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Abstract
By the late sixteenth century, ghosts were considered doctrinally unsupportable in the Church of England, yet ghosts survived in a wide variety of everyday ephemeral media. For many writers, the question of whether ghosts were real or not was a moot point because ghosts provided writers with a useful conceit. Writers could create ghosts that had intimate knowledge of the living and knew of the mysteries beyond the living world. Ghosts’ knowledge beyond the capabilities of the living made them perfect arbitrators of proper social, political, and ethical action. In this study, I examine ghosts across the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in ephemeral media (ballads, pamphlets, and plays) to show how writes used the voices of the dead to create the kind of world they wanted to live in.