Images of the Sacred: How Emotions Shape Beliefs about Supernatural Narratives

Presenter: Dr Charlotte Rose Millar (UQ)

Dr Charlotte-Rose Millar is a UQ Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. In early modern England, ghosts represented a key point of religious tension. For many early Protestant reformers, ghosts could no longer be viewed as departed souls; instead, they were merely tricks of the Devil. This paper will explore differing images of the ghost from the mid-16th to the late 17th centuries and demonstrate that, despite changing notions of the ghost, fear, even overwhelming terror, remained key to how it was interpreted.