Hamlet and the ghost of purgatory: Intimations of killing the father

English Literary Renaissance

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 443-467

  Low, Anthony ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949584988     PISSN: 00138312     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1999.tb01145.x     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (New York, 1926; rpt. Normal, Ill., 1995), p. 3. Research contributing to this essay was generously supported by a Pew Evangelical Fellowship and sabbatical leave from New York University
2. Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (New York, 1971), pp. 133, 142
3. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNellie, 5 vols. (New York, 1977-1984), III, 208
4. See Vara S. Neverow, "The Diacritics of Desire: Virginia Woolf and the Rhetoric of Modernism and Feminism," diss. New York Univ. (Univ. Microfilms International, 1989), which brought this passage to my attention
5. J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic As Host," Deconstruction and Criticism (New York, 1979), p. 251
6. For a detailed study with no axe to grind (except occasional overeagerness to debunk pious accounts), see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1984)
7. See, e.g., R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989). The Crown's chief interest in fraternities, as with other religious activities, was to license them for stiff fees, leading historians to suspect that many went unrecorded
8. Caroline M. Barron, "The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London," The Church in Pre-Reformation Society, ed. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, Eng., 1985), p. 33
9. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), pp. 19-20
10. See John Bossy, "The Mass as a Social Institution 1200-1700," Past and Present 100 (1983), 39
11. Colin Richmond, "The English Gentry and Religion, c. 1500," Religious Beliefs and Ecclesiastical Careers in Late Medieval England, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, Eng., 1991), pp. 121-25
12. Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk Eschatology in the West Country after the Reformation, The Folklore Society (London, 1979), p. 15
13. Virginia R. Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350-1558 (Woodbridge, Eng., 1997), pp. 96-97
14. The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, et al. (New York, 1931-40), II
15. Thomas Becon, Comparison of the Lord's Supper and Mass (1564), cited in the OED, which says that "housel" went out of use in the sixteenth century
16. Brown, The Fate of the Dead
17. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 2nd ed. (New York, 1961)
18. On the efficacy of masses for the dead, see Bossy, "The Mass as a Social Institution."
19. Martin Holmes, The Guns of Elsinore: A New Approach to 'Hamlet' (London, 1964), p. 156
20. "The Ruines of Time" (line 196), in The Works of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1947), VIII, 42
21. See G. W. Pigman, III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), PP. 16-39
22. Augustine, City of God (21.24), as cited by Le Goff, p. 67
23. Cited by Bossy, p. 43
24. Alastair Fowler, "The Case Against Hamlet," Times Literary Supplement (December 22, 1995), p. 7
25. For vivid details, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 454-58
26. George William Rutler, A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), pp. 118-19