It was James’s sanity that made his ghost stories, those unrivaled masterpieces of their genre scribbled for the amusement of colleagues and pupils for which he is justly remembered by most readers, so delightfully plausible and sanity, too, has ensured the survival of his academic reputation, built upon an unfashionable conservatism in biblical scholarship and an unrivaled fussiness in the cataloguing of medieval Latin manuscripts. The word is meant with all of its denotations, though the narrowly clinical one is undoubtedly the least relevant: soundness and health in body as well as in mind, sobriety of taste and judgement, sensibility, decorum, chastity, above all, correctness. Sanity is the most striking feature of Montague Rhodes James’s personality and the most salient characteristic of all his writings. Princeton University Press, pp.264, $84.95 Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.
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