Gasts and Gaps: Making Space for Souls in the Middle English Gast of Gy and an Illumination in Simon Marmion’s La Vision de l’âme de Guy de Thurno

Addressing anxieties surrounding the space taken up by spirits, this article examines the spatial and physical depictions of a medieval ghost in the fourteenth-century Middle English verse version of the Gast of Gy and an illumination from the fifteenth-century Burgundian manuscript, J. Paul Getty Museum MS 31. Positing a consideration of the ghost as an acousmatic apparition, it compares the ways in which two different modes wrestle with the visual and semantic incongruities of representing and delineating a presence whose existence is founded on insubstance. Treating aspects of the ghost including corporeality, sound and invisibility, this article introduces Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmêtre and argues for an enduring interest in the Gy- narrative around difficulties of spatiality and location. It explores the links between these spatial anxieties displayed in the text and the Avignon Papacy of the fourteenth century, considering the adaptation and redirection of authorities both doctrinal and textual over the course of the narrative’s reproductions.