2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 book arguing that Hamlet's ghost is Shakespeare's literary response to the Protestant abolition of Purgatory — the Catholic doctrine of a place between heaven and hell where the dead could be aided by the prayers of the living — which was abolished in England when Shakespeare was a child.
An ancient text referenced twice in the Hebrew Bible (Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18), likely a collection of epic poetry about Hebrew heroes. The original is lost; several later texts have claimed to be this book. Considered part of the broader apocryphal and pseudepigraphal corpus.