His ghost stories have an anti-Catholic slant, but there’s scant evidence of such bigotry in his scholarship.

History, as E.H. Carr argued, is what the present finds interesting about the past. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent scholarship on M.R. (Montague Rhodes) James, the Cambridge medievalist who is best remembered today for his ghost stories.

Known to his family and friends as “Monty”, he was born in 1862. Dying a little under 72 years later, James spent his entire adult life within the elite, all-male, cloistered environments of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. During this time, the devout Anglican built an unrivalled reputation as a scholar of biblical apocrypha and medieval manuscripts; his books on these subjects are still read today. His legacy is such that an entire field of literary scholarship is now devoted to “Jamesian” studies.

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