Robert Miles, The Great Enchantress, p. 87.

14. Chris Baldick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xiii–xiv.

15. Scott’s comment was as follows:

She [Radcliffe] has uniformly selected the south of Europe for her place of action, whose passions, like the weeds of the climate, are supposed to attain portentous growth under the fostering sun; which abounds with monuments of antiquity, as well as the more massive remnants of the middle ages; and where tyranny and Catholic superstition still continue to exercise their sway over the slave and the bigot, and to indulge the haughty lord or more haughty priest, that sort of despotic power, the exercise of which seldom fails to deprave the heart, and disorder the judgement.

See ‘Prefatory Memoir of the Author’ in Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library. Vol. X, facsimile edn, Ann Radcliffe, The Novels Complete in One Volume. (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), p. xxiii.

16. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xv, xvii, 9, 21.

17. On this and the points that follow about burial requests and location in the church, see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 71–90.

18. Ibid., p. 47: ‘They invoked the principle in ecclesiis vero nulli deinceps sepeliantur (henceforth let no one be buried in church).’

19. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris, 1764), quoted in Michel Ragon, The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration and Urbanism, trans. Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), p. 199. Ragon (p. 200) also quotes from Louis-Sebastien Mercer’s Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam: new edn, 1782–3):

The cadaverous smell is noticeable in almost all churches, which is why many people no longer want to set foot in them. The wishes of the citizens, the decrees of the Parlement, demands of all kinds have been of no avail. The sepulchral exhalations continue to poison the faithful.

In 1774 the Decree of the Parliament of Toulouse repeated the medical argument of ‘enlightened men devoted to the public interest’. This decree was affirmed in the following year by the Archbishop of Toulouse, Monsignor Lomènie de Brienne, who also condemned ‘the vanity of the great’ and ‘that of the small’ in his edict absolutely forbidding the burial in church of ‘any person, ecclesiastic or layman… even in private chapels, oratories, or any other enclosed spaces where the faithful gather together’. Moreover, the churches were told to renovate their floors. (See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, pp. 493–4).

20. This was done over four winters at night by torchlight – a truly Gothic undertaking. See Michel Ragon, The Space of Death, p. 201, and Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, pp. 495–6.

21. James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings.