The Many Lives of Raleigh’s Ghost: Reframing Atheism and the Afterlife in Early Stuart Britain

Abstract

"The overt admission that the name and fame of Sir Walter Raleigh are being used as an editorial foil to attract readers and sell copy will be my leading thread here. The key to understanding this strikingly English reframing of Lessius’s treatise ... is thus to situate it as part of the Jesuit activities of production and clandestine dissemination of translations for the spiritual “profit” of English recusants, and also in regards to other instances of exploitation of Raleigh’s enduring fame in contemporary translations and other “feigned apparitions.” In so doing, I shall explore the various “time-warps,” intertextual loops, visual tricks, and other manipulative devices that enable the translation of this famous ghost, through the circles of heaven or hell, and across material forms, ideological divides, and language barriers (real or imaginary), to seventeenth-century English readers."