The Return of old Mother Leakey: Ghosts and Stories in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

该项目首先调查了17世纪中期英格兰和爱尔兰发生的一系列事件，特别是1635-166年苏珊·利基的鬼魂在萨默塞特郡出现的报道，以及1640年沃特福德主教约翰·阿瑟顿因鸡奸罪在都柏林被处决的事件。Atherton是Leakey的女婿，与他的妻子妹妹乱伦，可能还串通了他们孩子的谋杀案。它继续展示了在接下来的三个世纪里，对这些事件的相互竞争的描述和解释是如何在口头文化和印刷中广泛传播的。在这个过程中，它解决了关于历史记忆的性质的问题，并为“历史”和“民俗”的现代建构提供了一个案例研究。该项目将于2007年春天由牛津大学出版社出版，书名为《利基母亲和主教：幽灵故事》。我的希望是，这本书将鼓励人们更广泛地了解通过微观历史研究可能发生的事情。

The project begins by investigating a sequence of events in mid-seventeenth-century England and Ireland, specifically the reported appearance of the ghost of Susan Leakey in Somerset in 1635-6 and the execution for sodomy of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford, in Dublin in 1640. Atherton was Leakey's son-in-law, committed incest with his wife sister and perhaps colluded in their child's murder. It goes on to demonstrate how competing accounts and interpretations of these events circulated widely in oral culture and in print over the succeeding three centuries. In the process it addresses questions about the nature of historic memory, and supplies a case study in the modern construction of both 'history' and 'folklore'. The project is to be published as a book by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2007, entitles Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story. My hope is that the book will encourage a wider conception of what is possible through 'micro-historical' investigation.