IMC 2024: Sessions

Given the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts throughout the Middle Ages, the study of medieval texts and practices that testify to the diverse ways in which the living and the dead relate to each other is a vibrant field of study that contributes to diverse areas within medieval cultural history, such as vision studies, purgatorial piety, demonology. This session explores communication practices between the living and the dead in two different genres that thrived in the late Middle Ages yet are rarely looked at in tandem: ghost dialogues and spirit conjurations. While the first fits in an ecclesiastical program to propagate the practice of purgatorial piety, the latter stands in a different tradition, that of ritual magic. However, both genres testify to practices of spectral communication with the aim of solving a crisis and finding answers to an urgent question, whether the query comes from the ghost as is the case in ghost dialogues, or from the living as is the case in spirit conjuration. Which crisis constitutes the trigger for the conversation?; Who are the interlocutors and what is their relationship?; Which languages are used? What is the efficacy of help in the situation of crisis?