Ghostly speech: Writing history and reading literature in the Renaissance

In the Renaissance, history was ghostly because it had the ability to conjure fictitious persons and imaginary communities. Ghosts were critical messengers that both visualized and articulated individual, collective, and anonymous anxieties about free-speech, legal justice, political disorder, and the play of the actor. Utilizing as its point of departure A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), this dissertation reveals the degree to which the ghostly voice penetrated the deep structures of history-based literature in the Renaissance---prose history, poetic complaints, ballads, chronicle, and drama. It shows how the orality of these ghostly English histories of the 16th century flies in the face of 19th and 20th century categorizations of history as either scientific or literary. In fact, the ghostly histories of the Renaissance were rippled and wrestled with the classical rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia, which I rename ghostly speech. Thus, ghostly speech characterized a distinct kind of performative historical discourse which today provides an alternative model for an oral historiography and pedagogy in the 21st century.