Empirical Form and Religious Function

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Empirical Form and Religious Function provides a fresh perspective on the rise of empirical apparition narratives in the Anglophone world of the Early Enlightenment era. Drawing on both well-established and previously unknown narrative sources, Michael Dopffel here offers a fundamental reappraisal of one of the defining literary genres of the 17th and 18th century. Intricately connected to the evolving discourses of natural philosophy, Protestant religion and popular literature, the narratives portrayed in this work form a hybrid genre whose interpretations and literary functions retain the ambiguity of the apparitions. Simultaneously an empirically approachable phenomena and a religious experience, witnesses and writers translated the spiritual characteristics of apparitions into distinct literary forms, profoundly shaping modern conceptions of ghosts, whether factual or fictional, ever since.