Throughout history, people have reported seeing ghosts. But if we compare a Victorian apparition with a medieval European or Classical Greek ghost, we will find that they are very different phenomena. In Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation, R. C. Finucane makes just such a comparison. Surveying reports of ghosts from ancient Greece, the early Christian era, the Reformation, the Victorian age, and the twentieth century, Finucane asks some probing questions: How have the physical aspects claimed for ghosts varied from age to age? What differences are there in the functions and intentions ascribed to ghosts? How have the changes in more general beliefs - in religion and science, in particular - influenced the perception of ghosts? For the first time a professional historian, drawing on primary sources from all periods and cultures, addresses this topic in its full breadth.

The records of 'miracles' in the Middle Ages are among the most valuable and unexploited documents of medieval popular Christianity. Now available for the first time in paperback, Ronald Finucane's highly praised historical detective-work, based on over 3000 posthumous miracles (the wonders attributed to saints after their deaths), pieces together a fascinating account of the extent to which the world of pilgrims, miracles and faith-healing exerted its hold over the medieval imagination. Miracle-working at saints' shrines usually concerned curative healing. The book is rich in stories of crippled limbs crackling as they straightened during a miracle, 'possessed' people on the rampage, the screams and groans preceding the moment when blind people could see again. Above all, Ronald Finucane makes important new connections between the medical knowledge of the Middle Ages and the incidence of miracles; for the conditions of medieval life unquestionably reinforced the popular beliefs in wonder-working saints. The events at the curative shrines provide a rare glimpse of the behavior of medieval people at centres of popular religion and an indication of what sorts of people were involved, and why and how they made their journeys.