Bodies of earth and air: corporeality and spirituality in pre-modern British narratives of the undead

ABSTRACT Scholarship on the returning dead has tended to contrast corporeal revenants, or risen corpses, with incorporeal ghosts, or phantoms returning from the afterlife. This article argues that it is misleading to draw so clean a distinction between material and spiritual apparitions. Focusing on accounts discussed in Britain between c.1200 and c.1750, the article demonstrates that the bodies of the returning dead were persistently ambiguous. Popular stories endowed apparitions with both spiritual and corporeal qualities, while medieval and early modern theories about elemental bodies offered a philosophical framework for understanding how apparently insubstantial spectres could interact with the material world. The article further suggests that we might better understand the history of ghosts, and of pre-modern bodies generally, by attending to how understandings of ‘spiritual corporeality’ changed over time.