Ecclesiastical Gothic

Abstract

The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ghost stories with their interest in ecclesiastical architecture, fittings, and texts. In M. R. James, antiquarian protagonists show little respect for holy objects and thus invoke demonic invasion. James is concerned with the effect of a world which refuses to admit the spiritual power of objects, and thus has no ways of mediating their causal power. His tales question this boundary between subject and object. J. Meade Falkner shares this desire to restore the sacramental and psychic efficacy of objects by showing their negative power in The Lost Stradivarius and positively in the novel of Gothic usurpation, The Nebuly Coat, in which Cullerne Minster is a living thing and agent of Providential judgement through the ‘speaking’ arches of its moving tower, and by the bells, which mediate past and present and enact providential judgement.