The absence of any specific genre of ghost story during the Middle Ages means that there is perhaps the danger of ‘over-classifying’ the ghostly occurrences and supernatural incidents which feature in medieval literature. By the late Middle Ages, European literature itself consisted of a number of different strands which, increasingly, were being written in vernacular languages rather than in Latin, but all of which drew upon interlocking and related traditions. For instance, just as the fashion for verse romance developed in the twelfth century alongside an older tradition of epic poetry – romance certainly did not ‘replace’ epic by some neat process of literary evolution – so monastic chronicles came to be complemented by historical verses in the vernacular, and popular fable, written in the language spoken in the streets, overlapped more and more with the exempla contained in the Latin preachers’ manuals.

Although what in retrospect have come to be seen as distinct forms of literary activity were all being practised at the same time, each of them is likely to have made its appeal to a different section of medieval society because of what might be called the ‘code’ in which it was written. This code governed the overall form of the work; it conditioned the audience's response to the development of the narrative; and it drew upon the shared cultural assumptions of author and audience. It could often result in profoundly different expectations of the conduct of the principal figures in the work. For instance, a baron and his retinue of warrior-companions listening to the recitation of epic verse in the hall of his castle would expect the knight who was the hero of an epic to conduct himself as a grim-faced warrior for Christendom, hewing with his sword at a mass of pagan enemies. At the same time, the baron's wife and her circle listening to a verse romance in the upper chamber of the hall would be presented with an entirely different image of a knightly hero: a blithe, elegant, golden figure, cantering off in springtime to listen to the nightingale. Ultimately, of course, the code of the romance, with its frequent emphasis upon the agonies and complexities of courtly love, proved the more durable and influential in that it permitted the development of ‘character’ in literature.