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Abstract

This multidisciplinary project, informed by queer theory and media studies, calls for broadening the framework of monster studies by accounting for the complex bodies, non-bodies, and auxiliary embodiments surrounding the figure of the ghost in non-fictional texts. In four exemplary German Protestant texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I trace how the ghost is introduced to serve a specific agenda or to enable the articulation of an event. Ghosts then take on an ungovernable agency as an active participant within the unfolding narratives. These narratives, I argue, are not a misrepresentation of reality. Instead, they rearticulate an experience or intention into a polysemous narrative that then acts back onto material reality, shaping it in turn. By following the figure of the ghost through the cracks in the narrative, we can access information about the texts’ contemporary environments. I examine this reality-shaping and commentary capability of ghostly figures with a methodological framework that is both media-conscious and informed by gender studies. I use this methodology to analyse two administrative records from early modern Württemberg on the cusp of late medieval/early modern state structures and modern-era bureaucracy and two anonymous pamphlets between the catastrophes of the so-called Little Ice Age and the Thirty Years’ War. These self-contradicting texts exemplify the process by which fractured realities, incongruous beliefs and not fully consciously held knowledges enter into narrative and are personified in seemingly impossible apparitions. The attempts to handle the fractured reality signalled by the ghost in turn changes and fractures the material, legal, and social reality of flesh-and-blood people while highlighting, and changing the perception of, their own bodies.