ascertaining if ghosts are real.”
10/04
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Kathryn Edwards, history
