Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature

This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth centuryand the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, 'constantlybeleeve' that they have an immortal soul. But he also reflects that in fact there isnothing 'so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul isimmortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul'. In understanding the question of man's disembodied part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he was entirely of his time,andImagining the Soul in Premodern Literatureconsiders this fraught, shifting,yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effectsinvolved in its representation. Gruesome medieval dialoguesbetween damned souls and worm-eaten bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, RenéDescartes, Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion ofsonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and travelogues;Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore: these chapters range across all this and more, offering a rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodernliterature that will be of interest to scholars, students and the general reader alike.