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octavia_cade's review against another edition
3.0
I had to add a new shelf for this one: "paranormal". I very nearly called it "woo" but that would have been unfair to Davies, who is certainly not banging about trying to lure in ghosts with headlamps and crystals and whatever those people on ghost-hunter shows use in the middle of the night when they can't see anything clearly anyway. No, this is an academic volume which looks at the history of how people interacted with ghosts - or with the idea of ghosts - in England. It covers things like representations of ghosts on the stage, or various religious responses to ghosts, or how frequently people used to dress up as ghosts to scare the shit out of other people (this last has a long and storied history, and clearly it has been a favourite practical joke for hundreds of years). And mostly it's all mildly interesting, although there's often such a welter of detail it can come across as a little repetitive. There is one chapter, however, which is genuinely very interesting, and I was sorry to see it end. Chapter six, "Imitating the Dead", looks at a lot of those practical jokes. Some were rather less jokey than others, with young people of both genders taking the opportunity to take revenge on others or to manipulate employers, for instance. It upends the idea of both the poorer classes and women and the young as being particularly credulous, and shows them actively exploiting the fears of the people around them for personal gain. Which is not really admirable, of course, but it is interesting.
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