The Ghostly Child in Medieval North-west Europe

Abstract

This work studies sixty Medieval ghost stories and analyses the role of children in these tales. Most stories were recorded for use as exempla, short narratives to be used in preaching to illustrate the dangers of sin. Ghosts took the form of apparitions (having the appearance of the person in life but lacking physical substance) or of revenant corpses (reanimated bodies that arise from their graves). Children occasionally feature as apparitions - usually souls in Purgatory seeking help in finding absolution for their sins or else seeking to furnish the living with information on the afterlife - but not as revenants. Child protagonists in ghost stories may be used to illustrate the consequences of minor sins, a role they can fulfil without undue threat to ideals of childhood innocence. The innocence attributed to children may also mean that children who return as apparitions were seen as a source of uncorrupted information about the afterlife.