This book is a study of ghostly matters in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, ‘constantly beleeve’ that they have an immortal soul. But elsewhere he reflects that in fact there is nothing ‘so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul.’ He evokes at once the soul’s centrality in premodern thought and the uncertainty that surrounded it, and Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation. Moving from gruesome medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten bodies to works by Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Andrew Marvell as well as a profusion of sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction, travelogues and natural philosophical treatises, and culminating in a natural philosophical reading of the ghostly soul in Hamlet, this book's rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodern literature will be of interest to scholars, students, and the general reader alike.