A European Hauntology

Genres

During the Renaissance, ghosts first appeared in collections of curiosities, histoires prodigieuses (Extraordinary Stories), and volumes with diverse genres of tales (“selves”). Those books’ genre is tricky to define, because they themselves comprise fragments from a range of styles: history, natural history, travel narratives, philological and etymological musings and more… The authors of that type of compilation selected excerpts they found exemplary and educational – in terms of both substance and style – in order to suit the era’s taste for tales from Antiquity. Not all of the fragments were borrowings, however; authors might also recount their own experiences or musings on the subject. They all piqued readers’ curiosity: for the extraordinary that was a change from the routine, as well as for the marvelous that was present in daily life, which the stories drew readers’ attention to. Written to stimulate that curiosity, these sensational collections were veritable bestsellers. Comprising short fragments that were easy to rearrange, they were real editorial undertakings that tapped into the market by enhancing the original text with sequels and additions with each new edition. The fact that ghost stories were emphasized through the layout and illustrations of these 16^th- and 17^th-century bestsellers proves the reading public’s craving for that type of tale.

Dug up, pruned and sorted, the corpus of spirits was blended together and reassembled in volumes that also offered their own catalogues of specters. Some humanists were active in that movement. Neapolitan lawyer Alessandro Alessandri’s († 1523) Brilliant Days (Geniales dies) provides an excellent example: first published in Rome in 1522, the book was extraordinarily popular in both France and the Holy Roman Empire. From 1522 to 1673, Days was republished some 40 or more times in Europe; it is considered “the book of European culture” (Benedetto Croce). Alessandri modelled it on Aulu Gelle’s Attic Nights, a commonplace book with short, varied texts on a range of different topics, some borrowed from Antiquity, but others being accounts of his contemporaries’ or his own experiences. No fewer than six of its chapters include ghost stories. An abridged version, published in Rome in 1524, comprised those chapters only – a sign both of Italians’ taste for the supernatural, and of how easily Alessandri’s text could cross over from one genre and readership to another.

Dissemination and Acquisition of Religious Overtones

The ghost stories in Days were later recycled in other types of publications, in an interplay of mutual publicity: those reprints disseminated Alessandri’s text across Europe, while the publications benefitted from his fame. Pierre Boaistuau (1517-1566) and François de Belleforest (1530-1583) were perhaps the most efficient disseminators of Alessandri’s ghost stories. The former’s Histoires prodigieuses (Paris, 1560) were hugely successful in late 
16^th-century Europe: they were republished no fewer than twenty-four times from 1560 to 1598, not including the many translations. One particular chapter, devoted to “extraordinary visions, with several memorable stories of spirits, phantoms, figures and illusions” constitutes a veritable treatise of some forty pages on the topic. Boaistuau’s intention was not to discuss the nature of spectral apparitions, but to collect stories by “the most famous authors.” 

Thanks to those story collections, a “general public that had by now rubbed up against humanism” (Jean Céard) was exposed to a veritable corpus of monsters, miraculous visions and freaks of nature. By skipping from author to author, that catalogue of spectral apparitions forms a literal “hauntology:” an anthology of European spectral phenomena. The Europe-wide circulation of ghost stories involved both translations and re-writings that were offered to readers in attractive volumes and in the vernacular. Jardín de flores curiosas (Salamanca, 1570), by the Spanish author Antonio de Torquemada (ca. 1507-1569), for instance, proposed a corpus of ghost stories that was comparable to Boaistuau’s; one whole section of it was in fact devoted to them. It was re-published nearly a dozen times, in Spain and the Netherlands, often in the shape of inexpensive, easy-to-carry editions equivalent to modern paperbacks.

A pliable material, the spectral corpus could adapt to various religious contexts, so it circulated across religious borders: both the German Lutheran Philipp Camerarius (1537-1624) and the Genevan Calvinist Simon Goulart (1543-1628) took on the task of offering Catholic-authored tales of spectral apparitions to Protestant readerships. In the chapter on familiar spirits, Goulart, the translator and continuator of Camerarius’s Historical Meditations, refers to the story of Athenodorus recounted by Pliny the Younger (ca. 61- ca. 115): he states that Pliny “shows himself to be uncertain” and that the recipient’s, Lucius Licinius Sura’s, reply is unknown. Although they allow themselves to mention the anecdote, both Protestant authors emphasize the problematic and rather unorthodox – from a Reformer’s point of view – nature of a ghost coming back from the dead. 

Publisher’s Dealings

The fact that ghost stories were a major publishing niche is shown by the manipulations of the German bookstore-owner-cum-publisher Henning Grosse (1553-1621). In 1597, at his print shop in Esslingen, a prosperous town near Stuttgart, he published a Latin anthology devoted entirely to specters and other ghostly apparitions: the Magica, or “The Magic of Specters and Spirit Apparitions.” It was translated into German just three years later, in 1600; adapted in the Netherlands twice, and plagiarized in England in 1608.

The book was designed to turn a profit: the text is composed of short summaries of ghostly tales, presented pell-mell, with no logical order other, perhaps, than a division between spectral apparitions and prophecies. Henning Grosse collected the tales both from his own bookshelves and from his friends’ and fellow bookstore-owners’ in Leipzig and Frankfurt. The paragraphs are often preceded by an author or character’s name, and the date and place of the apparition; they almost systematically end with a bibliographic reference, or even more than one, if the tale has been mentioned by several authors. The books so referenced also appeared in a catalogue Grosse published for the Leipzig book fair; meaning they could be purchased in his bookshop. So Magica became an entry point for purchasers from the printer-publisher, with the library in the author’s mind drawing readers to the merchant’s brick-and-mortar bookstore.  

So we can say that, starting from the Renaissance, ghosts had turned into well-known figures in western culture, disseminated Europe-wide thanks to the printing process. And their popularity was long-lasting, too. Books like Saducismus triumphatus (London, 1681) by Joseph Glanville (1636-1680), suggest that ghost stories continued to appeal to publishers in the century’s final decades. By then, their appeal was based on fighting skeptics’ atheism, before “superstition” came under attack in the very late 17^th century.