ABSTRACT
Multiple discussions of an idea suggest its topicality. Whilst this study is by no means exhaustive, enough evidence has emerged to state with some confidence that the idea of ghosts shaped some of the most pivotal debates and discussions that preoccupied the people of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The precise meanings of ghost stories were energetically contested, and interpretations reflected a circularity of influences in which the ideas of natural philosophers, politicians and clergymen overlapped with, and drew upon, those of ordinary men and women. Whether ghosts were conceived as tangible entities or as symbolic representations of spiritual or moral truths, the idea of the preternatural realm was sufficiently elastic to allow ghost beliefs and stories to adapt to the contours of a rapidly changing cultural environment. The boundaries between the natural and preternatural worlds were certainly redrawn in these years, and in some respects they became more stringent, yet the souls of the dead continued to haunt the physical and imaginative landscapes of English society.
