Vigor Mortis: The Vitality of the Dead in Medieval Cultures
Articles
The vitality of the dead in medieval cultures
Stephen Gordon
Pages: 155-165
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2049516
This article provides an overview of the current state of research into the dead and undead in the European Middle Ages. Looking at the theoretical frameworks that underpin modern scholarship on the topic, as well the key publications that have steered academic investigations on death and dying into exciting new arenas, this introduction highlights the myriad ways in which the traumas of death were conceptualised in pre-modern textual traditions.
The worm and the corpse: Carolingian visions of Gehenna's undead cemetery
Matthew Bryan Gillis
Pages: 166-182
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060484
This essay investigates Carolingian religious horror in the form of theological speculations about Gehenna as an undead cemetery for reprobates, whose living corpses suffered from hellfire and spontaneously generating worms. After illustrating that such horror was a spiritual way of seeing sin's corrupting powers, the examination turns to the role baptism played in curing souls and bodies of sin's rotten wounds. The study then surveys the range of eighth- and ninth-century theologians' interpretations of Gehenna's uncanny worms, including their creative reception of earlier, Patristic thought in their doctrine. Finally, the essay considers the role of Gehenna's worms in the ninth-century predestination controversy, in which intellectuals disputed about the corporeal and spiritual nature of such horrors. Overall, this study reveals how Carolingian religious horror was crafted to correct Christians by revealing sin's strange powers not only to corrupt the wicked, but also to punish them forever in hell.
‘Agite, agite et uenite!' Corrupted breath, corrupted speech and encounters with the restless dead in Geoffrey of Burton's Vita sancte Moduenne virginis
Stephen Gordon
Pages: 183-198
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060485
Written accounts of supernatural encounters often include reference to speech acts performed by the evil agent. In such instances, the human interlocutor may be overcome by sickness, sometimes leading to death. Despite the close relationship that existed between physical and metaphysical health in theological discourse, encounters with ‘diseased' supernatural agents generated little in the way of overt explanatory frameworks, especially in historical or literary writings. Focusing on the tale of the Drakelow revenants found in Geoffrey of Burton's Vita sancte Moduenne virginis (c.1118–35), this article evaluates the aetiology of interactions between the living and the undead, with particular reference to the dangerous speech exhibited by the restless ghost. The investigation begins with an exploration of the medical and theological context behind the belief in the transmission of ill health, before concluding with an examination of how such motifs were utilised for didactic effect in the creation of Geoffrey's Vita.
The necromancer and the abbot: summoning the dead in Cistercian exempla
Martha G. Newman
Pages: 199-217
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060487
The Cistercian storyteller, Engelhard of Langheim (fl. 1200), recounted two tales in which the living summoned the dead. A saintly abbot orders two young monks on their deathbed to go to heaven and return in seven days to report on their condition, while a necromancer in Spain tells a dying friend that he will bring him back to the world of the living. The abbot succeeds. The young monks appear and assure the abbot of their salvation. The necromancer fails, but his friend still returns to warn of magical practices. This essay compares Engelhard's two tales and places them in the context of other Cistercian exempla. The stories demonstrate the ambiguous boundaries between magic and religion, Engelhard's distinction between monastic formation and a university education, and his use of the emotions that the dead elicit to celebrate his Cistercian community.
The dead in dreams: medieval Icelandic conceptions of the unquiet dead
Kirsi Kanerva
Pages: 218-234
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2049514
This article examines encounters with the dead in medieval Icelandic contemporary sagas (samtiðarsögur) and the changes in cultural conceptions of the power of the dead to return as reflected in these sources. Whereas the better known family sagas (Íslendingasögur) that were based on centuries-old oral stories portrayed the undead as tangible restless corpses, in contemporary sagas that described more recent historical events the dead appeared in dreams. A short tale called Kumlbúa þáttr provides a case study, to which the examples of the dead appearing in dreams in other sources are contrasted. It is argued that the dead in dreams still acted as moral judges like the tangible restless corpses in the family sagas, but the focus of their attention often shifted from collective to individual responsibility for moral transgressions, thus reflecting the gradual individualisation and interiorisation of medieval Icelandic religious experience.
Talking with ghosts: Rancière, Derrida and the archive
John H. Arnold
Pages: 235-249
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060483
The French theorists Jacques Rancière and Jacques Derrida both produced reflections on the nature of the historical archive and its relationship to dissent or resistance. The notion of a ghost, a ‘spectre' (as referenced in Derrida's Specters of Marx), provides this article with a means of reflecting upon those theoretical positions. It engages briefly with the civic uprising in Carcassonne led by Hélie Patrice in 1303, an event ‘haunted' by earlier revolts; and with the evidence given by Arnaud Gélis to the inquisitor Bishop Jacques Fournier, in which Gélis claimed to have seen and spoken with a variety of ghosts. These brief examples allow us to reflect upon the nature of ‘dissent' in the medieval period, and upon the inescapable distance and epistemological uncertainty that the material nature of the archive places upon us in our practices as medievalists.
Landscapes of the dead in the late medieval imagination
Carl Watkins
Pages: 250-264
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060489
Historians have often assumed that the development and dissemination of a clarified geography of the afterlife was central to late medieval eschatological preoccupations, albeit they have differed on a central question, the causes and chronology of purgatory's emergence as a space. This essay reconsiders that geography and pays special attention to purgatory, but it focuses on continued disagreement about its nature, with questions persisting about where purgatorial punishment happened, where purgatory (or purgatories) might be and what the places of pain looked like to the eye of visionaries. The essay also explores how these different conceptualisations were able to coexist in late medieval imaginations, noting that Protestant divines identified in this diversity a weakness of Catholic teaching about the fate of the dead, drawing attention not only to the unscriptural origins of purgatory, but also to the varied and sometimes contradictory stories retailed about just what and where it was.
Bodies of earth and air: corporeality and spirituality in pre-modern British narratives of the undead
Martha McGill
Pages: 265-281
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2051329
Scholarship on the returning dead has tended to contrast corporeal revenants, or risen corpses, with incorporeal ghosts, or phantoms returning from the afterlife. This article argues that it is misleading to draw so clean a distinction between material and spiritual apparitions. Focusing on accounts discussed in Britain between c.1200 and c.1750, the article demonstrates that the bodies of the returning dead were persistently ambiguous. Popular stories endowed apparitions with both spiritual and corporeal qualities, while medieval and early modern theories about elemental bodies offered a philosophical framework for understanding how apparently insubstantial spectres could interact with the material world. The article further suggests that we might better understand the history of ghosts, and of pre-modern bodies generally, by attending to how understandings of ‘spiritual corporeality' changed over time.
Of Saxons and spectres
Matthew Vernon
Pages: 282-287
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060488
This note speculates on the possibility of re-assessing the form of medieval studies by seeing the discipline through the intersection of race and spectrality. I posit that for much of its history, medieval studies has been informed by race in ways that are spectral: visible, but fleeting. This analogy illustrates the uncanny hold medievalisms and medieval imaginaries have over Western psyches. I propose a counter-history as a move towards understanding and subverting the demands of this version of a medieval past. This note offers a brief critical reading of W. E. B. Du Bois' use of the language of the ghostly and the spectral in terms of national guilt about slavery. More importantly, I highlight the broader possibility of using the hard-won perspectives of Black authors to see past white innocence and white chivalry to construct a different epistemological apparatus around what the past might signify.
