When the Dead Rise 9781843845768, 9781800101418, 9781800101425

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note on Translations
Introduction ‘The Graves, All Gaping Wide, Every One Lets Forth His Sprite’
1 The Corpse in Christianity: The Dead, Mostly Dead and Very Special Dead
2 The Religious Revenant
3 The Corpse as Admonition, Art and Bogeyman
4 The Reformed Revenant
5 The Dead Rise - in Literature
Conclusion
Envoi: In the Time of Plague
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

This book offers a history of these revenant narratives, demonstrating how modern horror is haunted by past literature and exploring the motif of the risen dead as a focus of cultural anxiety and literary effort. The author examines the long arc of revenant tales from antiquity and the Middle Ages through the Reformation and into modernity, tracing their uncanny similarities and laying bare the rich traditions of narrative, theme, motif, supernatural belief and eschatological fears and preoccupations.

9 Design: Toni Michelle Cover: Corpse with a Coffin and a Spear, The Ghent Associates, The Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett-SMPK, 78 B 12, fol. 221r, ca. 1480) © Kupferstichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

CHRISTIAN LIVERMORE

CHRISTIAN LIVERMORE gained her PhD in medieval English literature and creative writing from the University of St Andrews.

WHEN THE DEAD RISE

T

he proliferation of books and films about the ‘undead’, those literally returning from the grave, in modern popular culture has been commented on as a recent phenomenon, but it is in fact a storytelling tradition going back more than a millennium. It drew on and was influenced by Christian eschatology, gathered momentum in medieval ecclesiastical chronicles, such as those written by Caesarius of Heisterbach, and then migrated into imaginative literature – famously in John Lydgate’s Dance of Death – and art. But why did revenant stories and imagery take such a hold in the Middle Ages? And why has that fascination held on into today’s world?

Narratives of the Revenant from the Middle Ages to the Present Day CHRISTIAN LIVERMORE



When the Dead Rise

When the Dead Rise Narratives of the Revenant, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day t Christian Livermore

D.S. BREWER

© Christian Livermore 2021 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Christian Livermore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2021 D.S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978-1-84384-576-8 (Hardcover) ISBN  978-1-80010-141-8 (ePDF) ISBN  978-1-80010-142-5 (ePUB) D.S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Corpse with a Coffin and a Spear, The Ghent Associates, The Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett-SMPK, 78 B 12, fol. 221r, ca. 1480) © Kupferstichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

For Ian Johnson and Jacob Polley

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Abbreviations

xi

Note on Translations

xiii

Introduction: ‘The Graves, All Gaping Wide, Every One Lets Forth His Sprite’

1

1.

The Corpse in Christianity: The Dead, Mostly Dead and Very Special Dead

19

2.

The Religious Revenant

36

3.

The Corpse as Admonition, Art and Bogeyman

64

4.

The Reformed Revenant

92

5.

The Dead Rise – in Literature

119

Conclusion 163 Envoi: In the time of plague

167

Bibliography 169 Index 185

Acknowledgements

I

am immensely grateful to Caroline Palmer and everyone at Boydell & Brewer, notably Elizabeth McDonald, for all their work in bringing out this book. My research is heavily indebted to the work of a number of scholars, most prominently Paul Binski, Peter Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum, Nancy Caciola, Bruce Gordon, Peter Marshall, Sophie Oosterwijk, Kenneth Rooney and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Beyond those listed above, I owe a number of other particular debts. I am grateful to the School of English at the University of St Andrews for welcoming me into the supportive embrace of its community and providing me a thousand opportunities and to Alexandra Wallace for always knowing the answers to my endless questions. Many scholars generously shared their expertise in a variety of ways, and I offer my grateful thanks to them. Chris Given-Wilson reviewed and corrected my translations of Old French in this manuscript. Any errors that remain are to be imputed to the pupil and not the tutor. Thanks also go to Julian Luxford for the generous provision of his time and expertise in art history; to Peter Maxwell-Stuart for advice on revenants in general and the Greek revenant in particular; to Donald MacEwan for his advice on the theological nature of Christ’s despair on the cross; to Chris Eddington for translating Latin excerpts from Historia Memorabiles; to Mark Elliott for advice on theological materials; and to Catherine Léglu for allowing me to study her translation of Nicole de Margival’s version of the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Hilda McNae and the library staff at the University of St Andrews were tremendously helpful in locating rare texts. I would also like to thank Santander for scholarship funds that enabled me to study manuscripts and church art in Germany, and Holm Bevers and the Kupferstichkabinett-SMPK in Berlin for allowing me to view folios from The Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Emperor Maximilian. I have also benefitted from conversations with and resources provided by Lenore Bell. I am especially grateful to Chris Jones for his many insightful comments and suggestions and for giving generously of his time and knowledge. My final and most profound thanks go to Ian Johnson and Jacob Polley, about whose remarkable and generous guidance, bottomless support, and general care and feeding of me as I toiled on this project, I scarcely know what to say. It must suffice to say, then, that this book simply could not have been written without them.

Abbreviations EETS es os KJV OED TEAMS

Early English Text Society extra series original series King James Version of the Bible Oxford English Dictionary The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages

Note on Translations

T

ranslations of Old French texts are my own; sources of German, Latin and Old English translations are identified in the accompanying footnotes.

Introduction ‘The Graves, All Gaping Wide, Every One Lets Forth His Sprite’

S

t

ometime after sundown on a cold night in 1196, in the graveyard of Melrose Abbey, the corpse of a most impious priest crawled from his tomb. He attacked the monks of the monastery but was driven off. He stumbled to the home of his former mistress, where he hovered outside her bedchamber groaning and murmuring horribly, until the terrified woman pleaded to one of the friars for help. The friar recruited a colleague and two strong young men. They gathered weapons and stood vigil at the tomb. Past midnight it grew colder, and the friar’s companions left him to seek shelter in a nearby house. The dead priest chose his moment, rose from the grave and attacked the friar. The friar struck the corpse with an axe, driving him back into his tomb. The friar’s friends, perhaps also choosing their moment, ran to his side. At dawn they dug up the corpse, carried it beyond the monastery walls, burnt it and scattered the ashes. They had no more trouble from the dead priest after that. At least that is the way the Augustinian canon William of Newburgh tells it.1 Such incidents were becoming a problem. The dead were rising throughout England and Scotland, and on the Continent as well. Similar events are recorded in the Low Countries, France and Germany,2 as well as in Eastern Europe,3 and even Iceland. Taken on their own, these stories could be interpreted as vestiges of pagan belief in revenants from which the Christian hierarchy could not dissuade the laity. But considered in the context of the history of the age, the development of the Christian doctrine of resurrection

1

2

3

William of Newburgh. The History of English Affairs, Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University, Book Five, chap. 24, www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/ williamofnewburgh-one.asp [accessed November 2014]. Nancy Caciola, ‘Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture’, Past & Present 152 (1996): 3–45.

Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 85–9.

2    W he n t h e Dead Ri se

and the cults of the body and of the saints, and alongside literature and art being produced during the same period, a more complicated picture emerges, one that involves a sort of chemical reaction between fear of death, Christian eschatology and the human imagination. By the High Middle Ages, accounts went abroad of the dead rising from their graves to attack the living. William of Newburgh tells us he knows ‘frequent examples’ of corpses rising from the dead: Were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.4

Along with the revenants people told of seeing in their own communities, the dead were also rising in literature. In the late thirteenth century, the poem attributed to Baudouin De Condé appeared: ‘Li Troi Mort et Li Troi Vif ’, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. In it, three princes out hunting are startled by three reanimated corpses in their path. I am afraid, the first prince says in substance. You should be, responds the first corpse: As you are, we once were; As we are, so shall you be.5

The corpses urge the princes to amend their ways, because power and wealth cannot save them once death arrives to carry them off. What followed in the historical development of the ‘revenant’ motif was a sort of epidemic of revenant literature and art. In 1424–25, an anonymous donor commissioned Dance of Death murals to be painted along with verses from the poem in the parish cemetery of Les Saints Innocents in Paris.6 John Lydgate viewed them, then returned to London and wrote a free translation of the poem.7 Lydgate’s poem proved very popular in England, and was incorporated into a Dance of Death mural in the cloisters of old St Paul’s Cathedral in London,8 where many people doubtless saw them. There are sixty-odd known

4 5

6

7 8

William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, Book Five, Chap. 24.

Baudouin de Condé, ‘Li troi mort et li troi vif ’, in Les Cinq Poèmes des Trois Morts et Des Trois Vifs, ed. Stefan Glixelli (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1919), 53–63.

Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum, 1996), 154. Beatrice White, ‘Introduction’, The Dance of Death, xxi. Ibid, xxii.

In troduction    3

versions of the Legend.9 By about 1300 it became popular as an image.10 Later it was joined by the danse macabre, of which there are some eighty surviving representations dating from about 1425.11 Why should revenant literature and art have so seized the medieval imagination, and why has it held on into modern times? Exploring that question is the project of this book. In previous epochs, death was largely viewed as a natural part of the cycle of life. One person died and another was born (though this perspective, too, has exceptions, which will be discussed later). In later years, death was seen as temporary, a state to be transcended when God came and judged the quick and the dead. Both views are ways of negotiating the bare fact of death. Just as fairy tales are stories we tell to explore how we might live, revenant tales are stories we tell to confront the preposterous notion that we will die, how we can live with that knowledge, and how we should behave towards one another so that when we do come to die, our fellows will be sorry for our passing. This is a book about those stories, how they have changed, and how they have remained the same. In those changes we can see the ‘march of progress’, religious ideologies, changing views of cosmology, the afterlife, and our ideas about the existence of a god. If we examine the similarities, we can see into the very core of our humanity. It is productive for our purposes to think of these accounts, which after all are folklore, as early fairy tales, for such stories have often shown the world from the perspective of the poor rather than the wealthy and powerful. Whereas ancient myths featured gods and super-humans, Italo Calvino found that the heroes of fairy tales were often peasants – labourers who picked cabbages and came home to empty cupboards.12 Just so with the people in revenant stories; both the risen dead and those they terrorise are often simple folk struggling to eke out an existence. Marina Warner writes that when Calvino proclaimed, ‘Folktales are real (le fiabe sono vere)’, he meant ‘that they speak of poverty, scarcity, hunger, anxiety, lust, greed, envy, cruelty, and for all the grinding consequences in the domestic scene and the larger picture’.13 The returned dead as a theme appears as far back as we can trace writing, such as in Virgil’s Latin epic poem The Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 9

Binski, Medieval Death, 135.

10 11 12

13

Ibid.

Ibid., 153.

Italo Calvino, ‘Introduction’, Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (London: Penguin, 1980), xxxii.

Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 74.

4    W he n t h e Dead Ri se

BC, in which the ghost of Aeneas’s wife Creusa appears to him. The motif endures through Christianity and into the present day. This says something fundamental about us, and while different accounts have different purposes, the motif conveys nothing more strongly than the human fear of death. Other studies have ignored this element altogether. A few have hinted at it. Peter Marshall wrote, ‘Alongside grief, anticipation, and the urges to commemorate and forget, there is a place for fear as one of the psychological building blocks of pre-modern relations with the dead.’14 Most studies focus instead on the political and propaganda value of the revenant. To do this is to identify one effect particular to a time, place or group, but miss the fundamental and enduring cause. The revenant has political, artistic or propaganda value because of its value as an expression of the human fear of death. Harnessing the revenant to frighten readers and listeners is not sensational or gratuitous horror; it is cathartic. As Aristotle said, we learn through contemplating the reproduction of ‘objects which in themselves we view with pain’, and that tragedy helps us purge emotions such as fear by imitating them.15 If we fear death, and we mourn those we have lost, stories of such visitations provide a way to confront those fears in a safe psychological space. This is a result of what Jerome Bruner called the linking of mental activity to a ‘cultural tool kit’, upon which it depends for its full expression.16 Bruner asserted that, unlike science, which constructs worlds against which a theory must be tested and provable through tests, stories have no such need for testability. ‘Believability in a story is of a different order than the believability of even the speculative parts of physical theory’, Bruner wrote. ‘If we apply Popper’s criterion of falsifiability to a story as attest of its goodness, we are guilty of misplaced verification.’17 The natural extension of this idea is that proving a theory of stories is equally – indeed, even greater – misplaced verification. However, as Bruner points out, a story is an ‘instantiation of models we carry in our own minds’. Thus, this book will examine revenant stories in a general way for such models. There is a smattering of accounts of returns from the dead in the pre-Christian and Anglo-Saxon periods, but these are not true revenants as they are defined for the purpose of this study, the rationale for which will be discussed 14

15

16

17

Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 262.

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Ibid., 14.

In troduction    5

later in the introduction. Those who die in these stories do not putrefy and rise as decaying corpses the way revenants do but rather remain uncorrupted, like saints, or they appear in visits to the afterlife, a common theme of early Christianity. These revenants do not commit violence or run riot amongst the living as do those of the High Middle Ages. Rather they experience through their brief deaths an epiphany and return to their bodies to live better lives. In The Myth of Er, at the end of Plato’s Republic, Er dies in battle and remains undecayed after ten days. He then revives on his funeral pyre and gives an account of his journey in the afterlife (a forerunner of later such visions in Christianity). Er is a morality tale demonstrating that the good are rewarded with eternal life and the evil punished. Er, then, is not a revenant in the parlance of this book, but more a saint-like figure.18 Likewise Bede’s vision of Drycthelm is not an account of a revenant but of a resurrection after a visit to the afterlife.19 The same is true of the Visio Pauli and Ælfric’s Homilies, which tell of Paul the Apostle’s visions of Heaven and Hell. According to the entry for the year 790 in the chronicle Historia Regum, Eardwulf was killed outside the gates of a monastery on the orders of King Osred. The brothers carried his body to the church with Gregorian chant and placed it outside in a tent. After midnight, Eardwulf was found inside the church, very much alive. A few entries later, Eardwulf becomes king.20 Alcuin’s letter to Eardwulf of 796 alludes to his revenancy.21 Eardwulf, then, does not rise putrefied from his grave as a walking corpse to terrorise the living. He is resurrected from the dead by the grace of God to become king of his people, in the image of Christ. New converts being the most fervent, Anglo-Saxons would have been keen to hew to doctrine. This may account for the dearth of revenant tales in early Christianity. The more distant they became in years from their conversion, and as they grew more comfortable with their Christian credentials, they were more willing to stray from strict doctrine in order to make moral points through 18

19 20

21

Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 297–303. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin, 1990), 284–9.

Dorothy Whitelock, ed., extracts from Historia Regum Historia Regum (‘History of the Kings’) attributed to Simeon of Durham. In English Historical Documents Online, vol. 1, c. 500–1042 (London: Routledge, 1979), https://www. englishhistoricaldocuments.com/document/view.html?id=7 [accessed 2 July 2016]. Dorothy Whitelock, ed., ‘Letter of Alcuin to Eardwulf, king of Northumbria’ (796, after May). In English Historical Documents Online, vol. 1, c. 500–1042 (London: Routledge, 1979), https://www.englishhistoricaldocuments.com/document/view. html?id-207 [accessed 2 July 2016].

6    W he n t h e Dead Ri se

accounts of revenants, as we will see. It is with the spread and strengthening of Christianity that accounts of revenants transformed from legends and folkloric accounts told by the laity into incidents related by religious as true stories. It was Christianity that freighted such accounts with a new authority, and a new power – one they lacked when they were mere scare stories told by villagers of things they thought they had seen but could not explain. Christianity conferred on the stories credibility, and a message. Christianity changed these stories, made them theologically sound (or almost), but the stories also changed Christianity. Church doctrine held that the dead could not appear to the living in bodily form in this way; only in true resurrections, solely through the hand of God (or churchmen acting as his instruments) could such miracles occur, and these dead returned to life physically uncorrupted, repentant of their sins and committed to living Christian lives. The revenant accounts that began to be told by ecclesiastics in the High Middle Ages were very similar to those told by the laity, but they came with a moral. Medieval literature often told poor people to view their sufferings in this world as a way of achieving salvation in the next. Many lives of Christ held up Jesus’ suffering as a model to emulate in order to gain eternal life.22 Revenant tales contained a similar message – that this world did not matter; it was preparing for the next that counted – but delivered the exemplum in reverse. It was because the dead had lived bad lives that they rose in these church accounts not to eternal life, after the model of Christ, but as revenants. They were putrefied and stank and often did violence to the living. Such stories are subversive, ignoring as they do the teachings of Church doctrine that the dead could not return bodily to the living. Then again, characterising the stories as subversive is itself a notion assuming the orthodoxy and superiority of the ecclesiastical elite. If it hewed to doctrine, it was acceptable. If it did not carry the approval of the Church, it was subversive. Yet as we will see, with these stories the beliefs of the laity were co-opted by the elite for their own purposes. Much scholarship has highlighted the chasm between elite and popular belief and the influence of the former on shaping the views of the latter.23 However, in medie22

23

See, for instance, Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005). See, for instance, Karen Louise Jolly, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies in Honor of George Hardin Brown, ed. Karen Louise Jolly, Catherine E. Karkov and Sarah Larrett Keefer (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia Press University Press, 2007); and Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

In troduction    7

val ecclesiastical chronicles featuring tales of revenants, the reverse can be seen. Chroniclers were told these tales by members of the community, often labourers, then recorded them as true and turned them into religious exempla meant to reinforce the agenda of the Church. In doing so, the chroniclers allowed lay belief to influence elite belief, albeit repackaging the stories in a way that fitted their own belief systems and agenda. There is also in the repetition of the popular tales by ecclesiastics something that characterises Christian culture more generally. Just as pagan temples and festivals were incorporated into the Christian community to encourage people to convert, the co-opting of popular beliefs about revenants into a Christian narrative gave them a gloss of orthodoxy and allowed people to persist in these beliefs without shedding their Christian identities. I am not suggesting that resurrection doctrine and saints’ cults are responsible for belief in the returned dead. That belief is ancient. What I am suggesting is that Christianity took a popular belief about an undesirable state of existence and said resurrection is real and it is good, and ascribed it to a deity, Jesus. Resurrection then became the assured final state for everyone who had lived a good life. Along with that message, however, the Church spoke of the Devil and demons, who lurked everywhere, seeking to harm sinners and faithful alike, so that the message was delivered on the blade of a strange kind of double-edged sword. It encouraged the idea in the minds of the laity that people could rise from the dead, and at the same time instilled a desperate fear of evil. It was inevitable that somewhere along the way those two notions would fuse. While there are many reasons for the popularity of revenant literature and art, and those reasons change with time, messenger and audience, what underpinned the power of revenant motifs is what they represented – death – and their potential for expressing the innate human fear of it. This may seem a simple idea. Indeed, it is one that, surprisingly, is dismissed by many scholars as too simplistic. Sometimes, however, the simple message is correct. The message the Church intended with macabre art and literature was not always – or at least not completely – the message to which the laity responded. While ecclesiastics intended such literature and art to serve as memento mori (‘remember that you must die’) to inspire the laity to lead more Christian lives, what people often saw was the embodiment of their fear of death. When the Church and secular authorities ceased to countenance revenant stories and frowned on depictions of the human body in cadaverous form, people sought other ways to express their fear of death. They continued to believe the dead could walk and began to develop supernatural tales using similar motifs. After centuries of telling such stories with a variety of religious justifications, the tellers finally removed the tales from any overt religious context and told them for their cathartic qualities, fulfilling the same underlying need the stories had

8    W he n t h e Dead Ri se

met all along: the need to express their fear of death and so exorcise it, at least for a little while. Let us take a moment to discuss terminology and why the term ‘revenant’ has been chosen to refer to reanimated corpses in this book rather than ‘cadaver’ or another description. That people in many cultures believed in reanimated corpses is well attested in the literature, which is the topic of this book and which will be detailed in future chapters. The term itself, however, is more broadly used to refer to all those who have returned from the dead, either in body or in spirit. The word ‘revenant’ is a loan word from French (revenant [the returned]; revenir [to return]) which meant simply a person who returns after a long absence (1690) and, later, a spirit returned from the dead (1718).24 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ‘revenant’ as ‘a person who returns from the dead; a reanimated corpse; a ghost’. Scholarship began to use the term revenant to differentiate a risen corpse from an incorporeal ghost, and the term became more prevalent with the work of Carl Watkins and Nancy Caciola.25 Two main causes are postulated in the accounts for the ability of corpses to rise from the dead, internal reanimation and demonic control. These will be discussed in subsequent chapters. The accounts themselves do not share a universal term for the risen dead, even within time periods. William of Newburgh refers to the revenant in one tale as ‘the dead man, who wandered about after burial’ and to another as ‘a deadly monster’ and a ‘pestiferous corpse’.26 In the thirteenth century Laxdæla Saga, a corpse ‘walked again a great deal after he was dead’ and made ‘ghostly appearances’, but a struggle in which he wrestles with a servant indicates that he is corporeal.27 In chapter 32 of the thirteenth-century Historiae memorabiles, the two dead are referred to simply as the good bishop and the bad bishop, which seems designed to lead with the moral of the tale rather than to identify its villain.28 The Chronicle of Lanercost, which covers the years 1201 to 1346, refers to a walking corpse in its account as ‘hideous, gross and tangible’ but 24

25

26 27 28

Oxford English Dictionary online, s.v. ‘revenant’, www.oed.com/view/Entry/ 164711?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=PVW8N7& [accessed 27 September 2019].

See Nancy Caciola, ‘Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Cultural’, Past & Present 152 (August 1996): 3–45; and Carl Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, chaps 22 and 23. Laxdæla Saga, trans. Muriel A.C. Press (London: Dent, 1906), 77–8.

Rudolf von Schlettstadt, Historiae Memorabiles, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, unpublished trans. Chris Eddington (Beihefte Zum Archiv Für Kulturgeschichte, Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag Wien Köln, 1974), 91–2.

In troduction    9

stipulates that it is uncertain whether the being was natural or aerial.29 In The Awntyrs offe Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, thought to have been composed in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, the spirit of Guinevere’s mother is called a ghost and a sprite, but the descriptions themselves depict a rotting cadaver.30 In the fifteenth-century Middle English poem De Tribus Regibus Mortuis, the three dead who appear to the three living from a bank of fog are called devils (‘dewyls’, line 90), but here, too, the descriptions are graphically suggestive of stinking corpses: With lymes long and lene • and leggys ful lew, Hadyn lost þe lyp and þe lyuer seþyn þai were layd loue 31 (lines 44–45)

[With limbs long and lean and weak legs, They had lost the lip and the liver since they were laid low.]

Rot also suggests corporeality, as ghosts do not decay, and since the three dead move towards the three living, it is clear that they are animated. As we enter the early modern period, the texts provide no additional clarity. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet (1881), the preacher who employs the ‘Janet’ of whom the entire town is terrified becomes afraid that his parishioners may be right, ‘that Janet was deid lang syne, an’ this was a bogle in her clay-claud flesh’.32 While Stevenson does not apply any particular word to identify Janet as a reanimated corpse, he depicts it through her actions, as in an unnerving passage in which the housekeeper wanders about singing loudly, tramping back and forth and talking to herself as though the reanimated body were reproducing the actions of the living Janet but not getting them quite right. He then describes Janet as a corpse, though at the moment of the depiction she has just walked to the edge of an upstairs landing and is looking over the railing down the stairs at her employer, clearly animated.33 In the version of James Harris (The Dæmon Lover) collected by Francis James Child in The 29

30

31

32

33

The Chronicle of Lanercost, Archive.org, 118, http://archive.org/stream/chronicleof laner02maxw/chronicleoflaner02maxw_djvu.txt [accessed 21 September 2019].

The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn: an edition based on Bodleian Library MS Douce 324, ed. Ralph Hanna III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 69. ‘The Three Dead Kings’ (De tribus regibus mortuis), in Alliterative Poetry of the Middle Ages: An Anthology, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre (London: Routledge, 1989), 152– 3. Robert Louis Stevenson, Thrawn Janet, in The Devil in Scotland: Being Four Great Scottish Stories of Diablerie (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1934), 88. Ibid., 91.

1 0    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

English and Scottish Popular Ballads, written between 1892 and 1898, the dead lover is referred to as a revenant but it is never made explicitly clear whether he is corporeal or ethereal, though he returns in death to carry his lover away to live with him for eternity, an act which would require the ability for the dead to interact physically with the living (the point of the much-misrepresented ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ debate).34 In ‘Willie’s Fatal Visit’, Child calls the dead ‘a great and grievous ghost’, but the spirit leaves no doubt as to its corporeality by tearing Willie to pieces and leaving a shred of flesh on every seat of the kirk past which Willie had walked nightly to visit his lover.35 As this brief summary of a smattering of accounts across several time periods indicates, though the language in most accounts is unspecific, all the tales of concern in this book depict their dead subjects as corporeal, animated and, usually, rotting. However, unlike cadavers, which are merely corpses, revenants are literally ‘returned’ from the dead. That forward motion itself suggests animation. Thus, taking into account all these factors, I have chosen the term ‘revenant’. Just as there is no uniform term of art for the risen dead, there is no fixed pattern of narrative development or purpose in the tales, no progression from exemplum to entertainment, theological to lay, political to non-political, etc. It is tempting to seek such guides. We are pattern-making animals, after all, and we look for patterns to create meaning and develop an understanding of the world around us, but the literary evidence does not conform to any convenient reading we would like to apply to it. Revenant stories cannot be easily categorised, nor can the figures in them. They are variously ghosts, demons, corpses and fiends in both medieval and modern texts, and their animation is referred to in some medieval and modern tales as the work of the devil, though that may be more conveniently seen as the product of Reformation thinking. When I asked the historian Jean-Claude Schmitt whether he thought tales of the walking dead were designed for political ends or whether they were simply ghost stories related for their narrative value, he said, ‘They are both’. Ultimately, revenant accounts are, at their core, scare stories. In a broader sense, revenant literature represents both hope and the subversion of hope – hope in the same way as do ghosts, in that they represent the possibility that our dead are not irretrievably lost to us, and subversion of that hope because, even in revenant tales, while the bodies of the dead return, their souls have departed. 34

35

‘James Harris (The Dæmon Lover)’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 4, ed. Francis James Child (New York: The Folklore Press, 1956), 360–9. ‘Willie’s Fatal Visit’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 4, 416.

In troduction    11

What remains cannot be communed with. They are unthinking automatons, and, worse, they often return intent on doing harm. They are nothing but rotting corpses, animated but not alive, with no memory of themselves or their connection to us. In that ugly truth, our worst fears are reflected. We try to maintain a connection with the dead, but what we conjure is a horrible perversion of the living we knew, thus subverting the very hope of the Resurrection doctrine mirrored in accounts of the risen dead. Following the same logic which guided the choice of terminology, this book seeks to extend the work done by scholars on the dead in literature of the Middle Ages in Great Britain and France, notably studies by Nancy Caciola, Jane Gilbert and Kenneth Rooney,36 and to refine the focus of books by JeanClaude Schmitt, Ronald C. Finucane and Martha McGill,37 which include all forms of returned dead, including ghosts, the latter focussing, as the title suggests, on ghosts in Scotland, to focus specifically on the reanimated corpses of the dead and their interactions with the living. The present study also encompasses a broader time period than those addressed by previous surveys, tracing revenant tales from the medieval period to the modern, to address the reception of medieval texts by modern writers and readers, to try to identify at what points motifs and themes unite and at what points they diverge, and thus to try to tease out some of the meanings those interactions have sought to express, then and now. There is, however, a larger question looming behind all of this: why did such stories captivate both ecclesiastical and lay writers and readers for so long? For behind that question lies an even larger one, which can always be asked but will never be fully answered: why do we tell ourselves stories? What larger needs do we serve by doing so? People turn to religion and art for answers to the same questions – or at least, since answers are thin on the ground, to hear those questions explored. It is only natural that they would inspire and be inspired by each other and seek to fill vacuums the other leaves behind. Ingmar Bergman was purportedly 36

37

Nancy Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Jane Gilbert, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Kenneth Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011).

Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Ronald C. Finucane, Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation (New York: Prometheus Books, 1996); Martha McGill, Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2018).

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inspired to make The Seventh Seal after seeing a 1480s medieval wall painting by Albertus Pictor, ‘Death Playing Chess’, in Täby Church in Sweden.38 The connection is not difficult to spot. ‘What is more horrible than death?’ asked Bernardino of Siena in one of his sermons on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell.39 You can hear an American preacher ask the same question in any Georgia church. Medieval or modern, most of us are afraid to die. Imaginative writers recognised the same thing Church writers saw early on, that the revenant was a powerful way to express their beliefs, and their fears. The larger question is why. Why is revenant art and literature so fecund a subject matter? Why has it captivated ecclesiastics and laity, writers and poets, painters and even composers, from the Middle Ages to the present? Let us first ask another question: why is this topic deserving of examination? French and German scholars have seen revenant literature and art as fit subjects for scholarly study for decades, but the Anglophone academic community has largely ignored it. This is puzzling, and no explanation readily presents itself. We study, for instance, hagiography. Do we really believe St George was killed six times before he finally died? That he was chopped into pieces and the bits reassembled themselves?40 We study the lives of saints not because we believe the stories to be true, but because we hope to understand what people were trying to express by telling them. What do the stories say about the people who told and heard them, about what they thought, felt, believed and feared? It is for that reason that revenant art and literature are worthy of study: to learn what anxieties and desires people were using them to express. Chief among the anxieties, as I have already argued, is fear of death. Sometimes, in looking for complex explanations, we miss the simple and most resonant one. Rather than looking at this as a simplistic explanation for 38

39

40

Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Dance, Dialogue and Duality: Fatal Encounters in the Medieval Danse Macabre’, in Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sophie Oosterwijk and Stefanie Knöll (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 14.

Franco Mormando, ‘What Happens to Us When We Die: Bernardino of Siena on The Four Last Things’, in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 109–42.

The Martyrdom of St George in the South English Legendary: Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections, ed. E. Gordon Whatley, Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, 2004), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/whatley-saints-lives-inmiddle-english-collections-martyrdom-of-st-george-in-the-south-englishlegendary [accessed April 2015].

In troduction    13

macabre art and literature, we should view it as primal, an a priori condition upon which the tradition relies for its power. Whatever uses revenant art and literature have been put to throughout the periods we have examined – as memento mori, as social leveller, expression of anxiety over the ills of the day, religious exemplum, horror story – it resonates because its imagery strikes in us a visceral fear. The skull and crossbones graced bottles of poison for a reason: it is the universal symbol for death. We fear death, so we do not drink the poison. It is because most people fear death that it is so valuable as a didactic and artistic fulcrum. It would not resonate if it did not hit so close to home. The body is designed with a complex set of physiological responses and protective mechanisms precisely to avoid death. Because other motivations behind such motifs are also valid – the danse macabre as social equaliser, for instance – does not mean fear of death is not one of them, and one that is key. If we say we do not feel an instinctive fear of death, we might just as well say that we do not love, or hate. We love, we hate, we covet, we strive, we fear to die. Even Jesus despaired when he was dying on the cross.41 Revenant tales in different historical circumstances have coincided with specific ills. In many accounts in England, for instance, revenants were blamed for outbreaks of plague. The dramatic rise in the number of tales starting around the year 1000, while certainly driven in part by the renewal of autobiographical writing and other related reasons as Jean-Claude Schmitt has suggested,42 may also have been motivated by millenarian anxieties that the end of the world was upon them. Because fear of death is at the root of such stories, any purely historical or literary study of the evidence is unsatisfactory in at least one respect. It does not answer a number of questions. Among these questions, one, for me, looms largest: why did people think they saw the things they saw (if indeed they were being truthful and not telling such tales for cynical motives)? That question has many possible answers. On this last score, Stephen Gordon is doing interesting work from the perspective of sleep paralysis and REM hallucinations, exploring the idea that people saw such visions in a sort of dream state but

41

42

The question of whether Jesus despaired on the cross is controversial. Jesus’ cry of ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’, taken from Psalms 22.2, appears in Matthew and Mark but not Luke and John. Some commentators have argued that Jesus quotes the psalm not to express despair but to teach the reassuring sentiments that close the Psalm. But there is no scriptural justification in Matthew and Mark for that argument, which makes it likely that including the cry of dereliction is meant to express Christ’s despair at his execution and death. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 35.

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believed them to be real.43 This could account for some claims, though not all. Sometimes we see what we wish to see, and when someone has just died, particularly someone close to us, it is not surprising that we might imagine we see them, from our peripheral vision as they round a street corner, half hidden in a crowd, or on waking in the middle of the night. Why, then, if the deceased is someone they loved, did people see them return as a revenant? As so many accounts of revenants identify them as familiar to those they knew in life, perhaps it is a way to express the pain of psychic injuries done to us by those we love, but which we feel would be a betrayal to confront openly. Many revenants, though, appear to those they had wronged in life. Perhaps these are a way of expressing our fears of the injuries that may be done to us by others. As Frankenstein says when the Monster has begun his campaign of revenge against him, ‘Now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood’.44 On this count, perhaps the revenant is also an embodiment of our own anger and capacity for violence. Perhaps we see in revenants, in Dracula, in the Monster, the same thing we see in the Devil: our own worst selves. Beyond the faults in ourselves and others, the revenant may also be a way to express distress about less tangible deficits in society, about the sense that something has gone terribly awry, something nobody can quite explain. As with more concrete fears such as plague, that something changes generationally. As the worries and fears of a community or society change, so does its assessment of itself and others. From those fears and assessments spring new bogeymen. Current anxieties in France over its Muslim population, painted as poisoning the well from within, make it fertile ground for a television series such as Les Revenants, in which the dead have returned for what many believe to be some malevolent purpose, putrefy before the eyes of their neighbours and carry away some of the living with them, like the dead in the medieval danse. In America, unlike in the 1950s, when the communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism fostered a spate of movies about aliens – invaders from without – the zombie franchises which have flourished since George A. Romero’s film Dawn of the Dead (1978) locate the enemy within. Romero’s revenants are not interlopers, but members of the community, infected with some mysterious modern plague that turns the undead into flesh-eating monsters. Romero has identified American consumerism as the ill he wished to expose, but 43

44

Stephen Gordon, ‘Medical Condition, Demon or Undead Corpse? Sleep Paralysis and the Nightmare in Medieval Europe’, Social History of Medicine 28, no. 3 ( July 2015): 425–44. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, 88.

In troduction    15

the 1970s heralded a spate of problems in America: the loss of the Vietnam War; the resignation of a president; the oil embargo, which brought down the curtain on the idea of Americans as the possessors of unlimited resources; the beginning of a decades-long stagnation in real wages that shook people’s confidence in their ability even to provide for their own families. Following hard on the heels of the assassinations of the 1960s, which ended both the dream of Camelot and the reign of the hero of the Civil Rights movement, these blows combined in a massive assault on American self-confidence and changed, perhaps forever, the country’s idea of itself as a force for good, the image it had maintained since the end of the Second World War. Fast forward to the present, when The Walking Dead is one of the most popular shows ever to appear on American television, and it seems people are searching for a narrative that expresses what they feel: that America is somehow sick at heart, with an illness nobody quite understands, the cure for which nobody has been able to find. And unlike in previous modern zombie stories, in which only those who are bitten turn, this new pestilence is not transmitted only through being attacked by one. The entire population is infected. Everyone who dies, whether they have been bitten or not, will become ‘walkers’. There have always been visitations of the dead, of ghosts as well as revenants. They come in different ages for different reasons, but always the dead come. If we remove the specific reasons for their coming, we are left with the bare fact of their return. It does not seem unreasonable to conclude from this that the importance of their visits is not the message they came to deliver, but the fact that the living have always seen them. If that is the case, we must assume, then, that it is the living who desire the visitations. Sometimes because they miss their dead, sometimes because they fear them, sometimes to express something ugly about themselves, sometimes because they hope for some assurance from the dead about where they are and where the living soon will go. Beyond fear of death, another common element in these revenant stories is otherness, the revenant as the other or the revenant figure as someone othered by those around them. And so I ask you to view each of the tales we will examine through a bifocal lens: one part watching for fear of death, the other for otherness. In exploring the motivations for stories of the risen dead, this book will examine a variety of sources, including scriptural and patristic writings, ecclesiastical chronicles, imaginative literature and art, to make its case. This, then, is not a book of literary theory. It is a cultural history of the revenant, its inseparable relationship with Resurrection doctrine, and its changing value to ecclesiastics, historians and storytellers from the Middle Ages to the present time. I should also say that I am writing this from a storyteller’s perspective, for a writer of stories will view these tales through a different lens than a

1 6    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

literary theorist. There will be analysis of texts from a theoretical perspective, but my primary approach will be not to examine the works within a theoretical framework but rather a motivational one, perhaps even a psychological one. I will be exploring the creative impulses, preoccupations and fears that led writers and artists to produce revenant literature and art, not to ‘identify’ motivations, as these are impossible to determine definitively in any writer, medieval or modern, but to trace the artistic and literary effects which might have emerged as a result of cultural cues, our ‘cultural tool kit’. Chapter 1 establishes the critical and new importance of the dead body in early Christianity, and how this preoccupation may have predisposed people in the Middle Ages to tell and believe accounts of revenants. It details the advent of the cult of Christ and the cult of the saints, traces the development of the doctrine of the Resurrection, and explains the central role I contend these played in the medieval view of the potential for dead bodies to rise. It discusses the different ways in which pagans and Christians viewed death and relates some of the pagan stories featuring cadavers and the raising of the dead, and how, with the coming of Christianity, the dead were transformed in the imagination from supernatural beings to be feared into friends of God who could aid human beings with all manner of ailments. It employs a variety of Scriptural and patristic sources, including the gospels, Psalm 103:16, 1 Corinthians 15 (which is essentially the central text for the doctrine of the Resurrection), and Bernardino of Siena in his sermons on the ‘Four Last Things’ (‘What is more terrible than death?’).45 Chapter 2 examines the ecclesiastical chronicles that feature revenant tales, including William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum, The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseberg, Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, Rudolph von Schleddstadt’s Historiae memorabiles, the Chronicle of Lanercost, stories recorded by the anonymous monk of Byland Abbey, and Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium. It explores why the ecclesiastics would have told such tales, how they fit into their doctrinal ideologies, and what other value the tales may have had for them, either propaganda, cautionary, artistic or otherwise. Chapter 3 turns to cadaver literature written by non-ecclesiastical authors. This necessitates some literary backtracking to examine earlier depictions of death and the dead, first in Soul and Body poetry, then in the Blickling Homilies, particularly Blickling X, and ‘Erthe upon Erthe’. It then discusses the advent of the Legend, with the appearance of the thirteenth-century poem attributed to Baudouin De Condé, ‘Li Troi Mort et Li Troi Vif ’, and John Audelay’s version of the poem, De tribus regibus mortuis (‘Three Dead Kings’). 45

Franco Mormando, ‘What Happens to Us When We Die: Bernardino of Siena on The Four Last Things’, 109–42.

In troduction    17

From there it turns to the emergence of danse macabre and then turns to imaginative writing outwith the Legend tradition that includes revenancy and/or danse macabre, including The Awntyrs off Arthure, ‘Death and Liffe’, Robert Henryson’s ‘The Thre Deid Pollis’ and William Dunbar’s ‘The Lament for the Makars’. Finally, it will discuss the growing depictions of violence in corpse imagery as an indication that, as these images lost their power to shock and therefore their value as expression, people felt the need for increasingly more frightening stories in order to answer persistent fears about what comes after death. It will also discuss the Church’s efforts to address those fears through the development of the doctrine of Purgatory and will explore whether the cementing of that doctrine sped the creation of secular supernatural tales. Chapter 4 examines the impact of the Reformation on the ecclesiastical community’s treatment of revenant tales. As the Reformation swept away the saints, Purgatory, prayers and other practices connected with remembrance of the dead and the connection between the dead and the living, the macabre continued. Were people expressing a need to replace what the Reformation unseated, and what did the Protestant Church offer instead? It will discuss the new way to explain revenants as good or bad angels expounded by Lewes Lavater, which was actually the old way expounded by Augustine that the Church was meant to be espousing all along.46 While I will make some observations about Roman Catholic treatment of revenants, I will focus primarily on Protestant early modernity, both for reasons of space and because its abrupt and radical changes to previous attitudes regarding revenants present great challenges for academic interpretation. We will examine the case of the revenant Isabel Heriot from George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, in which a minister’s family report poltergeist-type behaviour.47 The chapter will examine the 1597 Daemonologie of James VI and I, who believed in revenants and justified this belief with the doctrinally orthodox explanation that the devil automated the bodies of the dead.48 Attention will also be given to the assertion of John Kincaid, ‘the

46

47

48

Lewes Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, 1572, ed. J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley (Oxford: Printed for the Shakespeare Association at the University Press, 1929), 163.

George Sinclair, ‘Relation XXI, Touching Isabel Heriot’, in Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (reprinted from the original edition published in Edinburgh in 1685 by Thomas George Stevenson), Early English Books Online e-book, 144–54. James VI and I, Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue, Diuided into three Bookes (Edinburgh: Robert Walde-grave, 1597), Early English Books Online e-book, 59.

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witch-pricker’, that witches have an unpleasant smell because they have sex with the Devil, who accomplishes this by inhabiting a corpse for the purpose.49 We will then explore the changes wrought on revenant tales in this period and their migration from an ecclesiastical to a secular context. We will examine stories such as Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is an example of the post-Reformation depiction of the revenant as a corpse inhabited by a demon that was current during the Scottish witch-hunts. Chapter 5 studies imaginative literature that contains motifs and themes of danse macabre and the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead and attempts to demonstrate how such depictions may have developed from some of the elements discussed in earlier chapters, particularly as this literature is written by and for people who (presumably) do not believe in revenants. A variety of such literature will be discussed, including Charles Baudelaire’s ‘corpse poems’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington Irving’s The Adventure of the German Student and Mark Twain’s A Curious Dream. As this book argues that fear of death is the prime motivation behind revenant stories, there is no more fitting way to set the stage for our exploration than with a lyric by Dave Matthews, which epitomises as well as any text or artwork from any era the longing to cling to life that has driven the literature and art that are the subject of this volume: Gravedigger, When you dig my grave Will you make it shallow So that I can feel the rain?50

49

50

John Kincaid Questioned, Edinburgh, 4th April 1662, Justiciary Court Records, Box JC26/36, in David M. Robertson, Goodnight My Servants All, 425. Dave Matthews, ‘Gravedigger’, Some Devil (RCA Records, 2003).

1 The Corpse in Christianity: The Dead, Mostly Dead and Very Special Dead

B

t

efore dawn on a Sunday morning, a mother made her way along rocky ground in the dark. Two days before, she had buried her only son, and now she was going to visit his grave. Some of his friends came with her. They brought spices and oils with which to anoint his body. It was their way. They had wept terribly for this man over the past few days. He had suffered greatly before he died. There had been a conspiracy against him, and it was one of his own friends who betrayed him to the authorities. They took him in the middle of the night. He was stripped, spat upon, beaten, thrashed with reeds. When they finally killed him, it was by torture, with long nails driven through his body. People gathered to watch, and laughed. He died horribly, slowly, bleeding from his wounds. It took a long time. At the end, he begged for water. They gave him vinegar instead. He died crying out for his god. But when his mother and friends arrived at the tomb, a most extraordinary thing happened. An earthquake shook the ground, and an angel descended from the sky and rolled back the stone from the door. The tomb was empty, and the angel spoke to them: Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead.1

The mother and her son’s friends ran from the sepulchre, frightened and thrilled all at once. They went to find other friends to tell them the incredible news, but on their way, there appeared before them this mother’s son, the very man they had seen killed, and he was alive. They fell at his feet in awe.2 The dead stay dead: that was understood, until that day, in about the first third of the first century of the Common Era, when Jesus rose from the grave. From that moment, Christians were promised that when it came their time to die, all those who believed in him would rise as he had risen, Matthew 28:5–7. (All scriptural texts quoted are KJV.)

1

Matthew 26–28; Mark 14–16; Luke 22–24; John 18–21.

2

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and live again. Forever.3 Without pain, without deformities. Never hungry, never thirsty. Never cold, nor tired, nor sad. For ‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’.4 To say that this was a sea change in what people thought they knew about death is to grossly understate the point. It represented what Paul Binski has termed, regarding another resurrected body, that of Lazarus, ‘a conceptual breach of ancient barriers, ancient taboos’.5 Many serious philosophers were clear that death was final. Epicurus said there was nothing after death.6 Stories of the revivification of the dead, though not as frequent, did occur before Christianity. Meroe, the lamia (a witch or she-demon), raised the dead to seek revenge on her lover Socrates.7 In Metamorphoses, Apuleius of Madaura tells the story of a Telephron who was brought back from the dead to discover if his wife had poisoned him.8 Ovid relates how the Romans sacrificed to Tacita on the day of the Feralia, the Day of the Dead. They also brought offerings to their graves on that day, ‘for at certain times and in certain places, the dead emerged from their sleep like the unclear images of a dream and sometimes troubled the living’.9 Apollonius also raised the dead.10 Ancient Greeks believed that the human body sometimes did not decompose when buried, and that in this state it was liable to resuscitate and exist in a state not dead, but not alive either. But these revenants were not violent; they behaved just as

3

4

5 6

7

8 9

John 6:40: ‘And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day’; also John 10:28: ‘And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand’. Isaiah 35:10: ‘And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away’; also Revelation 7:17: ‘For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’. Binski, Medieval Death, 9–10.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, in The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, ed. Brad Inwood, trans. Lloyd P. Person (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 29. Martha Rampton, ‘Up From the Dead: Magic and Miracle’, in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, 277–8. Ibid., 276.

Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage, 2008), 23.

10

Rampton, ‘Up From the Dead’, 276.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   21

they had when alive, and they were to be pitied.11 Some pagans believed the souls of the dead lingered near their bodies for three days, hoping for a chance at a last bit of life.12 Some pagans also believed in an underworld, where gates at various locations were opened from time to time to allow the dead to cross over to the world of the living.13 Stories of the risen dead occurred, however, with nothing like the frequency of tales, ecclesiastical and secular, after the cult of Christianity took hold. It is not difficult to see why. Timor mortis conturbat me. ‘Fear of death disturbs me.’ The phrase comes from the Office of the Dead, the prayer cycle in medieval Books of Hours that dictated the proper prayers for souls of the dead.14 We are afraid to die. Philippe Ariès wrote that this fear is natural, and ancestral.15 This makes sense. Over time, species select the genes for reproduction that have most effectively helped the species to survive in their environments. This is how we evolve. Our genetic memory carries instincts, including the instincts to equip us for survival. Scientists at Emory University recently discovered that fear memory can be passed down through generations in DNA – in this case by training mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by administering electrical shocks in combination with the introduction of the smell. They then bred the mice and exposed the offspring to the smell of cherry blossoms without the electrical shock, but the baby mice were still afraid.16 A 2015 study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry found changes in the DNA of the children of Holocaust survivors, who are known to have a higher likelihood of stress disorders.17 In other words, a child could fear something they had no direct experience of but which a parent had been exposed to. Sudden death in particular – Mors repentina – is an ancient fear, felt long before Christianity.18 When death came with advance warning, such as in John Cuthbert Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 412.

11

Binski, Medieval Death, 10.

12

Ibid.

13

Vincent Gillespie, ‘Dead Still/Still Dead’, The Mediaeval Journal 1, no. 1 (2011): 55.

14 15

16

17

18

Philippe Ariès, ‘Death Inside Out’, The Hastings Center Studies 2, no. 2, Facing Death (May 1974): 5.

Brian G. Dias and Kerry J. Ressler, ‘Parental Olfactory Experience Influences Behavior and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations’, Nature Neuroscience 17, no. 1 ( January 2014): 89–99. Rachel Yehuda et al., ‘Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation’, Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (1 September 2016): 372–80. Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 10–11.

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old age, though it was frightening, it was regarded as inevitable. When death caught one unawares, through an accident, it was regarded as an unpredictable instrument of chance; it destroyed the order of the world on which everyone depended.19 ‘What is more terrible than death?’ Bernardino of Siena said in his sermons on the ‘Four Last Things’.20 And Julien of Vézelay (d. 1165), in his twenty-first sermon, makes manifest his personal terror: Three things terrify me . . . death, Hell, and the Judgment to come . . . death, which will take me out of my body and away from the pleasing light, shared by everyone, into I know not what region reserved for the spirits of the faithful . . .21

The italics are mine. It can be argued that Julien’s fear of death, as with the fear of all Christians, springs not merely from death itself but from the judgement which awaits him. But the specification of transport into an unknown region is wording repeated again and again by many people, wording suggestive on a basic level of a fear of the uncertainty that follows death. Julien follows the phrase with ‘reserved for the spirits of the faithful’. If he knows he is going to a region reserved for the spirits of the faithful and is still afraid, it is ultimately death that he finds so terrifying. Listen to the plaintive keen of Psalm 103.16: ‘For the wind passeth over him and he is gone, and the place thereof shall know him no more.’ What a lonely thought: you are going to die and nobody will remember you ever lived. Part of the reason Christianity succeeded must surely have been that people liked the idea of a religion that could cheat death. Christianity’s theory of the afterlife represented the latest attempt by frightened people, living in a world where early death came to many,22 to explain what that afterlife would look like. What is the doctrine of the Resurrection itself but an account of triumph over death, and therefore a wish to do so? Perhaps nowhere is this expressed more movingly than by Augustine in Sermon 344: I know . . . you love being alive, you do not want to die; and you would like to pass from this life to the other in such a way that you do not rise again 19 20

21

22

Ibid., 10.

Mormando, ‘What Happens to Us When We Die: Bernardino of Siena on The Four Last Things’, 109–42.

Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Scolar Press, 1984), 202.

Werner L. Gundersheimer, ‘Introduction’, in The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger, A Complete Facsimile of the Original 1538 Edition (New York: Dover, 1971), xiii.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   23

dead, but are changed, alive, into something better. That is what you would like, that is what ordinary human feelings desire, that is what the soul itself has, in I do not know what kind of way, engraved in its deepest will and desire.23

The power of this statement is not only its being expressed by a great doctor of the church expounding on one of the Four Last Things. It touches with a needle one of the most acute human fears. It is all the more powerful because, written as it was in his old age, it perhaps expresses the fear that Augustine felt as he prepared to face his own death. Augustine himself links obeying the will of God with fear of death by juxtaposing the teachings on sin before and after the arrival of Christ. Speaking of martyrs, but in a metaphor meant to extend to all in an exhortation to cleave to Christianity in the face of persecution, he writes that before Christ people were told that if they sinned they would die. Since Christ, however, they were told that shrinking from death would be the sin. ‘What was then an object of fear, to prevent man from sinning, is now something to be chosen, to avoid sinning.’24 Vincent Gillespie, amongst others, has ably demonstrated that the inevitable and terrifying prospect of death exerted at least as strong a grip on the medieval imagination as the sure and certain hope of resurrection, and that this grip was powerfully expressed in medieval writings, both lay and ecclesiastical: As medieval writers well knew, Three Sorrowful Things haunt human consciousness: the inevitability of death, the uncertainty of its time, and the unknowability of the soul’s fate after death.25

The superabundance of literature on dying well is in itself a sign that people were highly anxious about dying, full stop. The Ars moriendi (art of dying) tradition seeks to turn death into a navigable process.26 If a person on his deathbed followed the procedures carefully, they would safely negotiate their way past the demons hovering round, seeking to seize them for Satan when 23

24

25 26

Augustine, Sermon 344, in Sermons (341–400), ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), 51.

Augustine, City of God, ed. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), Book XIII, ch. 4, 514. Gillespie, ‘Dead Still/Still Dead’, 1.

See, for instance, Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the ‘Ars Moriendi’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); and Donald F. Duclow, ‘Dying Well: The Ars moriendi and the Dormition of the Virgin’, in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, 379–430.

2 4    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

they are at their weakest, and arrive, at the worst, in Purgatory, and eventually, Heaven. An echo of this concern with the inevitability of death (and the stench of bodily decay we hear of in Lazarus: ‘Lord, by this time he stinketh . . .’27) will appear later, in such poems as one of several fifteenth-century versions of the Middle English lyric Erthe Upon Erthe: Erthe gose upon erthe as molde upon molde: He that gose upon erthe, gleterande as golde, Like as erthe never more go to erthe sholde – And yitt shall erthe unto erthe ga rathere than he wolde. Now, why that erthe luves erthe, wondere me thinke, Or why that erthe for erthe sholde other swete or  swinke: For when that erthe upon erthe es broghte within brinke, Thane shall erthe of erthe have a foulle stinke.28

This will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter. Augustine himself grounds the power of Christianity in its conquering of death: ‘it was by the strength of faith and in the conflict of faith that even the fear of death admitted of being conquered, at any rate in the earlier ages; and this was seen pre-eminently in the holy martyrs’;29 and similarly: ‘What has happened is that God has granted to faith so great a gift of grace that death, which all agree to be the contrary of life, has become the means by which men pass into life.’30 This view of death is the source of another crucial difference between the resurrected dead of the pagans and those of Christianity. Pagans believed the dead were to be feared. One of the aims of the ancient funeral cults was to prevent the deceased from returning to disturb the living.31 A growing interest in the fate of the soul in the afterlife among Jews and pagans accompanied a shift away from fear of the dead to a fear for the welfare of the dead in the afterlife. At the same time, this meant funerals now served both the old and the new 27 28

29 30 31

John 11:39.

Reginald Thorne Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 180. Augustine, City of God, Book XIII, ch. 4, 513. Ibid., 514.

Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (London: Marion Boyars, 2009), 14.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   25

beliefs: they protected the living from the wrath of the dead and protected the dead from demons that might keep them from going to heaven.32 With the rise of Christianity, first with Christ’s own resurrection and then with the cults of the saints, this ancient fear of the dead would give way. It would return later, in tales told by religious and the laity of the dead rising. Some of these tales will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Let us first examine how people came to believe that the dead, and therefore they themselves, could rise. We do not know who first taught the doctrine of resurrection, whence it originated, or how it developed. All we know with any certainty is that the belief existed amongst the Israelites.33 As Arthur Marmorstein points out, Isaiah speaks of the dead who shall arise, and the earth that will cast out the dead.34 Ezekiel tells that God will cause the people to come up out of their graves and will bring them into the land of Israel: ‘And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, and caused you to come up out of your graves, O my people . . .’35 The belief is also in Daniel: ‘And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’;36 it is also to be found in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, in II Maccabeees, I Enoch, and the Testaments.37 A Jewish prayer recited three times daily ran, ‘Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever, Thou quickenest the dead.’38 Another benediction said, ‘Blessed be He who is trustworthy in His word, the quickener of the dead.’39 But it had never happened – until Jesus. Paul Binski has attributed the thriving of Christianity to the story of Christ raising Lazarus, which changed a fundamental idea about death, that it was final: St John’s story of Lazarus plays on many of the contemporary anxieties about death; and in challenging them it inverts and throws aside ways 32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39

Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 20.

Arthur Marmorstein, Studies in Jewish Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 145. Isaiah 26:19.

Ezekiel 37:12–14. Daniel 12:2.

Marmorstein, Studies in Jewish Theology, 146. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 148.

2 6    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

of thinking. Its image of the gravestone rolled away – foreshadowing the narrative of Christ’s own void tomb exposed by the rolling of a stone – symbolizes for us a conceptual breach of ancient barriers, ancient taboos.40

It is undoubtedly true that the story of the raising of Lazarus would have worked a profound change on people, and indeed was a febrile source for the antique and medieval imaginations. In the Office of the Dead, the second most frequently found subject in miniatures, after Job, is Lazarus.41 How­ ever, people were only told that Lazarus was sick, and then that he had died. Not having seen it with their own eyes left open the possibility of lies, or magic. By the time Jesus arrived, the action had already taken place, and Lazarus was in his tomb. Furthermore, the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus is not even told in Matthew or Mark. Luke tells of Jesus raising the son of a widow, but does not name him as Lazarus, and the story is different, and much less elaborate.42 It is only in John that we get the fully elaborated dramatic tale.43 The death and Resurrection of Jesus, combined with the promise of the same gift of eternal life to others, would have a greater impact. Jesus’s healing of the sick and other miracles could be put down to magic, and they were by some.44 (Christian writers countered this argument by claiming that the miracles done by their holy men were not made by magic, which derived from demons, but rather by the divine power that came from God.45) Even if Christ’s raising of Lazarus could be believed, it was something that had happened once, that had changed people’s lives in no fundamental way, like a patient with inoperable pancreatic cancer who mysteriously goes into remission. It is to be celebrated, but it does not affect the life of anyone but the patient himself. On the other hand, people saw Jesus die.46 They saw him buried.47 When he was then seen walking around, for people 40 41

42 43 44

45 46 47

Binski, Medieval Death, 9–10.

Roger S. Wieck, ‘Office of the Dead’, in Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life, ed. Roger S. Wieck (New York: George Brazilier in association with the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD, 1988), 132. Luke 7:11–7.

John 11:1–44.

Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (Berkeley, CA: Seastone Press, 1978, reprinted 1998); also Rampton, ‘Up From the Dead’, 279. Rampton, ‘Up From the Dead’, 281.

Matthew 27:50; Mark 15:37; Luke 23:46; John 19:30. Luke 23:55; Mark 15:46–7.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   27

who were disposed to believe there would be no doubt that he had risen from the dead (apart from those who, quite logically, asserted that Christ’s disciples had stolen his body from the tomb).48 When Christ rose, and along with his rising brought the promise that others could escape death as well, the message was like an inoculation against disease, and then a booster shot. Death was now something that could be evaded: ‘In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.’49 Turning on its head the ancient belief of the dead as to be feared, in the Christian view, eternal life was brought by a dead body: For by a man came death; and by a man the resurrection of the dead. And, as in Adam all shall die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.50

It has been observed by many scholars that, in the words of Robert Bartlett, ‘Of all religions, Christianity is the one most concerned with dead bodies.’51 It is a preoccupation that grew and evolved throughout the Middle Ages. A.N. Galpern has remarked that pre-Reformation Catholicism was in large measure ‘a cult of the living in the service of the dead’.52 The oldest extant Christian prayer over a corpse, from the prayer book of Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis (mid-fourth century), runs: ‘God, you who have the power of life and death, God of the spirits and lord of all flesh, God, you who kill and make alive, you who lead down to the gate of Hades and lead back up . . .’53 In medieval terms, such a corpse is not officially or properly dead. In many societies, dying was thought to be a slow transition from a state of life to a state of death. During this time, the person was neither fully alive nor fully dead. This liminal period did not end until the corpse had completely decomposed and all

Matthew 28:13–5.

48

1 Corinthians 15:52.

49

1 Corinthians 15:21–2.

50

Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 3.

51

A.N. Galpern, ‘The Legacy of Late Medieval Religion in Sixteenth-Century Champagne’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 149.

52

Paxton, Christianizing Death, 22.

53

2 8    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

that remained was bones.54 In the Middle Ages, too, a human being was not believed to be completely dead until every bit of flesh had rotted away.55 Once they had established that they could rise from the dead, Christians of late antiquity and the Middle Ages turned to the issue of exactly what kind of body would rise. They asked, and answered, the same question posed by 1 Corinthians 15:35: ‘How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?’ For them, it was crucial that not only their spirits were resurrected, but their bodies as well. In protracted debate over the doctrine of Resurrection, specifically whether the body that rose from the grave was the material body or a spiritual body, theologians tied themselves in knots trying to explain how – and why – the risen body had to be the actual, physical body of the dead and not just the soul. There is scriptural justification for this belief. In Ezekiel 37:5–6 God speaks to dry bones: ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live.’56 Extra-canonical books also offer evidence. The Apocalypse of Peter tells that at the Resurrection, animals and birds will regurgitate all the human flesh they have eaten.57 Though they do not offer very satisfying explanations for why the whole body must rise and not just the soul, theologians clung steadfastly to the contention that survival of the body was essential for survival of the person. Tertullian of Carthage made clear in no uncertain terms that unless a man was raised in his physical body, he was still dead: If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire, although he dies entire? Who is without hurt, that is without life? What body is uninjured, when it is dead, when it is cold, when it is ghastly, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? When is a man more infirm, than when he is entirely infirm? When more palsied, than when quite motionless? Thus, for a dead man to be raised again, amounts to nothing short of his

54

55

56 57

Loring M. Danforth, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 37. Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 133. Ezekiel 37:5–6.

J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 593–612.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   29

being restored to his entire condition, – lest he, forsooth, be still dead in that part in which he has not risen again.58

Augustine wrote that ‘not a single hair of the head will perish’.59 But resurrection of the entire body as it was in life raised problems. What if you were cannibalised, or eaten by a bear? What if you drowned and were devoured by sharks? You need not worry, Augustine wrote. Wherever you are, whether whole or in pieces, no matter if you have been food for beasts, God will find you. ‘The whole universe is filled with the presence of him who knows from where he is to raise up what he has created.’60 What about all the fingernails and hair you cut during your lifetime? Did you get all those back at your resurrection? Would that not look kind of funny? What about aborted foetuses? Would they rise as well? Would the deformed be resurrected with their defects? What about those who died as children? Would they rise the same age they were when they died, or as adults? Augustine treats all these questions. Children would, ‘by a marvellous and instantaneous act of God’, gain at the resurrection the maturity they would have attained had they lived to adulthood.61 What he concludes about children, he writes, can also be inferred to apply to aborted foetuses.62 A few theologians, principally Origen, proposed theories that successfully located identity with the spirit, but so important was the body to medieval Christian thinkers that these theologians were condemned (including Thomas Aquinas, whom we will discuss later in this chapter) because their theories did not necessitate the survival of the body.63 This insistence upon the resurrection of the physical body, and the preoccupation with the minutiae of exactly what would and would not be resurrected, continued well into the thirteenth century. In Distinctions 43–50 of his Sentences, Peter Lombard addressed some of the same questions wrestled with by earlier theologians such as Augustine. In Distinction 44, the Lombard discusses the sex, age and height we will have in our resurrected bodies; whether all the food we have eaten in our lifetimes will return with us; whether hair 58

59 60 61 62 63

Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ch. 57, www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.v.viii.lvii.html [accessed August 2014]. Augustine, City of God, Book 1, ch. 12, 21. Ibid., Book 1, ch. 12, 21.

Ibid., Book 22, ch. 14, 1055. Ibid., Book 22, ch. 13, 1054.

Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 10.

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and fingernails will return; and whether aborted foetuses will be resurrected.64 Thomas Aquinas concluded that the soul could not be completely happy while separated from the body, and souls must therefore be reunited with their bodies at the resurrection.65 (It should be noted, however, that Aquinas’s solution to the question of what constitutes identity was condemned, as Origen’s, because while it proclaimed that resurrection would be bodily, in its logic it made the body unnecessary.66) This suggests the central importance of the body to the religious who were debating the issue. In a question encapsulating his defence of physical resurrection, Gregory the Great focused on the identity inherent in the physical body, saying that I am not ‘I’ if I rise in an aerial body.67 It seems to me that Gregory’s concern for maintaining his identity, his ‘I’-ness, is at bottom a concern that without that ‘I’-ness, he ceases to exist. That loss of ‘I’-ness sounds like death, for what are we if we are not ‘we’? One cannot separate the soul from its body and still maintain self, which is what everybody could count on after the resurrection. So, Gregory’s question could be rephrased this way: if I am not ‘I’, I am not. Full stop. As Caroline Walker Bynum observes, ‘analysis of current philosophical discourse and of contemporary popular culture suggests that Americans, like medieval poets and theologians, consider any survival that really counts to entail survival of body’.68 She points to the work of medical sociologists who struggle to write organ transplant guidelines, as donors and recipients ‘often assume self is being transferred’.69 Stuart F. Spicker argues essentially that a person is his or her body.70 Another element important to the development of the doctrine of resurrection is the part played by fear. The doctrine of resurrection constructed by the early patristic writers had principally in mind the martyrs who were killed for their faith. As Caroline Walker Bynum writes, ‘Their images of stasis, 64

65

66 67 68 69 70

Peter Lombard, Sentences, Book 4, On the Doctrine of Signs, trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies), 238–44.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, The Collected Works of Thomas Aquinas. Intelex Past Masters Full Text Humanities, IV, 79, 10–11, http://pm.nlx. com.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/xtf/view?docId=aquinas/aquinas.01.xml;chunk. id=id251008;toc.depth=2;toc.id=id227040;brand=default [accessed August 2014]. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 10.

Moralia in Job, Book 14, Chaps. 55–8; Bynum, 60, footnote 3. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 15. Ibid., 16.

Stuart F. Spicker, ‘Introduction’, in The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 3–23.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   31

hardening, and re-assemblage in heaven gave to mortal flesh the promise of victory over what martyrs, and those who admired them, feared most: excruciating pain in the moment of dying and dishonour to the cadaver after death.’71 It seems fair to say, then, that these doctrines recognised and were developed with fear of death and suffering in mind. Once the power of Christ’s body was established, the way was made for the power of any dead body of a person who had lived a sinless life. The Christian cult of the body was therefore quickly expanded to include not just Christ, but what Peter Brown called ‘the very special dead’, the saints.72 This exclusive group was reserved first for martyrs, then, as the persecution of Christians abated, for confessors and others who had led a sinless life. The theory held that these people had earned so much merit through their good lives that they had enough left over to cover the rest of us. This cult of the saints represented a sea change in human attitudes towards the dead. Whereas the pagan cult of heroes believed that the gods should not be exposed to human death, in the cult of saints the dead were transformed in the imagination from supernatural beings to be feared into ‘friends of God’ who could and would intercede on our behalf. The pagan cult of the gods and the Christian cult of the saints are part and parcel of the same desire. For pagans, the cult of the gods was a way to triumph over death by having gods who did not die, were not even tainted by death. How powerful a notion Christians had hit upon, then: to cheat death by taking for their heroes these saints who were once alive just like them. How much less frightening does death become when our heroes are humans who die just like us, but in dying, are transformed into powerful beings who reside with God – who are, in a sense, undead. The power of this notion must have been evident to Latin bishops, who quickly began siting their bishoprics near shrines.73 Ecclesiastics also began to translate the bones of saints to their new churches and cathedrals, whether they had permission to appropriate them or not. When relics of Saints Gervasius and Protasius were discovered in Milan in 385, Ambrose took possession of the relics and moved them into his new basilica, where he placed them under the altar.74 So early on, it seems, Christianity seized on, even encouraged, the laity’s preoccupation with corpses. As André Grabar said, ‘The imagery of a 71 72

73 74

Ibid., 45.

Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 69. Ibid., 8.

Ibid., 36.

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martyr’s relics is never in any case an imagery of the memento mori; rather it strives by all means in its power to proclaim the suppression of the fact of death.’75 People identified saints who could protect you from death. Florian could be invoked against drowning.76 Sebastian warded off plague.77 So many saints’ body parts were making the rounds that Julian the Apostate was driven to complain, ‘You keep adding many corpses newly dead to the corpse of long ago. You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres.’78 This cult of the saints, says Peter Brown, broke ‘most of the imaginative boundaries which ancient men had placed between heaven and earth, the divine and the human, the living and the dead’.79 In 1299 the idea that the whole body was resurrected may have been at work on the mind of Pope Boniface VIII when, in the bull Detestande feritatis, he forbade eviscerating, dismembering and boiling a cadaver to disengage the bones, a practice at that time common for monarchs and others with the power and the desire to spread their bones around at different holy places, both to demonstrate their power and to locate their remains near as many shrines as possible in the hope of gaining salvation through proximity to the bones of a saint (burial ad sanctos).80 This sense is illuminated by Elizabeth A.R. Brown: ‘The feelings about the corpse that these justifications seem to reflect may well have stemmed from a conviction that the body’s life was or could be prolonged even after vital signs had ceased, an idea which Roger Bacon’s teachings could have fostered.’81 The materialist view of the resurrection – one in which the physical body and not only the soul returned – held sway until the early fourteenth century.82 This had major implications for the way ecclesiastics and the laity 75 76

77

78

79 80

81 82

Ibid., 75.

Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 4, Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100–c. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 173.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), 552. David Satran, Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine: Reassessing the Lives of the Prophets (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 113. Brown, Cult of the Saints, 21.

Elizabeth A.R. Brown, ‘Authority, the Family, and the Dead in Late Medieval France’, French Historical Studies 16, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990): 805. Ibid., 827.

Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 10.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   33

thought and wrote, and what they believed, about the dead. Ecclesiastics began to take an interest in ghost and revenant stories in the eleventh century.83 They began recording tales told to them by the laity or other religious about the dead rising from their graves, sometimes harassing them, even attacking them. Gregory the Great, in one of his tales designed to throw glory on St Benedict, tells the story of a young monk who left the abbey to visit his parents without Benedict’s permission and died when he arrived at his parent’s house. When the body was found outside its grave several times after burial, the parents beseeched Benedict for help, and Benedict gave them a Eucharistic wafer to place on the boy’s chest. Once they do so, the corpse stays buried.84 This tale has obvious public relations value, demonstrating as it does the salutary effects of possessing the goodwill of Benedict, and by extension, other worthy religious the laity should obey. But not all tales of the reanimated dead contained such purely religious lessons. Some more grotesque tales seem to relate details of violence or gore for their own sake. The Dominican Rudolf von Schlettstadt in his thirteenth-century Historiae memorabiles relates several stories of the dead attacking the living.85 Saxon bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, in his chronicle written between 1009 and 1018, tells the story of a priest murdered on the altar by the dead. The anonymous monk of Byland Abbey wrote down a number of stories of physical visitations of the dead in which the spirits were often violent. In one of these, Robert, the son of Robert of Boltebi, escapes from the cemetery at night, terrorises villagers and makes dogs howl. In another, the former curate of Kirkby, Jacques Tankerlay, rises one night and gouges out one of his ex-mistress’s eyes.86 And, as discussed in the introduction, William of Newburgh tells the story of the corpse of the impious priest of Melrose Abbey. The idea that a normal person could rise from the dead was doctrinally unsound. For the religious who were telling these tales that would have been a problem, if not for a notion found in Augustine’s theory of apparitions. He wrote that when apparitions did appear, which was very rarely, it was not the body or soul that appeared, but a spiritual image, and this image was placed in 83

84

85 86

Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 35.

Gregory the Great, Dialogues, trans. John Odo Zimmerman (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), Book Two, ch. 24, 94. Nancy Caciola, ‘Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture’, 17. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 140–7.

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the mind of the person by angels, either good or bad. These wonders, even if accomplished by bad angels, happen through the permission of God. As JeanClaude Schmitt has noted, once clerics had acknowledged that, they could then safely write about these phenomena.87 Ecclesiastics wanting to tell these stories still had a problem, however, and it lay in the difference between ghosts and revenants as the term has been defined in this book. Ghosts were generally incorporeal spirits returning from Purgatory to report on their suffering and to ask for help. These were covered under Augustine’s theory of apparitions. Revenants were the dead actually rising from their graves to wander about, usually for nefarious purposes. They served no theological purpose, and, according to doctrine, could not exist. Why, then, did ecclesiastics tell such stories? Perhaps it was because, while they knew these things could not be true, they feared that they might be. Exorcism rituals in the early Middle Ages illustrate a fear of the evil dead and of demons. Holy water and salt were sprinkled, and a conjuration was uttered to cast aside ‘every shadow, every Satan, all the diabolical workings of the infernal spirits of suicides or of those who wander the earth’.88 Perhaps it is as Aristotle said, that we learn through contemplating the reproduction of things that cause us pain. This explanation can be extended to fear. If we fear death, and we mourn those we have lost, stories of such visitations may provide a way to confront those fears in a safe psychological space. We will observe this in the tales to be discussed in subsequent chapters. Perhaps the tellers utilised the tales for their propaganda value. Schmitt observes that appearances of the dead sometimes occurred when there was a change in ecclesiastical or some other office and therefore a will to be enforced or suffrages or bequests to be observed.89 Or perhaps it is as Schmitt suggests in the case of the monk of Byland, that he wrote down the stories simply ‘because he was seduced by the wonder of the tales themselves’.90 Is that not, after all, why storytellers have always told tales, and why we have always listened? Sit down by the campfire in the middle of a tale and, if the story is a good one, we will immediately be drawn in and want to know: who is being chased? What is chasing him? And how will it all turn out? However that may be, we have seen the fundamental importance of the dead body in early Christianity, and the belief of patristic writers such as 87 88 89 90

Ibid., 80. Ibid., 29.

Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 38. Ibid., 147.

Th e C or p se in Chr istia n it y   35

Augustine that Christianity conquered fear of death. In the next chapter we will look at some of the religious tales that feature the risen dead and examine why the ecclesiastics might have told them, and then follow the progression of such tales into devotional books and art.

2 The Religious Revenant t But since sensation remains to all who have ever lived . . . see that ye neglect not to be convinced, and to hold as your belief, that these things are true. For let even necromancy, and the divinations you practise by immaculate children, and the evoking of departed human souls . . . let these persuade you that even after death souls are in a state of sensation . . .1

S

o wrote Justin Martyr in about 155–157 CE in his First Apology, addressed to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. His project was to justify Christianity and explain why Christians should not be persecuted. The passage was part of Justin’s proof of immortality and the truth of the Resurrection. When he wrote of the sensation that remains to everyone even after they die, he was referring to spiritual sensation, not physical, but as we have seen, theologians expended much thought and disputation determining what exactly it meant to live on after death. It was a thought process that could conceive the dead as still conscious, still sentient. The question asked by Thomas Aquinas, whether more than one angel could occupy the same space at the same time, which Robert Bartlett wrote is probably the source of the erroneous and much-mocked assertion that Scholastics debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, was an attempt to determine whether angels had physical bodies. As Bartlett writes, this had implications for whether demons could move things or interact with human beings.2 It also suggests an openness by theologians to the possibility that angels, good or evil and despite Augustine’s assertions to the contrary, could be corporeal. There was, as Peter Brown wrote, a ‘tremendous sense of the intimacy and adjacency of the holy’: ‘Priests serving at the altar must,

1

2

Justin Martyr, First Apology of Justin Martyr, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ch. 18, www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.viii.ii.xviii.html [accessed December 2014]. Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, 75.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   37

if they spit, spit to one side or behind them; for at the altar the angels are standing.’3 If angels could have bodies, why not the dead? Christianity was meant to banish superstition, to wash away the charms and totems of Paganism. Its construction of a Christian afterlife was meant in part to keep the dead dead until the Last Judgement. The trouble was, the dead kept bursting back in, even amongst the very religious who were meant to encourage the doctrinal view that the dead could not return in bodily form to the living. The conduits for this contamination of doctrine were ecclesiastical chronicles of revenants. Why, then, did these religious men tell such stories? Jean-Claude Schmitt has posited that at least in some cases, religious writers related ghost stories to reinforce the benefit of masses and suffrages for the dead; in other words, to promote the need for the Church.4 And, as we saw in chapter 1, he points out that ghosts also tended to appear when there was a change in ecclesiastical or secular office so that a will needed to be enforced or suffrages or bequests needed to be observed. These may indeed be some reasons ecclesiastics related accounts of revenants. But as we have seen, revenants are extra-doctrinal. Ghosts return from Purgatory to ask for masses and prayers; revenants do not. Revenants tend to stumble about, moaning and frightening animals, terrorising neighbours and loved ones, spreading disease and making mischief, even committing acts of violence.

Analogues

Scholars have noted similarities between the medieval ecclesiastical tales and the Icelandic sagas, which feature strikingly violent undead, called draugar (singular: draugr), menacing their families and neighbours.5 In the tale of Thorolf Halt-foot, for instance, a herdsman is found dead near Thorolf ’s tomb, ‘coal-blue’, with every bone in his body broken.6 Likewise, revenants in both ecclesiastical tales and the Icelandic sagas often were unpleasant in life. In Laxdæla Saga, Viga Hrapp, who later died and turned revenant, Peter Brown, ‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change’, Daedalus 104, no. 2, Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C. (Spring 1975): 141.

3

Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 8–9.

4

See the draugar tales in The Saga of Grettir the Strong, trans. G.A. Hight, ed. Peter Foote (London: Dent, 1972), 42–4, 88–90 and 95–100; The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggia Saga), ed. William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892), 89–92 and 142–52; and Laxdæla Saga, trans. Muriel A.C. Press (London: Dent, 1906), 41–2 and 77–8.

5

The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggia Saga), 89.

6

3 8    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

had a bad temper while he lived, was very violent and ‘did his neighbours much harm . . .’7 People in both sets of tales often fall ill after encountering revenants. After two revenants are seen walking in Eyrbyggia Saga, a housecarle takes sick and dies three nights later.8 And, as we shall see, once the revenant is dealt with through burning and scattering the ashes or a similar apotropaic ritual, both the ecclesiastical tales and the Icelandic sagas often end with some version of the same sentiment: ‘And they had no more trouble from him after that.’ What the medieval clerics do with the tales, or at least try to do, is justify them with edifying Christian morals (though this is not the case with the monk of Byland Abbey, as we shall see). The Icelandic revenant tales do sometimes contain morals, but what offends in these tales are not spiritual transgressions but often social lapses. In one, for instance, a dead woman rises naked from her coffin to cook supper for the party conveying her to her funeral when the farmer who owns the house in which they have stopped for the night refuses to feed them.9 The ecclesiastical revenant tales, like those in the Icelandic sagas, are sprinkled in amidst unrelated stories. The chroniclers break off from the thread of their narrative, tell their marvels, and then return to their histories. But why tell them at all? Before we explore that question, it is worth noting that some were told by Walter Map, who in the words of the editors of the 1879 edition of his De nugis curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles), ‘never allowed dramatic biography to suffer from the inopportune intrusion of fact’.10 His tales may therefore not require an explanation. It is very likely that he recorded them for the sheer pleasure of storytelling. But others were told by sober chroniclers and churchmen – William of Newburgh, William of Malmesbury, Thietmar of Merseburg, to say nothing of Gregory the Great. To take one case, something of William of Newburgh’s seriousness as a historian and concern with truth can be deduced from the frankness with which he catalogues the vices of Henry II, including his womanising, his covetousness of money, and his treatment of Thomas Becket, even though he evidently admired the king greatly.11 7 8 9

Laxdæla Saga, 41.

The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggia Saga), 146. Eyrbyggia Saga, 143–4.

10

11

Frederick Tupper and Marbury Bladen Ogle, eds, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Map, De nugis curialium (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924), x. Walsh and Kennedy, ‘Introduction’, in William of Newburgh: The History of English Affairs, ed. P.G. Walsh and M.J. Kennedy (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2007), 6.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   39

So why would so capable a historian tell tales in which the dead rise? William himself finds it unlikely that such things had occurred in former times, as the ancient authorities, who laboured so earnestly to record all events of interest, make no mention of any such events. But as he has heard so many stories from various trusted sources, he concludes essentially with a shrug of the shoulders, resolving to record the tales he has heard ‘as a warning to posterity’.12 The observations of Sidney J.H. Herrtage in the introduction to the 1879 edition of the Gesta Romanorum may also be instructive here. In early versions of the compilation, Herrtage wrote, the stories themselves were less important than the moralite that followed each tale. Sometimes, if the tale was very well known, only a few words of the story itself are given, with the moralite following. Later, the story became the most important element, the moralite only secondary.13 This suggests that storytellers became so captivated with the tales, they lost all sight of the moral. Let us explore the tales they told, and let us take them in chronological order, as this may help to highlight the chroniclers’ growing use of horror in the spinning of their yarns. This does not of course demonstrate a causal progression from one set of tales to the next. Such an explanation would not take into account cultural and geographic differences, personal agendas, to say nothing of literary ability. It does, however, let us take a bird’s-eye view, so to speak, and from this we may learn something. Gregory the Great in his Dialogues, written in 593,14 tells of two nuns born of noble family who, despite their vocation, did not display humility but were haughty and insulting towards a religious man in their service. Fed up with his mistreatment, the man complained to St Benedict, who sent word to the nuns: ‘Amend your tongues, otherwise I do excommunicate you.’ But the nuns did not change their ways and continued as before. Soon after, they died and were buried in the church. When mass was next celebrated, the deacon pronounced the accustomed words, ‘If any there be that do not communicate, let them depart’, whereupon a nurse who had given offerings for the nuns saw them rise from their graves and leave the church. After this had happened 12 13

14

William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, Book 5, ch. 24.

Sidney J. H. Herrtage, ‘Introduction’, in Gesta Romanorum, formerly ed. Sir Frederic Madden for the Roxburghe Club, re-edited from the mss. in British Museum (Harl. 7333 & Addit. 9066) and University Library, Cambridge (Kk. 1–6) by Sidney J. H. Herrtage, Early English Text Society (EETS), es, vol. 33 (London: N. Trübner & Co for the EETS, 1879), xiii.

Edmund G. Gardner, ‘Introduction’, in The Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, trans. John Odo Zimmerman (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), xxvi.

4 0    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

several times, the nurse remembered the words of Benedict excommunicating the nuns if they did not change their ways, so she reported to him what she had seen. Hearing this, Benedict gave the nurse an oblation to offer on behalf of the nuns, saying they would then be excommunicate no more. She did as she was told, and the next time mass was celebrated, and the deacon spoke the words commanding those who were under excommunication to depart, the nuns kept to their graves, and appeared no more after that. This story, writes Gregory, shows that the nuns had received communion from Benedict.15 The story is intended to demonstrate the power of holy men to influence the health of souls by virtue of authority bestowed by God. This is not strictly a revenant tale, and Gregory does not say whether the nuns rise from their graves in their bodies or spiritually only, nor is it clear whether anybody besides the nurse witnesses their departures. But it is interesting for that ambiguity, and because Gregory chooses the image of the dead being physically unable to remain in church because of their uncleanness. Gregory’s next tale features a decidedly corporeal body – that of a young monk who left the abbey to visit his parents without Benedict’s permission and, immediately on arriving at his parent’s house, died. The parents buried their son, but the next day they found the body cast out of its grave. They reburied it, but the following day found it cast out again. The parents ran to Benedict and begged him to show favour on their dead son. Benedict gave them a Eucharistic wafer and bid them place it on the boy’s chest and rebury him. They did this, and the boy stayed in his grave after that.16 This tale has obvious public relations value and political power, demonstrating as it does the salutary effects of possessing the goodwill of Benedict, and by extension, other worthy religious the laity should obey. It also serves a doctrinal purpose by demonstrating the power of the Eucharist in providing repose to the souls of the dead. The third story we will examine from the Dialogues is not a revenant tale, but bears mentioning as it features a boy brought back from the dead. A distraught father arrives at the gate of the abbey bearing his dead son in his arms and calling out for Benedict. When informed that the holy man is in the field with his monks, the father lays his son’s body at the gate and runs to seek Benedict. Finding him, the man begs Benedict to restore his son to life. ‘Such miracles are not for us to work, but for the blessed Apostles’, Benedict tells him. But still the father begs, until finally Benedict kneels before the body and, laying hands upon him and then rising, says, ‘Behold not, O Lord, my 15 16

Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Book Two, ch. 23, 91–3. Ibid., ch. 24, 86.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   41

sins, but the faith of this man, that desireth to have his son raised to life, and restore that soul to the body, which thou hast taken away.’ At that moment, Gregory writes, the boy’s soul returns to his body, shaking and panting, but alive. Benedict takes the boy by the hand and returns him to his father, ‘alive and in health’.17 This is not a case of a revenant walking abroad through the work of good or evil angels. It is a miracle – a true resurrection of the dead – wrought by God through the conduit of Benedict. Again, Gregory’s purpose is hagiographical and doctrinal. He seeks to demonstrate the power of the holy to intercede on behalf of people in need and that such power comes from God alone. There may of course also be some effort to explain a physiological experience not understood by those who witnessed it. If the story is based on an actual incident, as seems possible, the shaking of the boy’s body and his panting could suggest some sort of medical disorder, such as a seizure, but this is pure speculation.18 However that may be, Gregory’s accounts are completely lacking in the evocation of terror that mark some of the later ecclesiastical revenant tales. He uses the word ‘corpse’ in describing the body of the young monk, but the term is not freighted with any sense of the putrefaction and stench that accompany its use in later tales. None of Gregory’s narrative language suggests fear or revulsion on the part of any of the witnesses of these events, only wonder and the desire to release souls. Nor do the dead in these tales have any malevolent intent. They are sinners being punished for the sin of pride. None has lived a ‘bad life’ of the sort that causes one to turn revenant after death. In the tales of Saxon bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, we begin to see some narrative choices that suggest the desire to evoke terror, if only for edifying purposes. In his chronicle written between 1013 and 1018, Thietmar tells a number of stories of the dead confronting the living, in one instance with horrific violence in which the revenant turns killer.19 The first transpired in the town of Walsleben, after rebuilding following destruction by the Slavs. In the early morning darkness, the priest of the local church is on his way to sing Matins, but when he arrives at the churchyard he sees ‘a great multitude’ of the dead bringing offerings to a priest standing at 17 18

19

Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Book Two, ch. 32, 92–4.

According to the National Health Service, seizures can be characterised by uncontrollable ‘myclonic jerks’ and difficulty breathing: NHS.uk Epilepsy Symp­ toms, www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Epilepsy/Pages/Symptoms.aspx [accessed Decem­ ber 2014].

David A. Warner, ‘Introduction’, in The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, trans. David A. Warner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3.

4 2    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

the church doors. At first, he stands ‘stock still’, unable to move, but he is able to steel himself, drawing courage by making the sign of the cross, and passes through the group to the oratory, ‘trembling, and without acknowledging even one’. There he is approached by a woman who has recently died. She informs him that the dead have already seen to Matins and tells him he will not live much longer. He apparently died soon after for, as Thietmar tells us, ‘it proved to be true’.20 Thietmar gives no indication that he disbelieves the story, prefacing his tale by saying that these are events ‘which are believed to have occurred’. He tells the tale, he writes, ‘That no one faithful to Christ may doubt the future resurrection of the dead . . .’.21 But if that is his project, he is working for it by evoking the sheer terror felt by the priest in the story. When first he sees the dead, he cannot move, apparently paralysed with fear. When he finally does move forward, however, he can do so only after fortifying himself by making the sign of the cross and not looking at any of the dead as he moves amongst them to the oratory. It is not entirely clear whether the dead in this case are corporeal, but Thietmar’s recommendation of the tale for those doubting the resurrection of the dead tends to suggest that the beings were being seen in their bodies for, as we have seen in chapter 1, orthodox resurrection doctrine at that time held that resurrection was physical and not merely spiritual. The tale immediately following is short, but similar in purpose. In it Thietmar relates an event that he learnt occurred in Magdeburg whilst he was living there. Guards keeping night watch in the church of the merchants, ‘seeing and hearing things similar to what I have just described’ (in the previous tale), brought some neighbours there to see. While standing near the cemetery, they saw candles burning in candleholders and heard two men singing the invitatory and morning praises. But when they approached, they saw nothing. No overt moral is offered here; it seems the only purpose of the tale is to relate another account of the dead rising from their graves, in this case at night in the graveyard, but in this case to a Christian purpose. The implication seems to be that the dead are abroad in many places at night, and that in this case they just happened to be witnessed by the living. Another tale, mentioned briefly in chapter 1, is more frightening. Thietmar heard it from his niece Bridget, the abbess of the monastery of Saint Laurent. One morning at dawn a priest of an ancient church in Deventer found dead people making offerings in the cemetery and singing. He reported this to the bishop, who ordered him to sleep in the church. He tried to do as he was told, 20 21

Ibid., 75–6. Ibid., 75.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   43

but the dead lifted both him and the bed on which he was resting and threw it out of the church. Terrified, he again reported to the bishop, but the bishop blessed him with saints’ relics and sprinkled him with holy water – which can be interpreted in this context as apotropaic (meant to ward off evil) protections against the dead – and sent him back again to guard his church. Again, he tried to sleep in the church, ‘but the stimulus of fear kept him awake’. Indeed, his worst fears were confirmed, for ‘coming at the accustomed hour’ the dead lifted him up, placed him before the altar, and burnt his body to ash.22 Bridget ends the story with a declaration right out of a horror tale: ‘If the day belongs to the living, the night is given to the dead.’23 Most visitations of medieval revenants happen at night. It is a time when much of the world is hidden to us, and in that darkness it is natural that we should imagine we see shadows, flickering figures, and that we might fear that what we cannot see may do us harm. It is a natural instinct exploited by the medieval tellers of such tales and, as we shall see later, modern writers as well. In the Magdeburg story we also see a frequent feature of the revenant tales that ecclesiastics saw fit to tell: Thietmar heard the story from ‘reliable witnesses’. Even educated men were willing to believe seemingly impossible events if they were related by credible sources.24 Thietmar writes of apparitions and noises made by the dead in other tales, usually to herald a coming death, his stated purpose being ‘so that the incredulous may learn that the words of the prophets’ (regarding the resurrection of the dead) ‘are true’.25 But these other tales are noticeably lacking in the descriptions of fear with which Thietmar punctuates the tales that include revenants. William of Malmesbury in his Gesta Regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings), compiled 1125–27, writes of a priest who practises necromancy and a dead priest who returns to his living friend (as per their pact in life) to inform him that there is indeed an afterlife, and proves his corporeality by showing his friend running sores on his hand and then flicking him with three drops of pus. But his account of the witch of Berkeley reads like a horror story. He relates it as true. He got it, he writes, ‘from the sort of man who would swear he 22 23 24

25

Thietmar of Merseburg, The Chronicon, 76–7. Ibid., 76–7.

Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 7. Thietmar of Merseburg, The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, 77.

4 4    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

has seen it, and whose word I should be ashamed to impugn’. (Again, we see the reliance on a witness the chronicler believes to be credible.) It is the story of a woman in Berkeley who had committed great evils with witchcraft and soothsaying in her lifetime. She receives word that her son, who lived in a neighbouring village, was killed. She takes to her bed in grief and grows ill. On her deathbed, she regrets her evil life, fearing not for her soul, the sentence on which she says cannot be undone because her crimes are so great, but for her body, for the devil will raise her and abuse her horribly if he can. (Her belief that she is past saving constitutes the sin of despair and could be considered heretical, as it suggests that Christ’s passion is insufficient to save all sinners, but William does not address this.) She summons her surviving son and daughter, a monk and a nun, and begs from them a complicated set of protections against the devil. They are to sew her body in a deerskin, encase her in a stone sarcophagus, fasten the lid with iron and lead, then bind the stone with three heavy iron chains. Then one hundred psalms a day are to be said for her soul. If she lies in peace for three nights, they are to bury her. The children carry out their dying mother’s wishes. But alas, the devil will have his due. On the first night, as clerks sang psalms round the body, demons came. They burst through the church door, though it had been barred against them, and broke the first coffin chain. On the second night they came again and broke the second. On the third night, at about cockcrow, ‘the whole convent seemed to shake’. A demon, ‘taller and more frightful than the rest’, shattered the door, sending splinters flying. The clerks ‘were paralysed with fright’, William, quoting Virgil, continues: ‘stood hair on head, and voice in throat did freeze’. The demon stalks to the coffin and calls the woman by name. ‘Arise’, he commands her. ‘You are loosed, much good may it do you’. And he snapped the chain ‘like a piece of string’. He kicked off the coffin lid, seized the dead woman by the hand and dragged her from the church. Outside a black stallion stood, with iron barbs set point upwards all along its back. The demons set her there and off they went. She begged for help as they rode away, her cries still heard from four miles distant.26 Interestingly, William cites as one of the reasons we should believe this tale Gregory’s account of one Valentinus, who lived a wanton life and was buried in church, and whom the keepers saw at midnight being hauled out of his tomb by devils as he cried and roared in fear.27 26

27

William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, completed by R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–9), 377–9. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 247–8.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   45

For William and the medieval reader of this tale, the fact that there are three chains would carry additional meaning. Medieval people put great stock in the significance of certain numbers. The number three is spiritual, signifying, for instance, the Trinity.28 The chains could therefore serve an apotropaic function: binding the coffin with three chains could represent an attempt to bar the demons from approaching it. The demons’ ability to break them suggests, then, that her sins were so great she was unworthy of salvation. One of the most striking features of this story, however, is its narrative flair. William takes care to demonstrate that the woman, though she is wicked and has committed great sins in her life, is still bound by love for her children, so much so that the death of her son sends her to her bed in grief. He takes care to build suspense. Many tales are dispatched quickly, the entire story related in a paragraph or two, but William spreads out the terror. The chain is broken over three nights. He gives his characters dialogue, as in the case of the demon who breaks the final chain and curses the woman as he raises her from the dead with a stylish bark of derision: ‘You are loosed, much good may it do you.’ He even tells us that the stallion on which the demon carries her away is black, ‘with iron barbs set point upwards all along its back’. The picture he paints allows the reader to visualise the horse and to imagine the woman’s pain as she is hauled onto the spikes. This is a writer who is as interested in storytelling as he is in any moralite, a quality we see in many of the more dramatic tales, with any religious purpose quite obviously taking a back seat to narrative style. This is unsurprising, as William is regarded as having a particularly strong writing style and solid literary instincts. Orderic Vitalis keeps mainly to history in his Historia Ecclesiastica, but in Book VIII, he tells a lengthy Hellequin’s Hunt story, in which a young priest in the diocese of Lisieux is out at night visiting a sick man on the fringes of his parish when he witnesses a troop of spirits, mostly on horseback, being punished for misdeeds in life with various tortures along this eternal march.29 When he returns home the priest, as we see in some of the other revenant tales, takes sick and is seriously ill for a week. It seems the spirits in this account are non-corporeal, but the fact that Orderic chose to include it at all is interesting. He writes that he had the story from the priest himself and records it, ‘so that just men may be encouraged in good, and vicious men may repent of evil’.30 28

29

30

Annemarie Schimmel, The Mystery of Numbers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 22.

Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), Vol. IV, Book VIII, chap. 17, 237–51. Ibid., 249–51.

4 6    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

Walter Map, a cleric, was one of the clerks of the royal household of Henry II, and therefore perhaps more courtier than ecclesiastic, and it is in this light that his De nugis curialium should be read. Written in the early 1180s, probably 1181–82,31 it was a collection of trifles, as the name suggests, intended to entertain courtiers and in some cases lampoon the court. Thus, when we read the tales, it is reasonable to assume that Map is more concerned with entertainment than with history or moralite. Map writes of a knight who buried his wife, ‘who was really dead’ (in other words, not ill of some sickness that made no signs of life detectable), and later recovered her by snatching her out of a dance (presumably a reference to the dance of death in which the dead come to carry off the living when they die), after which the couple lived out their lives together and had children and grandchildren, the people from their line being called ‘sons of the dead mother’.32 He tells also of a man who died ‘unchristianly’, and for a month or more afterward wandered about in his burial shroud, not only at night but in broad daylight, until the whole town chased him down and lay siege to him in an orchard. The dead man remained there for three days. At this point, Roger, the bishop of Worcester, where the event apparently took place, ordered a cross to be laid on the man’s grave and for the man to be allowed to leave the orchard. When the people fell back, the dead man emerged from the orchard and, the people following behind, returned to his grave. But on seeing the cross, he ran. So the people removed the cross, which apparently had the desired effect. The dead man sank into his grave, and the earth closed over him. The people quickly laid the cross on the grave again, and the dead man remained quiet after that.33 Here we see the nugget of a moral. The man died ‘unchristianly’. We are not told whether this means he died a bad death, in that he did not receive shrift and housel (confession and Communion) or died in the midst of some unholy activity, but the message is clear. Take heed: if you die outwith the sacramental protection of the Church, you are at risk of walking abroad after death. We see also another feature of some revenant tales (one we see in William of Newburgh’s story of the priest of Melrose Abbey, discussed in the introduction on p. 1): upon the revenant re-entering his grave, the ground apparently opened to receive him and closed over him again. This is an effective storytelling device, 31

32 33

C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Map, De nugis curialium, ed. M.R. James, trans. C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), xxvi. Map, De nugis curialium, 161. Ibid., 205.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   47

both because it eliminates the need for townspeople to be endlessly shovelling grave dirt over corpses and because it introduces another marvellous element into the tale. It also makes clear that the dead man is a reanimated corpse, since a ghost could pass through the grave dirt without impediment, while a corporeal body would need the dirt to be parted to clear a path for him. We see also a case in which the revenant is subdued with a Christian symbol: the cross. In some other tales, similar efforts succeed. In others, more drastic measures are necessary. Map’s most frightening revenant tale is the story of ‘a Welshman of evil life’ who also died ‘unchristianly’ (again, no explanation is given of precisely how, but the mind ticks off the titillating possibilities). Four nights after he died, the Welshman rose from his grave and began making nightly trips back to the village, calling out the names of neighbours as he went. Each person whose name was called took ill and died within three days. Upon hearing this, the bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, speculated that God must have given power to an evil angel to animate the dead corpse. He ordered that the body be exhumed, the neck severed with a spade, the corpse and grave sprinkled with holy water and the dead man reburied. This was done, but the dead man continued to walk, and people continued to die. Then it happened that the dead man thrice called the name of a knight called William Laudun. But William drew his sword and chased the dead man back to his grave, and as he fell in, William cleaved the dead man’s head to his neck. After that the pestilence ceased, and the revenant walked no more.34 The story is given a gloss of doctrine through the bishop’s explanation of the revenant in the terms, as we have seen, set down by Augustine: that a demon is inhabiting the body through the permission of God. However, this is orthodox only up to a point, as Augustine also specifies that such apparitions happen in the mind of the viewer, not in physical reality. We see again also the feature of pestilence, which frequently is spread by a revenant as he walks. It is possible, one supposes, that the visions are inspired by grace in William’s mind and therefore not heterodox, but there is no suggestion of this in the text and there are other cases of revenants being destroyed to end a pestilence, none of which specifies them to be visionary either. De Nugis Curialium was of course satirical, so perhaps that means we should take Map’s stories with more of a pinch of salt than the others. Then again, perhaps not. The fact is he told the stories, and we do not know whether all of the other people who told such stories believed they were true or whether they were telling them for other reasons. For our purpose, it matters little whether 34

Ibid., 203–5.

4 8    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

Map believed the tales he told. Our project is to determine what it was that captivated him and other tellers of such tales. Map himself makes no apologies for his stories: ‘I am but your huntsman. I bring you the game, it is for you to make dainty dishes out of it.’35 For Map, and perhaps for some other tellers of mirabilia, that may be the point. The story of the priest of Melrose Abbey is not the only revenant tale William of Newburgh tells. He relates other stories that are equally frightening. The first we will discuss, related to him partly by friends and more fully by Stephen, the archdeacon of Buckingham (once again, a storyteller who has heard the account from a reputable source), concerns a man in Buckingham who died and was buried on the eve of the Ascension. The next night, however, his wife awoke terrified to find her husband in her bedchamber, apparently lying on top of her as he nearly crushed her with the weight of his body. The next night he appeared again and did the same. The third night, the wife stayed awake and gathered friends around her to wait for her husband’s arrival. The husband turned up as expected, but the friends drove him off. He then began to afflict his brothers. But they too gathered companions and sat up through the night. The dead man therefore ‘rioted among the animals’, which, William tells us, was evident from their wildness and agitation. It became necessary for the whole neighbourhood to stay awake at night to watch against his coming. When he could get nowhere at night, he began to walk in broad daylight, though only some could see him, William is careful to say. The archdeacon Stephen reported the events to Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln (1186– 1200).36 The bishop was told by his people that similar things had happened in England and that the only thing that stopped the dead walking was to dig up the body and burn it. Hugh thought this ‘indecent and improper’, however, so he wrote a letter of absolution and directed the tomb to be opened and the letter placed on the man’s breast. Stephen had it done, and the dead man stopped afflicting his neighbours and never walked again after that.37 Here we see another case in which objects imbued with Christian power are sufficient to quieten the corpse. We see also a parallel with Gregory’s story of Benedict writing an absolution to be placed on the body of the errant young monk. Further, Hugh’s solution comes as a corrective alternative to the wish of the people to burn the body, the solution favoured by people in some other

35 36

37

Ibid., 209.

Carl S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 185. William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, Book 5, ch. 22.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   49

revenant tales. Instead, he offers the saving power of the Church as the only cure necessary, in the form of absolution written in his own hand. William tells also of a similar event at Berwick, where a man who was wealthy, but a rogue, died and thereafter sallied from his grave at night, wan­ dering about, pursued by a pack of dogs barking wildly. He struck great terror in his neighbours, but always returned to his grave before daylight. The townspeople became so frightened none would venture out after dusk. They held a meeting to decide what was to be done, fearing failure to act would allow the air to be infected and corrupted by the ‘pestiferous corpse’, causing disease and death. Apparently, the revenant had at some point in its wanderings (being borne about by Satan, William writes) told people it encountered that as long as it remained unburned the people should have no peace. So, the town designated ten brave young men to deal with the creature. They dug up the corpse, cut it limb from limb, and fed the parts to the fire. Once this was done, the man stayed in his grave, but a pestilence, which had already arisen in consequence of his walking, carried off the greater part of the population. They apparently put it down to the revenant, ‘for never did it (the pestilence) so furiously rage elsewhere, though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England’.38 William’s final revenant tale shows a similar preoccupation with the physical body to that we see in debates about the doctrine of Resurrection. A man ‘of evil conduct’ flees York to evade his enemies or the law and turns up at the castle of Anantis. There he marries, but he continues in his evil ways. He soon hears that his wife is having an affair, so he tells her he is going a journey and will not return for several days, then sneaks back into the castle that night and hides on a beam above his wife’s bedchamber. Before long, the wife’s lover turns up and, catching them in the act, the husband is so infuriated that he loses his grip, falls from the beam and lands hard by where the adulterers lie. The lover flees, and the wife helps the husband up, but when he accuses her, she behaves as though shocked and affronted, insisting he is confused from his fall. Shaken and in pain, he takes to his bed, where he is visited by a priest (from whom, in fact, William says he heard the story). The priest urges him to make confession and receive the Eucharist, but the man, brooding on his troubles, puts off the sacraments until the next evening. But by then he is dead – dead, but not gone, for soon after he is buried, he begins to walk. He issues from his grave at night, pursued by a pack of barking dogs (dogs again; other animals are also affected by the presence of revenants, as we shall see later, though no explanations are given by the storytellers for why this should 38

Ibid., Book 5, ch. 23.

5 0    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

be so). The air was poisoned by the ‘foul carcass’, every house ‘filled with disease and death by its pestiferous breath’. So many died that the town seemed almost deserted, and others moved away. Two young men whose father had been carried off by the plague this revenant brought decided to take matters into their own hands. They armed themselves with a spade, went to the man’s grave and began to dig. Before they had gone nearly deep enough for a normal grave, they came upon the corpse. They stabbed it and the body erupted with an enormous stream of blood, like a leech, William writes, ‘filled with the blood of many persons’.39 They dragged the body away from the town and built a funeral pyre. One of them decided the body would not burn unless the heart was removed, so his brother hacked at the man’s side with the spade, thrust his hand in, and pulled out ‘the accursed heart’. They tore it to bits, then burned the body. When the ‘infernal hell-hound’ had been destroyed, the pestilence ceased.40 Here we can see the same sort of logic applied to how a body could physically resurrect being applied to how a body should be utterly destroyed so that it will not come back. In all these tales we see varying degrees of the element of horror. William describes the Berwick revenant as a ‘deadly monster’ of whom dogs are suspicious or frightened; the Buckingham revenant nearly crushes his wife, apparently on purpose, for he returns several times to try again (an unusual version of an incubus, perhaps, or an early hint of the sexuality that will appear later with vampires?); and the Anantis revenant kills off much of the town with pestilence. Many of these touches seem to be attempts at literary flair, though none of the writers achieves the storytelling impact of William of Malmesbury. Caesarius of Heisterbach, prior of the Cistercian abbey of Heisterbach, wrote ghost and revenant stories in his Dialogus miraculorum (c. 1223). We already know that Caesarius was possessed of an active imagination as he is alleged by some to have asserted that a demon called Titivillus was responsible for errors in the work of scribes. Caesarius’s tales, told in dialogue form by a ‘Monk’ to a ‘Novice’, appear in the books entitled ‘Concerning the Dying’ and ‘Punishment and Glory of the Dead’. Something of his purpose in relating such tales can be seen in his explication of the four types of dying men: those 39

40

This is an early description of a revenant bloated as though it contained the blood of other people. Such accounts are mostly reserved for early modern accounts of vampires, and there is virtually no suggestion in medieval revenant accounts that they suck the blood of the living. This may simply be an attempt at narrative detail, the bloodletting itself obviously part of the post-mortem process of decomposition as the body bloats and releases fluids. Ibid., Book 5, ch. 24.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   51

who live well and die well; those who live ill and die ill; those who live ill but die well; and those who live well but die ill. The tales are told as exempla of the rewards and punishments meet for such deaths. They include that of a lay brother who died but returned to life to tell his brethren of a halfpenny he had neglected to repay to a ferryman and did not mention in his confession. The abbot immediately sent the halfpenny, and the moment the ferryman received it, the lay brother died (again).41 This tale is clearly a moralite about settling one’s accounts and making a full confession before death. Another is told of a citizen of Strasbourg who rose up on his burial bier to declare that until he and his wife had disposed of all their possessions they could not be saved, for the property was ill-gotten. They did so, and three days later the man died again, presumably this time into eternal life.42 But the books also include stories of ghosts and revenants, which contain slightly less doctrinal content (though it is there) and slightly more shock value. In one, the leaders of two families who carried on a mortal feud in life died on the same day and, ‘it so pleased the Lord, who wished to show the evil of quarrelling’ that their bodies were placed in one grave. Before the eyes of all the mourners, the two corpses turned their backs on one another and began dashing their heads, heels and backs together violently. The Lord’s point apparently made, the onlookers removed one body and buried it farther off in another grave.43 Another story tells of a ‘monster’ in the graveyard of the church at Bonn, ‘a creature of human shape’ that, when vespers had been sung, climbed out of one of the graves where canons lay buried, walked about over some graves, and descended into another. Soon afterwards, a canon of the church died and was laid to rest in the very grave from which the revenant had emerged.44 The story ends stating its doctrinal purpose – ‘By visions of this kind the future is sometimes predicted’ – but such visions more often involve a ghost, not a revenant, and Caesarius’s choice of the words ‘monster’ and ‘creature’ bend the tale slightly away from pure doctrinal purpose and towards storytelling. In Book XII, we get putrefaction. A churchman sang so sweetly that he delighted all who heard him. Then one day a man of religion turned up, heard the man sing and said, ‘That is not the voice of a man but of a devil’, and conjured the devil to come out of the man. On the instant, the body collapsed 41

42 43 44

Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. Von E. Scott and C.C. Swinton-Bland (London: Routledge, 1929), Book 11, ch. 35, 267. Ibid., ch. 37, 269.

Ibid., Book XI, ch. LVI, 282.

Ibid, Book XI, ch. LXIV, 287–8.

5 2    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

and became immediately putrid.45 Caesarius here keeps to doctrine, explaining that it was the devil animating the corpse and not a soul returned to its body, but the image of the pure priest transformed into a stinking corpse is designed to shock. There is also no indication of how the man came to be dead, if he had lived a good or bad life and died a good or bad death, nor of how the devil came to inhabit the corpse, so it is difficult to puzzle out what moralite the tale might hold. It is possible that the point is that the ‘man of religion’ who turned up was able to see the evil missed by everyone else, but this raises more questions than it answers. Was the churchman who was inhabited by the devil the only religious in the area? If not, how is it that none of his colleagues spotted the evil within him? And in any case, how is it that the vessel of a holy churchman could be corrupted by demonic infiltration? Did he live a bad life or die a bad death? If so, why did Caesarius not specify this in the story, as it would have provided a natural moralite? This would tend to suggest that Caesarius told the story more because it was a good story than for any doctrinal purpose, and that he simply was not a particularly gifted storyteller. We hear also of a knight called Everard, ‘a man of crime’, who rose up on his bier through the agency of the devil animating his body and terrified all present. His friends, to avoid further outrages to the body by devils, bound it before the mass and buried it.46 Here, Caesarius expounds his doctrine – it is because the man lived a bad life that God allowed the devil to take possession of his dead body – but the point of this very short story seems to be to frighten the reader as much as to teach. This brings us to the strange tales recorded by Rudolf von Schlettstadt, prior of the Dominican convent in Schlettstadt from 1288, in Historiae memorabiles. Apart from a group of tales that contain some eye-watering anti-Semitism, in which Rudolf alleges various acts of sacrilege and torture of consecrated Hosts to justify the persecution of Jews in Franconia, there are six tales relating to ghosts or revenants. One story tells of a good and devout bishop of Lübeck who dies and is buried in the church and is replaced by a man who weighs the church down with debts accrued through wars, lavish feasts and other useless and worldly things. That bishop in turn dies and is buried in the church next to his predecessor. One night, the churchwardens keeping watch see the good bishop rise from his grave and strike three times (again the number three) fiercely on the tomb of his unworthy replacement. The grave of the bad bishop opens on its own (as we have heard in other tales), and the bishop rushes out. The good 45 46

Ibid, Book 12, ch. 4, 292. Ibid., ch. 11, 300.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   53

bishop takes hold of a large candelabra and gives chase and, as the bad bishop escapes through the church door, hurls it at him with such force that it is driven into the church door. The churchwardens were ‘(so) scared to death that they did not dare to ring out matins at the appropriate time’. At daybreak the clergymen come to the church but find it shut tight. They seize axes and hack their way through the church doors. Inside, they go in search of the churchwardens and finally find them ‘scared witless in their beds’. The churchwardens relate the horrible scene they witnessed the night before and, as proof, they show the candelabra suspended in the wood of the doors.47 Apart from the literary detail of the candelabra driven into the church door, which creates the impression of the sound it would make on impact, there is little in the way of narrative style in the tale. It is instructive for our purposes, however, in that the detail of the grave opening for the escape of the bishop again suggests corporeality. In a more violent tale, the wonderfully titled ‘On Henry, who was grievously wounded by dead men’, a corrupt official called Henry (Heinrich), with the participation of his son-in-law commits many evil acts, notably insisting that an honest and devout but poor woman owed him one hundred pounds when all her possessions could not have repaid thirty. Shortly after this, he and his son-in-law ride to a villa on business matters. After dinner they ride down the hill and start across the water. Suddenly both are taken with violent trembling. ‘Quickly’, Henry tells his son-in-law, ‘run away from me, lest death should seize us together’. The son-in-law obeys, but after riding a short way off he looks back and sees Henry’s horse running about the fields as though he were mad. The son-in-law rides back and finds Henry lying on the ground, his cloak drawn over him as though he were dead. He uncovers him and, though he is alive, blood is flowing from his mouth, nose and ears. Henry is conveyed home and lies for a great many days weak and insensible. When he is well enough to speak, he says he had been attacked by Count Everard of Hapsburg, citizen Heinrich of Oroltzweiler, and Heinrich the slain noble soldier, and shows black bruises on his hands and right side to prove the truth of his tale.48 In these tales we have not only horror, but dramatic chases and, in the case of Henry, a terrifying and violent physical attack. The tales contain the typical moralite – the bad bishop is driven from church by the good and Henry, the corrupt official, is punished for his sins. But in these tales, the identities are 47

48

Rudolf von Schlettstadt, Historiae Memorabiles, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, unpublished trans. Chris Eddington (Beihefte Zum Archiv Für Kulturgeschichte, Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag Wien Köln, 1974), 91–2. Ibid., 109–10.

5 4    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

reversed. Rather than the evildoer turning revenant, it is the good and noble turned revenant to punish the bad. We see other examples of this kind of revenant in the exempla, which we will examine later. In the Chronicle of Lanercost, the violent revenant kills again. The chronicle, covering the years 1201 to 1346 and likely of Franciscan authorship,49 departs from its history of England and Scotland to tell of something ‘horrible and marvellous’ that happened in Clydesdale, in the west of Scotland, in the house of a certain Sir Duncan de Insula. It tells of a monk who had lived a wicked life and died badly, excommunicated because of certain sacrilegious acts he committed in his own monastery. Presumably the dead man is a Benedictine, as the chronicler writes that he appears in the clothes of a black monk, the colour of the robes worn by the order. After he was buried, the dead man began to trouble his fellow monks by appearing at night in the monastery. This ‘child of darkness’ then went to Sir Duncan’s house ‘in order to disturb the faith of simple persons and terrify them’ by assaulting them in broad daylight. The writer coats this with the patina of doctrine by speculating that the revenant may have been able to do so by the ‘secret decree of God’ in order to implicate inhabitants of the house who had participated in his misdeeds. The dead man then assumes bodily form and begins to appear in broad daylight. Whether the body is natural or aerial is unclear, the chronicler writes, but however that may be, ‘it was hideous, gross and tangible’. The monk settles on the tops of houses and storehouses. (Here we see a similarity with several of the Icelandic sagas.50) Men shoot at him with arrows or run him through with forks, but each object burns to ash in an instant. Others struggle with him, but he batters them ‘savagely’, ‘as well-nigh to shatter all their joints’.51 One evening, as Sir Duncan sits at the hearth with his household, the ‘malignant creature’ bursts in and scatters them with a rain of blows. The others run, but Sir Duncan’s son attacks the dead monk single-handed. When the household returns the next morning, they find the young man dead, slain by the creature. This tale, like those of Thietmar, is told with at least the semblance of doctrinaire purpose. It may serve, writes the chronicler, ‘to strike terror into 49

50

51

Sir Herbert Maxwell, ‘Introduction’, in The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346, trans. Sir Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1913), xx. In The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Glam rides the rooftops, 90, as does Thorolf Haltfoot in Eyrbyggia Saga, 89. The Chronicle of Lanercost, Archive.org, 118, http://archive.org/stream/ chronicleoflaner02maxw/chronicleoflaner02maxw_djvu.txt [accessed 21 Septem­ ber 2019].

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   55

sinners and foreshow the appearance of the damned in the day of the last resurrection’.52 The writer also cannot resist offering a likely reason why the son is killed. ‘Wherefore, if it be true that a demon has no power over anybody except one who leads the life of a hog’, our chronicler writes, ‘It is easy to understand why that young man came to such an end.’53 It is also told with an eye towards inspiring horror in the reader. The chronicler calls the dead man a ‘malignant creature’, ‘hideous’ and ‘gross’, a ‘child of darkness’ whose purpose is to terrify those he accosts. And he is violent. He does not merely go about moaning and calling out names as do some revenants. He attacks them, and indeed kills the son of a knight. At about the same time, in the late fourteenth century or c. 1400, an anonymous monk of Byland Abbey in Yorkshire took advantage of blank pages in the middle and at the end of a volume of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what is now Royal MS 15A.xx. in the British Museum, to record snippets of ghost and revenant tales told in his region.54 M.R. James transcribed the Latin in the 1920s. The tales are, James remarks, ‘occasionally confused, incoherent, and unduly compressed’, and so they are, but he noticed similarities with some of the Icelandic tales and found the Latin ‘refreshing’. The tale with the greatest attempt at exemplum value is that of Snowball, a tailor who is accosted one night by a spirit in four corporeal forms, first a crow, then a chained dog, followed by a goat, and finally, when Snowball conjures it to declare itself, a ‘huge and horrible figure of a man, cadaverous’.55 The spirit has come to ask Snowball to arrange for masses and prayers for his soul so that he may obtain absolution and, to further make his point, explains that he was only able to appear to Snowball because Snowball had not received Communion or recited the Creed that day.56 Snowball obtains the man’s absolution, and when next he meets him the spirit is accompanied by two others. From here the tale disintegrates into a strange account of divination and fortune-telling, but contains one more point, interesting to us only because it is similar to some other revenant encounters: after returning home, Snowball falls ill with a sickness that lasts several days. The monk of Byland also tells ghost stories, which bear mentioning for our purposes only because they share features with either earlier or later tales. He 52 53 54

55 56

Ibid., 117. Ibid., 118.

M.R. James, ‘Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories’, English Historical Review 37 (1922): 414. Andrew Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories (Woodbridge: Boydell 2001), 168–9. Ibid., 169.

5 6    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

tells of a spirit of a canon of Newburgh who appears to a man to confess the theft of some silver spoons, for which he was excommunicated and now in death seeks absolution. But the man only learns this information after wrestling the spirit into submission when his own lead ploughman runs from the scene in terror. This sounds much like the account of the revenant Hrapp in Laxdæla Saga, who terrorises a servant who keeps cattle for Olaf the housecarl. When Olaf accompanies the servant to the stables because he is afraid, the servant flees in terror, leaving Olaf to struggle with Hrapp. The monk of Byland’s story ends in the spirit’s absolution, however, not in the burning and scattering of ashes as with Hrapp. But we once again see the man who encounters the spirit return home and fall ill for several days. The most frightening of the tales, though brief, tells of a man called James Tankerlay, one-time rector of Kirkby, who was buried at the chapter-house at Bellelande but begins to walk abroad by night, and one evening returns to gouge out the eye of his mistress. The abbot and chapter order the body in its coffin dug from its grave by one Roger Wayneman and conveyed to Gormyre. Just as Wayneman is about to heave the coffin into the water, the oxen that pull the wagon panic and, in their fear, almost drown. Again, we see a similarity with an Icelandic saga, this time with two strong oxen seized by madness whilst hauling the body of the revenant Thorolf. They break loose, run off a cliff and drown.57 We cannot know why the Monk of Byland chose to record these stories in the blank pages of a manuscript any more than we can know why monks chose to record the double-entendre riddles in the Exeter Book. But as the Monk of Byland’s tales have little didactic purpose, we can speculate that it was the attraction of the tales for their own sake, the thrill of the ghost story, that led him to record them (which may have been why they were so attractive to M.R. James, himself a great teller of ghost stories). Let us turn now to the exempla collections. After William of Malmesbury had told his stories, and after Walter Map had told his, after William of Newburgh and Caesarius of Heisterbach, came Jacobus de Voragine with The Golden Legend. It is a collection of saints’ lives and liturgical and doctrinal instruction culled in the 1260s from various patristic and medieval sources.58 Jacobus drew on the earlier works of Jean de Mailly (Abbreviatio in gestis et miraculis sanctorum in the late 1220s) and fellow Dominican Bartholomew 57 58

Eyrbyggia Saga, 91.

Eamon Duffy, ‘Introduction’, in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), xi.

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of Trent (Epilogus in gesta sanctorum in the mid-1240s), and Jacobus in turn would be drawn on for many vernacular sermon collections, including Mirk’s Festial.59 Jacobus intended the work as a collection of edifying lessons, exempla, with which preachers could fill out their sermons.60 It is packed with gruesome detail, and was later condemned by both Catholic and Protestant reformers as ‘a tissue of unedifying tall tales’.61 Still, it must have enjoyed immense popularity in its age. Some indication of this can be gleaned from the fact that it survives in nearly a thousand manuscript copies of the Latin text alone and another 500 or so whole or partial translations in various European vernaculars.62 Jacobus’ tales include ‘The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’, seven young Christian men who hid in a cave to avoid being forced to sacrifice to pagan gods. They are walled in on orders of the emperor Decius, and die, but ‘wake’ 372 years later (looking not a day over 300), telling astonished onlookers that ‘God has raised us before the day of the great resurrection, so that you may believe without the shadow of a doubt in the resurrection of the dead’.63 Another tale in ‘The Commemoration of All Souls’ seems to echo William of Malmesbury. In it, a deceased scholar returns to his former master and demonstrates his corporeality and the severity of his suffering for his sins by letting a drop of his sweat fall on his master’s hand, which it pierces like an arrow.64 Jacobus tells also the life of St John Almsgiver, who rises from his grave in response to the noise and crying of a female mourner to show her a letter absolving her of her sins.65 But for our purposes, the most telling stories in the volume take place in graveyards. The first, attributed to Peter of Cluny, is of a priest who celebrated mass for the dead every day but is denounced for this by the bishop and suspended (though one cannot imagine why, and the tale offers no explanation). Afterwards, as the bishop processes through the graveyard on his way to Matins, the dead rise up against him. ‘This bishop gives us no masses’, they say, ‘and, more than that, has taken our priest away from us! But if he does not mend his ways, he will certainly die!’ Needless to say, the bishop reinstates the priest straightaway and, moreover, begins celebrating his own masses for the 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Ibid., xi and xiv. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xv. Ibid., xi.

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, ch. 101, 401–4. Ibid., ch. 163, 669. Ibid., ch. 27, 118.

5 8    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

dead as well.66 The second, this one from the Cantor of Paris, tells of a man who always recited the De profundis for the dead whilst walking through the graveyard. One day he was chased through the cemetery by his enemies, and the buried corpses rose out of their graves, each bearing the tools they used in life, and defended the man. The attackers, ‘terrified’, beat a hasty retreat. In a straightforward declaration of its exemplum value, Jacobus writes that it ‘shows how grateful the dead are for the prayers of the living’.67 This tale is an interesting combination of the violence of revenants with the goal of that violence being for good, the reinstatement of the priest who celebrates masses to relieve their suffering in Purgatory. Medieval practices of holding markets, peddling prostitution and other activities in graveyards notwithstanding, the setting adds a distinctive note of horror to the tales as well, for surely, then as now, a graveyard at night is almost invariably an unnerving place. But why tell such tall tales? As Eamon Duffy has noted, Jacobus was capable of scepticism.68 In his account of St Margaret, he relates the part of her story in which the saint was swallowed alive by the devil in the form of a dragon, but burst from his stomach by making the sign of the cross, and then writes, ‘What is said here, however . . . is considered apocryphal, and not to be taken seriously’.69 And in his account of St Andrew he tells of Andrew’s alleged rescue of the apostle Matthew from kidnappers and then comments, ‘This, at any rate, is what we are told; but I find the story very hard to believe’.70 So he is sometimes sceptical, but not because things sound outrageous; only if they are not doctrinally sound.71 Stories of the dead rising are riding the rough edge of orthodoxy, but as Jacobus glosses them with edifying religious points, he may have felt the ends justified the means. He may also have enjoyed writing them. In The South English Legendary, a hagiographic and exempla collection of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we find a version of The Golden Legend tale of the man protected from his enemies by the dead, but in this account, the man has become a clerk who, like the man, always sang the De profundis for all Christian souls when passing a church. Here we again see the dead not as malevolent, but as friends of the living, like the saints, as evidence that:

Ibid., ch. 163, 670–1.

66

Ibid., ch. 163, 671.

67

Duffy, ‘Introduction’, Golden Legend, xviii.

68

Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, ch. 93, 369.

69

Ibid., ch. 2, 14.

70

Duffy, ‘Introduction’, Golden Legend, xviii.

71

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Meni þinges ane soule helpeþ þat in purgatorie is As þreo þinges hem helpeþ mest; tofore alle oþere iwis Beden of men & almesdede & song of massen also Þis þreo þinges beoþ best iwis & mest god wolleþ do Þat bidde beden beoþ gode.72

We see also an expansion of the drama of the encounter. The dead rise with weapons as in The Golden Legend, but this account names the implements, and they sound dangerous: ‘Plouᵹ man with his aker staf, schutere wiþ bowe & knyue . . .’73 And this time before the issue is settled, there is ‘a wonder bataille’, but in the end the dead save the clerk.74 Tale LXX of the Gesta Romanorum, from the first half of the fourteenth century, tells the story of a dead man who comes back to life to take vengeance on the magistrate who wrongfully put him to death. The magistrate wanted the dead man’s field, but the man would not sell it, so the magistrate put his own horse there then asked neighbours to help him search for the animal. When they found it in the man’s field, the magistrate accused him of stealing it, tried him and had him hanged. When the man hung dead, the magistrate rode by on his horse and taunted the corpse: ‘if thou wolde haue lette me haue hadde thy close, thou shuld haue had thy life’. He then drew his sword and cut the dead man down, at which point the dead man started up and took hold of the horse’s bridle. The hanged man, the noose still round his neck, led the magistrate to town and into the church where another dead man lay on his bier. ‘Rise vp, on goddis behalfe, and gife a dome [judgement] betwene this man and me.’ The second dead man rose and pronounced that because the magistrate had behaved wickedly and falsely caused the man to be hanged, he would go to Hell. But the hanged man was in for it as well. Because he cursed the magistrate and sought vengeance on him and so died out of charity, he would go to Hell as well.75 This legend serves as a double lesson: do not bear false witness, and be charitable. But there are unmistakably frightening elements: a hanged man walking, the noose that killed him dangling from his neck but unable to contain him; the onlookers in church, terrified first by the arrival of the hanged 72

73 74 75

The South English Legendary, edited from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS.145 and British Museum MS. Harley 2277 with variants from Bodley MS. Ashmole 43 and British Museum MS. Cotton Julius D.IX, by Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the EETS, os, 1956), 469–70. Ibid., 470. Ibid.

Gesta Romanorum, 386–7.

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man and then by the rising of the dead man from his bier; and the dead man pronouncing sentence on both. The dead were thought in the medieval period to be able to show the guilt of the living, but it is also a frightening thing to see a dead person speak. In his burial sermon of this collection from the 1380s, John Mirk explains one of the reasons a body is brought to church for burial by telling a story of a demon that is able to inhabit the corpse of a dead man because the man has died without receiving last rites. Three men are slain in a quarrel in town but the third dies without being houseled (he has not confessed his sins). The three are buried in church, but a ‘fend’ [fiend] enters the corpse and rides in it round the town, ‘and makud many cryes be þe which men weron sore agaste . . .’ The terror only ends when an anchor conjures the demon to depart the body.76 Mirk also tells versions of The Golden Legend stories of the man saved from his enemies in a graveyard by the dead and of the bishop threatened by dead people in a graveyard after he suspends the priest. He adds the detail to the story of the bishop that his anger comes from the fact that the Requiem mass is the only one the priest can sing, but beyond that, there is little to distinguish his stories from the earlier versions.77 We have also the account of a baker in Brittany, probably part of an early fifteenth-century preacher’s collection.78 The baker dies and, soon after, begins returning at night to help his wife and children knead the bread dough and to urge them to their work. Terrified, his family flees. Neighbours rush to see and, finding the revenant, raise a great racket to run him off. He soon returns, though, and assails them with stones. He has apparently avoided the footpaths, as he shows up covered in mud to his thighs. The neighbours proceed to his grave, open it, and find the body covered with mud just as they had seen him abroad. They cover over the grave again, but that does not stop the dead baker walking. Finally, to stop his wandering for good, they break his legs.79 This revenant seems more of a nag than an outright terror. The story ends similarly to the account of Christina Mirabilis, a Beguine from the Low Countries, who rose from the dead during her own funeral, but was never quite the same. She frequented graveyards, and again and again ran from town 76

77 78

79

John Mirk, Festial, ed. Susan Powell, from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the EETS, os, 2011), vol. 2, 257–8. Ibid, ch. 65, 242–3.

Hervé Martin, ‘A la recherche de la culture populaire bretonne à travers les manuscrits du bas Moyen Age’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 86, no. 4 (1979): 632. Ibid., 631.

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to live in the forest. The townspeople thought she was possessed by demons, so they caught her and chained her up, but she kept escaping. Finally, her sisters hired a man who found her, broke her leg, and brought her home, where she was chained up again.80 The Alphabet of Tales is a fifteenth-century translation of the thirteenth-century Alphabetum narrationum attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Étienne de Besançon.81 In this collection’s account of the bishop who has angered the dead by suspending their priest, the dead threaten the bishop with death if he does not reinstate the priest, and to prove they are serious, they flay him with spades: ‘And with þat he was so flayed he was like hafe dyed, & fell in a swownd.’82 As far as can be determined, this is the most violent version of the tale. To get around the doctrinal problem, the tale says that the bishop ‘þoght’ this happened. It seems it was only a vision, which is in keeping with the rules of the appearance of apparitions set down by Augustine. What observations can we make from these texts? First, we see, with exceptions, gradually increasing evocations of horror in the narrations from the earlier tales to the later, though this varies with the ability of the writer. Second, there seems to be a greater focus on the craft of storytelling in the later tales. The tales are drawn out, with attention paid to how characters feel, particularly their fear. Third, we see an effort to use the revenants to explain outbreaks of plague, and perhaps other events people could not understand. Paul Barber has observed that vampires and revenants are capable of different things in different regions because they are scapegoats, ways of explaining events people do not understand, and those things differ in different parts of the world.83 So, let us return now to our original question: why would clerics and historians tell tales that do not conform to Christian doctrine and that to such educated men must surely have seemed impossible? As we have seen, the chroniclers themselves are often at a loss to explain their reasons. Gervase of Tilbury, in his Otia Imperialia (Recreation for an Emperor), wrote that the consideration of marvels refreshed the mind because of their strangeness: 80 81

82

83

Caciola, ‘Wraiths’, 275.

Ann C. Chapman, ‘Sacred Movement in the High and Late Middle Ages’ (unpublished thesis, ProQuest, 2009), 56.

An Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th century translation of the Alphabetum narrationum of Étienne de Besançon / from Additional ms. 25, 719 of the British Museum, Mary Macleod Banks, ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co for the EETS, os, 1904–5), vol. II, Tale DCLXXXVI, 461. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 87.

6 2    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

When anything strange is observed we seize on it, partly because of the inversion of the natural order which surprises us, partly because of our ignorance of the cause, whose working is a mystery to us, and partly because of seeing our expectation cheated in unfamiliar circumstances of which we lack a proper understanding.84

The limited way the tales conform to doctrine is in one element of Augustine’s theory of apparitions: that the dead return through the permission of God. But in Augustine, such visitations are through the agency of good or evil angels, and only in the mind of the person witnessing the visitation. Revenants return in body, not in the mind, and through their own agency, not that of angels. But unlike in resurrection doctrine, these revenants do not return because they have lived Christian lives. They usually return because they have lived bad lives. So, revenants defy doctrine far more than they conform to it. Andrew Joynes has suggested that Gervase might have seen such marvellous tales as a stimulus to theological and philosophical speculations, which would appeal to European court patrons.85 As we have also seen, scholars have attributed the stories to propaganda for the church and to captivation on the part of the tellers by the stories themselves. And as we discussed earlier, perhaps they told the tales because, even though their minds told them they could not be true, the place where fear is located made them dread that they might be. Beyond all this, there has also to be a place in the mix for imagination. (This was, after all, a prime medieval teaching tool. Clerics, for instance, often encouraged parishioners to imagine Christ’s suffering in the Passion as a way to imitate him and become a better Christian.) The ecclesiastics who told revenant tales were trying, as all teachers do, to reach out to their pupils, the laity, in a way that would engage them and make them take their lessons to heart. They did so by tapping into a very basic human fear, fear of death, and one suspects it was all the more easy to do since, surely, they shared the same fear themselves. Many primitive people believed in a living dead.86 But in most of the stories we have examined in which the dead have been imbued imaginatively with sentience, these dead frighten the living. They harm them. They kill them. Why would the minds that created these tales imagine the sentient dead as malevolent if not to express anxiety about the thing they 84

85 86

Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. S.E. Banks and J.W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 559. Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories, 62.

Reidar Thoralf Christiansen, ‘The Dead and the Living’, Studia Norvegica, ii (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1946), 6–7.

Th e Religious Re ven a n t   63

represent: death itself, particularly if the storytellers are churchmen trained to see the risen dead as a gift from God to the just? We imagine life in a dead body because we do not know what death is, what it looks like, what it feels like. We know only that it will mean the end of us. That is a frightening thought. In order to make it less so, we imagine it hoping to better understand it, but imagining it stokes our fear and makes it ghastly. In chapter 3, we will pursue the revenant into another region in which people search when religion does not provide the answers they seek: art.

3 The Corpse as Admonition, Art and Bogeyman t For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings . . . Within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king, Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp.

Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2, William Shakespeare1

S

hakespeare understood the power of stories about death, and about the human need to tell and hear such stories. For stories about the death of others are ultimately stories about our own deaths. They are a way to confront our inevitable end beforehand and, for now at least, live to tell the tale. Perhaps such stories carry an apotropaic value, helping people to drive away the spectre of death in the same way that parishioners in late medieval Rogationtide ceremonies processed with hand bells, banners and the parish cross to drive away evil spirits.2 Both activities are based on the construction of a dramatic ritual or action around the thing we fear and in doing so, imagining that the ritual protects us from it. As John Aberth puts it, ‘By conversing with Death, man took some of the terror out of his coming and could better prepare for the final end.’3 Shakespeare’s word ‘antic’ is a peculiarly apt and disquieting description of Death (big ‘D’ or little), evoking as it does the fool at court, who lampoons and admonishes without regard to station; the madman, who acts irrationally, 1

2

William Shakespeare, Richard II, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardii/full. html [accessed February 2015]. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400– c. 1580 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 136.

John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse (New York: Routledge, 2001), 196.

3

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sometimes violently, without rhyme or reason; and death, which strikes one man while sparing his neighbour. In much of the art and literature we will discuss in this chapter, we will witness death as antic, as fool, as madman, for surely only a madman would fell a child with plague and leave unharmed the parents to mourn her loss. There is, of course, Death, death and the dead. The stories we will examine involve them all, and will deal not just with stories of death, but specifically with stories of the dead interacting with the living. The belief that the dead may continue to live on as corpses is, like the search for eternal life, of such ancient pedigree that it cannot reliably be dated. Belief in revenants usually includes a belief that those revenants are malevolent. They are almost always presented as having lived an evil life and/or dying badly. (This has an obvious parallel in modern ghost stories in which hauntings occur when someone has murdered someone, been murdered themselves, or left behind unfinished business, but the incorporeal dead are outside the scope of this book.) The belief is founded on the same basic principle that fostered belief in relics – the idea that the incorruptibility of the relics suggested remaining vitality. Nancy Caciola cites the thirteenth-century bishop of Paris Guillaume d’Auvergne referring to tales he had heard of the dead attacking the living. He mocks the assertions but by recording them he confirms how widespread the belief was.4 This stems from popular medieval belief about the human life force. A human being was thought to have a predetermined life span; if they died before that time was up, they had not used up their full life force. This is particularly interesting, because two medieval interpretations of the model of life clash here: the ecclesiastical view that the source of life was spiritual versus the popular view that the source was material – in the flesh itself – and that life was not fully extinguished until the flesh decayed and only bones were left. As Caciola points out, the fact that revenants, unlike skeletons, are not completely decomposed places them in the in ‘fleshy “danger-zone”’ when they may walk abroad and, as they are wont, harm the living.5 Lester Little writes of curse tablets, defixiones, found near Greek tombs of those believed to have died young. Defixiones were inscribed by Greeks and Romans with messages asking deities to wield their supernatural power against certain individuals. Since the young dead had not lived their full lives, they had ‘energy left unexpended’; that surely made them resentful, and that resentment gave them power. The defixiones were placed in the hope of sapping that power.6 Caciola, ‘Wraiths’, 17.

4

Caciola, ‘Wraiths’, 32.

5

Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 151.

6

6 6    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

As Ariès has pointed out, the very philology of the word ‘funeral’ can be taken as significant. The word funus can be translated either as referring to the dead body, the funeral ceremony or murder. Funestus means a profanation provoked by a cadaver; in French it became the word funeste, or deadly, ill-omened.7 As we have seen, there was a large spike in apparitions beginning in the year 1000, many of which were revenant accounts. Unlike in tales such as ‘Sir Orfeo’, in which, in a triumph over death, or at least the undead state of living in the underworld, Orfeo descends into the Other World to rescue Heurodis and brings her back alive,8 the dead in stories such as the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead return from the realm of the dead, but not to life. They return as hideous, putrefying corpses. They walk, but they are not alive. They are horribly, grotesquely dead. It is perhaps not coincidental that a change also took place in the depiction of Death personified in some French and English illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts of the late thirteenth century, just before the first known appearance of the Legend. Up until this time the Fourth Rider of the Apocalypse had usually been depicted as strong and vigorous, carrying a sword or a brazier of fire. But now, in some manuscripts he became a decaying cadaver.9 From roughly the twelfth century on, medieval people developed ‘an increasing obsession with decay and rot’, as Caroline Walker Bynum puts it, and a growing fear of Hell.10 This growing fear is reflected in the tone of such tales, and particularly the iconography, which as we shall see grows more frightening over time. Because of the breadth of the topic and length of the time period involved, space limitations make a complete study or even a comprehensive survey impossible.11 We will therefore focus only on artistic touchstones to illustrate the growing use of death as a narrative tool meant to evoke fear. 7 8

9

Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, 14–15.

‘Sir Orfeo’, in A Book of Middle English, ed. J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 114–31. Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse, 187.

10

11

Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Death and Resurrection in the Middle Ages: Some Modern Implications’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 4 (1998): 591–2.

For comprehensive studies on the art and iconography of death, see Philippe Ariés, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Ashby Kinch, Imago Mortis: The Mediating Image of Death in late Middle English Culture (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2013); and Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500–c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991); for

Th e C o r pse as Admoni t i on, A r t an d B oge y m a n    67

The Instructive Corpse

Use of the corpse as memento mori to the living is very old indeed. As Francis Douce notes, Herodotus wrote that at Egyptian banquets, somebody was appointed to carry round the table the figure of a dead body in a coffin, advising the feasters, ‘Behold this image of what yourselves will be.’12 The difference between that memento mori and those of the Middle Ages lies in the second part of the sentence: ‘Eat and drink therefore, and be happy.’ For medieval people, the moral was not carpe diem, but abandon the pleasures of this life and look to the health of your soul in the next. As we have seen, Christians have been preoccupied with the dead body as didactic signification since antiquity. Rosemary Woolf writes that the warning from the dead first appears in sermon injunctions to visit the tomb. The first known occurrence of such a warning is in the Necrosima (funeral hymns) of Ephraem of Syria. Ephraem urges the proud, the rich and powerful not just to imagine a corpse but to look into a grave and its body and infer from these the futility of the world. This injunction is taken up in sermons of other eastern writers, such as St John Chrysostom.13 But it was Caesarius of Arles, Woolf writes, who first urged his flock to look on a corpse as though the dead body itself were preaching to the living: Look at me and know yourself; consider my bones, and lust and avarice will become abhorrent to you. What you are, I was; what I am, you will be . . . Gaze at this dust and desist from your evil desires.14

In his words, as we will see, are those we will find later in the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead: as you are now, we once were; as we are now, so shall you be. In early medieval writings, this concern often manifests itself in the context of apocalyptic literature. Blickling Homily X (The End of This World Is Near) takes up the convention of a corpse cautioning the living. In it, a dead body in

12

13

14

medieval religious art, see Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages. A Study of Medieval Iconography and its Sources, ed. Harry Bober, trans. M. Matthews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949, repr. 1986).

Francis Douce, The Dance of Death Exhibited in Elegant Engravings on Wood: with a Dissertation on the Several Representations of that Subject but more Particularly on those Ascribed to Macaber [sic] and Hans Holbein (London: William Pickering, 1833), 2–3. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 401. Ibid., 402.

6 8    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

its grave relates a message of memento mori to a living companion.15 Blickling X exhorts readers and hearers to turn aside from sin and look to God, for they will soon face the final judgement of Doomsday. It tells of a man driven from his homeland by grief over the death of his friend. Soon, though, he longs for his native land, and returns to his dear friend’s tomb. The bones of the dead man call to the friend, asking why he has come, and in doing so, we hear the refrain of the Three Dead. All there is to see is dust, and the relict of worms, the dead man says: Sceawa þær nu dust & dryge ban, þær þær þu ær gesawe æfter flæsclicre gecynde fægre leomu on to seonne. Eala þu freond & min mæg, gemyne þis & ongyt þe sylfne, þœt þu eart nu þœt ic wæs io; & þu byst æfter fæce þœt ic nu eom.16 [Behold now dust and dry bones, where thou before didst see limbs, after flesh’s kind, fair to look upon. O my friend and kinsman, be mindful of this, and convince thyself that thou art now what I was formerly, and after a time thou shalt be what I now am.]17

In Body and Soul debate poetry, which appeared in the Anglo-Saxon period and continued into the seventeenth century,18 body and soul argue over who is to blame for the soul’s damnation. It employs fear through the use of shocking and graphic imagery to terrify the reader into living a moral life. In ‘Als I lay in a winteris nyt’, a Middle English lyric that also explores the relationship between body and soul, the soul berates the body on its bier for living an immoral life, while the body blames the soul for not offering better counsel. The soul is then carried off by hell hounds to Hell, where it is tormented, 15

16

17

18

The Blickling Homilies are anonymous and of uncertain date. Richard Morris found the language consistent with older English of the ninth century, but Blickling XI mentions the year 971. On anonymity and dating to the ninth century, see Richard Morris, ‘Preface’, in The Blickling Homilies, ed. and trans. Richard Morris, EETS, os, vol. 58 (London: N. Trübner & Co for the EETS, 1880), vi. On possible dating to the year 971, see Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169. ‘Blickling Homily X (The End of This World Is Near)’, in The Blickling Homilies, 113. Translation is from volume in previous footnote. The inscription became common in medieval English epitaphs, including, perhaps, the Sparham corpse panels; see Julian Luxford, ‘The Sparham Corpse Panels: Unique Revelations of Death from Late Fifteenth-Century England’, The Antiquaries Journal 90 (2010): 432. John W. Conlee, ed., Middle English Debate Poetry, A Critical Anthology (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991), xxv.

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while the body will rot in its grave until Judgement Day. The narrator wakes, terrified, prays to Christ for mercy and urges the reader to do likewise.19 In ‘A Disputacione betwyx the Body and Wormes’, one of the last of the Body and Soul poems in Middle English, the body of a noble lady lies dead in her tomb, lamenting the worms that devour her flesh. Set during an outbreak of plague, its message of accepting death may have been an effort to assuage fears of the pestilence.20 The medieval memento mori poem ‘Erthe upon Erthe’, the earliest known texts of which appear in early fourteenth-century manuscripts,21 evokes images of the body as it is buried in the dirt, with all the wistful regret and love of life that implies, and is a paean to the transience of earthly life, but participates in none of the graphic depictions of worm-eaten cadavers we see in other texts. It is in the later medieval period, however, and in imaginative writing, that fascination with giving voice and action to the dead really begins to take off. In MS 3142 in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, probably produced for Marie de Brabant around 1285, is one of the earliest known versions of the poem ‘Li Troi Mort et Li Troi Vif ’, The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, attributed to Baudouin de Condé.22 (The translations below are my own.) The poem tells the story of three noblemen out hunting who are startled by three corpses in their path. The first of the three living describes his terror at the ghastly sight of the three dead: ‘Compaignon’, dist li uns des trois Vis hommes, ‘je sui molt destroys De paour de ces trois mors la. Voiiés de cascun, con mors l’a Fait lait et hideus pour veoir.’23

19 20

21

22

23

‘Als I lay in a winteris nyt’, in Middle English Debate Poetry, 20–9.

‘A Disputacione betwyx the Body and Wormes’, in Middle English Debate Poetry, 51–62. Erthe Upon Erthe’, in Erthe Upon Erthe, Printed from Twenty-Four Manuscripts, ed. Hilda Murray, EETS, os, vol. 141 (London: Oxford University Press for the EETS, 1911), x. Christine Kralik, ‘Dialogue and Violence in Medieval Illuminations of the Three Living and the Three Dead’, in Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sophie Oosterwijk and Stefanie Knöll (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 136. Baudouin de Condé, ‘Li troi mort et li troi vif ’, in Les Cinq Poèmes des Trois Morts et Des Trois Vifs, 55.

7 0    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

[‘Comrades’, said the first of the three living men, ‘I am much tormented by fear of these three dead here. Look at each, how death has made them hideous and horrible to see’.] (lines 27–31)

The second living declares that the three dead are a mirror shown them by God to chastise them for their pride. The third living then describes in forensic detail the damage wrought by putrefaction on the bodies of the three dead: E las! K’il sont des cors alé! Voiiés, con cascuns poi a lé Le pis, le ventre, ne le dos. Li plus carnus n’est mais que d’os; N’a d’entier li ales le mains Piés, ne gambes, ne bras, ne mains, Dos, ne ventre, espa le, ne pis. Mors et ver I ont fait le pis K’il pueent; il pert bien a iex As bouces, as nés et as iex.24 [Alas! How removed they are from bodies! Look, how each scarcely has A breast, stomach, or back. Most of the flesh is naught but bone; None of the departed is whole in the least, Feet, nor legs, nor arms, nor hands, Bones, nor intestines, shoulder-blade, nor chest. Death and worms have done the worst That it can there; he has lost much at the eye, the mouth, the nose and the ears.] (lines 49–58)

The first of the dead explains that they were indeed sent by God as a mirror to persuade the three living to abandon sin and change their ways, and utters the famous lines, ‘Such as you are, we once were. As we are now, so shall you be.’ The second dead then bemoans the horribleness of death:

24

Ibid., 57.

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Ha, mors male, mors griés, mors sure, Mors felenesse de morsure! Comme est outrageus tes desrois.25 [Ah, evil death, terrible death, bitter death, Cruel bite of death! So dreadful in your devastation.] (lines 97–99)

He reminds the living of the origin of death, and the horrible destination of the unrepentant dead: E mors, ki viens de pere en hoirs, Et d’oirs en hoirs convient que pere, Par le mal mors de nostre pere Premier, ki ot a non Adans, Ki nous a pené, molt a d’ans; Car de son mors vint nostre mors Par le pume, u il fist le mors; Don’t mors nous savoura le seve, Que ja n’eüst savouré, s’Eve Ne fust, ki par son mal enort Nous fist de net liu metre en ort Et en dur tourment et en fer De mort, et d’aler en enfer, U tout aliens.26 [And death – who comes from the father through heirs, And from heir to heir as befits the father, Through the wicked death of our first father Whose name was Adam, Who did us harm – is of great antiquity. Through whom we have suffered for many years; For from his death came our deaths Through the apple, where he created death; Then we came to understand death, Which we could not have understood, had Eve Not created it, who by her wicked exhortation Had us put out of a lovely place 25 26

Ibid., 59.

Ibid., 59–60.

7 2    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

And placed in hard torment and fire Of death, and go to Hell, Where all are strangers.] (lines 104–17)

The third dead cautions the three living that death strikes unannounced, and that one must be prepared at all times: Ne contre mort n’a c’un confort, C’est de soi soir et main tenir En boine oeuvre.27 [Against death there is but one remedy, That is to hold and maintain oneself In good works.] (150–2)

He ends by asking them for that due of all living Christians to their dead, and in doing so, the poem reinforces the institution of suffrages: Priiés pour nous au Patre nostre, S’en dites une patrenostre.28 [Pray for us to Our Father, And recite a paternoster.] (lines 159–60)

The horror of an encounter with the dead, and their alarming state of putrefaction, is subsumed in the poem’s didactic message that all men must be prepared for death at all times, by living morally, but it is the shock of the macabre imagery that captures the reader’s attention, the fear engendered by the prospect of the ugly finality of death that makes them receptive to the message.29 27 28 29

Ibid.

Ibid., 62–3.

Chism sees pictorial representations of the Legend as driven by the sense of indebtedness of the living to the dead as described by Blauner and the conflicting needs of putting the dead at a distance and keeping them close in order to maintain bonds; see Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 243. She also notes the way such depictions reinforce the exchanges between living and dead, such as prayers for the souls of the dead, 245.

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The tale crossed the Channel to England, notably in the Psalter of Robert de Lisle, a fourteenth-century English nobleman who commissioned the book for his daughter. Estimates of the date of the manuscript vary from 1285 to the late 1330s but centre on 1300–10.30 A section of text on the illumination translates a portion of one of the anonymous versions of the French poem. In it, the three living say: Ich am afert Lo whet ich se Me þinkes hit bey develes þre.31 [I am afraid. Lo, what I see! Methinks these be devils three.]

to which the three dead reply: Ich wes wel fair Such schel tou be For godes love bewer by me.32 [I was well fair Such shall you be For God’s love, beware by me.]

The illustrated poem appeared in other penitential books, including the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg.33 The Legend seems to have been so well known by the mid-fourteenth century that images needed no text for people to know what they were.34 That there was a house in Paris whose sign read ‘Maison des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifs’ is perhaps evidence of this.35 But what accounts for cadaver tales and art, and why did they become more horrifying over time? The plague has been cited by many scholars as

30

31 32 33

34

35

Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Psalter of Robert De Lisle in the British Library (London: Harvey Miller, 1999), Intro. 8.

‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, Folio 127, The Psalter of Robert De Lisle, 44. Ibid.

Florens Deuchler, ‘Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg’s Prayer Book’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (February 1971): 267–78. Kralik, ‘Dialogue and Violence in Medieval Illuminations of the Three Living and the Three Dead’, 134. Camille, Master of Death, 29.

7 4    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

an incitation to the kind of fear that drove the creation of the macabre, and certainly it must have contributed. Images of the legend were common in pre-plague paintings, but became more plentiful and more shocking after the pestilence. They are joined also in the fifteenth century by new memento mori subjects – the shroud brass, the cadaver effigy, and the Dance of Death.36

In other words, the more frightened people became, the more violent became the images of the legend and danse macabre. But there were many sources of unexpected death besides plague. As Margaret Aston notes, a drought in Spain in 1473–74 destroyed grain crops, forcing parents to give away their children in the hope that someone else might be able to feed them and, therefore, keep them alive. Harvesters in England in the summer of 1473 dropped dead in the fields because of heat.37 Perhaps as time wore on it was the cumulative effect of so much and so many kinds of death that contributed to the growingly sinister depictions of death in cadaver art. Despite the assertions of some scholars that this made medieval people more accustomed to death, it would seem more likely that they did not at all acclimate to the overwhelming onslaught of death but rather sought an outlet for it, that the constant presence of death drove people to create and consume art and literature that helped them to process the death they saw coming to those around them, the death they feared might come for them at any moment. We must also look at the changing topography of the afterlife, how the Church conceived its doctrine, and how it was interpreted by artists. First among the factors we must consider is the doctrine of Purgatory. Though theologians began writing of a place of purgation in the fourth century and the corporate apparatus of suffrages were in place by the ninth, Purgatory became official Church doctrine in the twelfth century. The church institutionalised Purgatory at the Second Council of Lyons (1274), the Council of Florence (1438) and the Council of Trent (1563).38 It was the culmination of centuries of hand-wringing over where people go when they die, centuries of thinking on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.39 For the first 36

37

38 39

Colin Platt, King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England (London: University College London Press, 1996), 151.

Margaret Aston, ‘Death’, in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosemary Horrox (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 84–6.

Mormando, ‘What Happens to Us When We Die: Bernardino of Siena on The Four Last Things’, 109–42.

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time, the Church could offer an answer to the nervous faithful, and the theology drew heavily on Augustine’s categories of sinners.40 If you are completely without sin – a martyr or saint – you will go straight to Heaven. If you are completely wicked, you will go directly to Hell. If you are like most people, though, not altogether good or altogether wicked, you get another chance at eternal life, a second bite at the apple, if you will. You go to Purgatory, where you can work off your sins. (You can also get time off for penance done in life.) So Purgatory, then, was a way for people to change the outcome of their fate after death. That is an extraordinarily powerful idea, almost as powerful as the doctrine of the Resurrection. It gave people some control over what would happen to them when they died, and in the process, made that impending death a little less frightening. But ironically, this may also have raised anxieties about the individual moment of death. By representing another chance of escaping Hell and going to Purgatory instead, it also raised the possibility that you might not be so lucky. Other theological changes also made death more individual. Books of Life were kept in some monasteries in the Carolingian era, where names were recorded to be mentioned at mass. These took the place of the older diptychs, waxen tablets on which the names of those who had donated offerings were recorded. In the eleventh century, probably between 1024 and 1033, Cluny began commemorating the dead annually on 2 November, which became known as the Day of the Dead. Before long it was being celebrated throughout the Christian world.41 There was also, as Philippe Ariès sees it, a shift in the late Middle Ages from collective judgement at the end of time to individual judgement at the hour of death. He suggests that a series of changes in the focus of eschatology in the eleventh and twelfth centuries began to transform the idea of death in peoples’ minds from the old idea of the collective destiny of the species into that which will come for them individually. Chief among these changes was the displacing of the judgement of souls at the end of each individual life. Church art before this time reflects the idea that the dead who belonged to the Church went to sleep like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and remained at rest until the day of the Second Coming, when they would awaken in Heaven. There was no individual responsibility, no counting of good and bad deeds. The wicked would not awaken at the Second Coming. They would remain dead for

40 41

Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 69. Ibid., 125.

7 6    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

all eternity. So at this time, it seems, death really meant death for those who were not saved.42 That would be frightening enough. But in the twelfth century, art shows that eschatological focus changed, inspired by the book of Matthew: the resurrection of the dead, the separation of the just and the damned, the Last Judgement, and the weighing of souls by the archangel Michael. The good and bad deeds of each individual were weighed. The accounts of these deeds were recorded in a book, the liber vitae.43 So now there is even more riding on what happens at this moment of death: even more frightening. At first, there was one book, a sort of census. But by the end of the Middle Ages it became viewed as an individual account book. A fresco at Albi of the Last Judgment from the end of the fifteenth century shows the risen wearing the books around their necks. And, Ariès observes, another thing changes. The balance sheet is not closed at the moment of death but on the last day of the world: Here we can see the deep-rooted refusal to link the end of physical being with physical decay. Men of the period believed in an existence after death which did not necessarily continue for infinite eternity, but which provided an extension between death and the end of the world.44

Let us return now to the way these elements were expressed in art. We see the conception of Death as rot in Death & Liffe, an alliterative debate poem written at the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century.45 The poem is an illustration of Christ’s victory over death, exemplified in the section of the poem in which Dame Death claims to have vanquished Christ but Dame Life sets the record straight by recounting Christ’s passion and his harrowing of Hell. She closes the poem by resurrecting those whom Death had earlier destroyed and leading them into eternal life. In a common medieval motif, the poem begins with the narrator falling asleep in a field of flowers and dreaming that he is walking in ‘a wood stronge’ (line 39).46 The forest, which is also to be seen in The Three Dead Kings and The Awntyrs off Arthure, is a typical location for supernatural encounters. 42 43 44 45

46

Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death, 29–31. Ibid., 31–2. Ibid., 32–3.

Mabel Day, ‘Preface’, in Death and Liffe: A Medieval Alliterative Debate Poem in a Seventeenth Century Version, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), ix–xvi. ‘Death & Liffe’, in Middle English Debate Poetry, 144.

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Dame Life, in contrast to Death Death, is depicted as cheerful and healthy-looking: Shee was brighter of her blee then was the bright sonn, Her rudd redder then the rose that on the rise hangeth, Meekely smiling with her mouth & merry in her lookes, Euer laughing for loue as she like wold;47 (lines 65–8)

But before long Dame Death makes her appearance, with a noise loud as a horn, and the very ground ‘gogled for greefe of that grim dame’ [shook with fear] (line 147).48 The poet works hard to convey the terror created by Dame Death’s appearance, and, by inference, the arrival of death to each man. The narrator goes ‘nere out of my witt for wayling care’ (line 148).49 He calls Dame Death ‘one of the vglyest ghosts that on the earth gone’ (line 152),50 ‘grislye & great & grim to behold’ (line 154),51 and ‘the ffoulest ffreake that formed was euer’ (line 157).52 In fact, she resembles a putrefying corpse: Her eyes farden [glowed] as the fyer þat in the furnace burnes; They were hollow in her head with full heauye browes. Her leres [cheeks] were leane, with lipps full side, With a maruelous mouth full of long tushes [teeth]; And the nebb of her nose to her navel hanged; And her lere [face] like the lead þat lately was beaten.53 (lines 165–70)

She bears in her right hand a bloody weapon, the dreaded dart wielded by Death and cadavers in much medieval iconography. Dame Death explains that she would have kept the commandment of the high king of Heaven forbidding death if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit of the tree they were forbidden. Dame Life’s words suggest the Augustinian contention that death was unnatural, and was only the result of the sin of Adam and Eve: 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., 145–6. Ibid., 150. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Ibid., 151.

7 8    W he n t h e De ad Ri se

In what hole of thy hart thou thy wrath keepeth. Where ioy & gentlenesse are ioyned together Betweene a wight & his wife & his winne children, & when ffaith & ffellowshipp are ffastened ffor aye, Loue & charitye, which our Lord likethe, Then thou waleth them with wracke & wratheffully beginneth; Vncurteouslye thou cometh, vnknowne of them all, & lacheth away the land that the lord holdeth, Or woryes his wife, or walts downe his children. Mikle [much] woe thus thou waketh where mirth was before.54 (lines 291–300)

Before death (or, if you like, Death), people lived happily – husbands, wives and children in gentleness and joy. Then death arrived, which people had never known before, tore families apart and brought woe to wives and children. But, explains Dame Life, Death has no might against everlasting life: Shee hath no might, nay no maine, to meddle with yonder ost, Against euerlasting Liffe that Ladye soe true.55 (lines 443–4)

The poet uses the horror inspired by Dame Death’s appearance to didactic ends, to explain original sin and remind the faithful of the everlasting life that awaits those who keep faith with Christ. Some scholars see the exaggerated rendering of Dame Death as an impetus to the reader to laugh at rather than fear her.56 Even if that is so, comedy is one of the most effective and satisfying ways of defanging that which horrifies us. What else are we to make of the scene illuminated in the margins of a fourteenth-century French psalter, in which monstrous monkeys and other grotesques mock a group of monks singing the Office of the Dead over a coffin?57 Nearby are drawn a laughing skeleton and a grave-digging hybrid who trudges along with a shovel slung over his shoulder. It seems to me that this scene is a similar, more light-hearted reaction to the same fear of death

54 55 56

57

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 164.

See Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Paul Elek, 1976), 180. Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2002), 52.

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that prompted cadaver imagery, only here the artist is mocking death in an attempt to defang it rather than quavering before it. The overt purpose of the first ‘half ’ of The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn, an Arthurian romance dated to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, is a retelling of the Trental legend to argue for the efficacy of masses for the souls of the dead, but as with many didactic accounts in ecclesiastical writings, it is nevertheless a species of revenant tale in which the poet uses horror to deliver his message to the greatest effect. The hideous spectre of Guinevere’s mother appears to Guinevere and Gawain in a wood as the sky darkens and the rest of their hunting party flee in terror. In one sense, the medieval forest can be precisely the environment in which such a thing might happen. As Pearsall and Salter note, it is ‘a place of mystery, a place of testing, and always potentially evil’.58 Corinne Saunders observes that in some classical texts, the forest was acknowledged as a setting for mysterious or supernatural events.59 Whether the apparition that appears to Gawain and Guinevere is a ghost or a true revenant is unclear. The poet calls it a ‘sprete’ [sprite] and a ‘goost’ [ghost], but lines 105–6 seem plainly to describe a decaying corpse: Bare was the body and blak to the bone, Al biclagged in clay uncomly cladde.60 It seems painfully obvious to belabour such a point, but incorporeal ghosts do not decay. For decomposition to take place, a physical body must be present. Lines 114–15, in which a toad gnaws at the cheek of the apparition, also indicate corporeality (and also illustrate the medieval belief that toads spontaneously erupted from the bodies of the deceased): On the chef of the cholle, A pade pikes on the polle . . .61 [On the top of the neck A toad bites into the skull . . .]

58

59

60

61

Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (London: Paul Elek, 1973), 52.

Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), 26. Saunders, however, essentially characterises this perception as incomplete. The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library MS Douce 324, ed. Ralph Hanna III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 69. Ibid.

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It would be misleading to suggest that there was a steadily escalating trajectory towards horror in all cadaver writing, though the general trend definitely strayed in that direction over time. Both ecclesiastical and lay poets along our timeline used the motif for didactic or memento mori purpose without resorting to some of the grizzlier imagery we have seen in such poems as Death & Liffe. We will examine some of them now. Suffice it to say that for those disposed to express fear of death, the theme was an effective tool, and was used as such. In St Erkenwald, most likely composed in the 1390s or early 1400s,62 the motif of the risen dead is used to hagiographic and didactic effect. The saint is summoned to a cathedral built on the site of a former pagan temple where a tomb has been uncovered containing the perfectly preserved body of a man in fine robes. Unlike cadavers in some revenant tales, the body is uncorrupted and arrayed in fine robes glistening with gold and pearls. St Erkenwald conjures the corpse to speak and tell how long it has lain buried there and whether it is ‘joined to joy’ or ‘judged to pain’. Immediately the dead man wakes: Þe bryᵹt body in þe burynes brayed a litell, And with a drery dreme he dryves owte words Þurgh sum lant gostte-lyfe of hym þat al redes.63 (lines 190–3) [The bright body in the tomb stirred a little, And with a dreary air he let out words Through some ghost-life given by Him who rules all.]

Because the writer specifies that the body is able to speak through some ‘ghostlife’ granted to him temporarily by God, the account retains some connection to doctrine. If the corpse stirred of its own internal will, this would violate the Augustinian stipulation that visitations of the dead only happen through the permission of God. The corpse tells St Erkenwald that he was once a just judge, but as Britain was not yet Christian, he has not gone to Paradise. He asks if all those born before Christ go to Hell. St Erkenwald resolves to baptise the dead man and recites to him the invocation of the Trinity that he will say over him during the baptism, just as soon as he can fetch some holy water. But in his emotion over the plight of the dead man, he sheds a tear, which falls on the body. This ‘water’ from the holy bishop and his speaking of the words of

62

63

J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds, A Book of Middle English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 201. ‘St. Erkenwald’, in A Book of Middle English, 209.

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the Trinity are enough to baptise the corpse and save his soul. The moment the tear falls, the body immediately turns to dust.64 John Lydgate turned frequently to resurrection and personified Death in his poetry, though as a priest he used them for didactic ends and made little of the opportunities for horror they presented. In ‘The Legend of St Austin at Compton’, c. 1420–40, Lydgate tells of a tormented ghost, ‘terrible of face’, who rose at the command of St Augustine to say that he had been cursed by his parish priest for not paying tithes. The priest is dug up, the two dead men absolve each other, and both are reburied.65 In ‘The Fiftene Toknys Aforn the Doom’, Lydgate details corpses rising from their graves as the eleventh sign of the coming of Doomsday: Ded boonys that day shal aryse, And grisly stoned on ther sepulture [sepulchre], And shewyn [shown] outward a dredful foul figure; So to stoned [stand] al day, with boonys blak and donne; Of doom [judgement] abyde the dredful aventure [event], Tyl goyng doun of the bloody sonne.66

And in ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’, Lydgate strikes a predictably moralising tone, reminding the reader of the original sin of Adam that created death and damns all those who are not saved.67 The message of the three skulls that address the reader in Robert Henryson’s ‘The Thre Deid Pollis’ is the same as in the Legend and the ‘The Three Dead Kings’, though it is delivered with less horror: no earthly state can save one from death – you must die – so look to these three dead skulls as a reminder, and flee from wicked vice. The three dead call upon the living to behold ‘Oure holkit ene, oure peilit pollis bair’ [our hollowed eyes and skinned skulls bare] (line 4).68 And 64 65

66

67

68

Ibid., 213.

John Lydgate, ‘The Legend of St. Austin at Compton’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate I, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, os, vol. 107 (London: Oxford University Press for the EETS by Humphrey Milford, 1934) 193–206. John Lydgate, ‘The Fiftene Toknys Aforn the Doom’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate I, 117–20.

John Lydgate, ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, os, vol. 192, 828–32 (London: Oxford University Press for the EETS by Humphrey Milford, 1934), 828–32.

Robert Henryson, ‘The Thre Deid Pollis’, in Robert Henryson: The Complete Works, ed. David J. Parkinson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/parkinson-henryson-complete-worksshorter-poems-weaker-attributions [accessed February 2015].

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again with the same line as in the Legend, confront them with the truth of their ultimate end: ‘As ye are now, into this warld we wair’ (line 5).69 The three skulls counsel the ladies similarly, that despite their white throats, their fingers bedecked with jewels, soon they shall die and be just like these skulls, with ‘peilit pollis and holkit thus your heid’ [flayed skulls and hollowed heads] (line 32).70 For all the imagery of flayed skulls and hollow eyes that he evokes, however, Henryson strikes perhaps his most moving effect when the skulls ask a question: This questioun quha can obsolve, lat see, Quhat phisnamour or perfyt palmester: Quha was farest or fowlest of us thre Or quhilk of us of kin was gentillar Or maist expert in science or in lare, In art musik or in astronomye? Heir still sould ly your study and repair And think as thus all your heidis mon be.71 (lines 141–8)

What pains so much in this image is the vision of one’s own head, stripped of all that made it you – the chin that once a parent cupped, the neck that once a child hugged, the lips that once a lover kissed – this head flayed to the skull, unrecognisable to everyone you ever loved, or, conversely, the image that of a loved one, stripped of all that made it them, whom you, the reader, can never touch again. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.72 It makes the final exhortation to fall on your knees and cry mercy to Christ very effective. William Dunbar briefly uses cadaver imagery in ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’, though not to educate the reader but for comic effect. Dunbar insults Kennedy in this verbal joust by calling him ‘Thow Lazarus, thow laithly

69 70 71 72

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/ hamlet/hamlet.5.1.html [accessed February 2015].

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lene tramort [lean corpse]’73 (line 161) and goes on to describe him as a hollow-eyed ghost that should serve as an example to humanity: To all the warld thow may example be, To luk upoun thy gryslie, peteous port; For hiddowis, haw, and holkit is thyne ee, Thy cheikbane bair and blaiknit is thy ble. Thy choip, thy choll garris men for to leif chest; Thy gane, it garris us think that we mon de. I conjure thee, thow hungert Heland gaist.74 (lines 162–8)

It is in ‘The Lament for the Makars’, c. 1505, that Dunbar uses death poetry to most effective and moving ends. ‘Lament’ is reminiscent of a ‘Dance of Death’ poem, though the dance and the conventions in which Death and its victims speak have been removed.75 In it, Dunbar, sick and in decline, meditates on what he perceives as his coming death. The poem exudes not only sadness at the loss of so many poets he admires, but also an obvious fear of death. It is this sentiment that gives the poem much of its power and lyric beauty, largely through the use of the chant, Timor mortis conturbat me, at the end of every stanza. Onto the ded gois all estatis, Princis, prelotis, and potestatis, Baith riche and pur of al degré: Timor mortis conturbat me.76 (lines 16–20)

He then goes on to name those Death takes: knights, babes, beautiful ladies, lords, clerks, astrologers, logicians, theologians, physicians, and – as the title of the poem says – makars. He names Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, Andrew Wyntoun, Henryson, and ends his litany with Kennedy, his jousting opponent 73

74 75

76

William Dunbar, ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’, in William Dunbar: The Complete Works, ed. John W. Conlee (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2004), 186. Dunbar, ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’, 186.

For discussion of the poem, see R.D. Drexler, ‘Dunbar’s ”Lament for the Makaris” and the Dance of Death Tradition’, Studies in Scottish Literature 13: no. 1 (1978): 144–58. William Dunbar, ‘The Lament for the Makars’, in William Dunbar: The Complete Works, 48.

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of ‘The Flyting’, who lies sadly on the brink of death. He turns then to the inevitable conclusion. As Death has taken all his brethren, he knows that it will come for he himself before long. He closes, therefore, with a reminder to prepare for a good death in order to achieve eternal life: Sen for the ded remeid is none, Best is that we for dede dispone, Eftir our deid that lif may we: Timor mortis conturbat me.77 (lines 97–100)

For all its simplicity and relentless listing of the names of the dead, it has a baleful beauty and a lyricism that Lydgate’s ‘Dance of Death’ lacks. Let us return now to more horrifying uses of the cadaver, beginning with ‘The Three Dead Kings’, an early fifteenth-century poem attributed to John Audelay.78 De tribus regibus mortuis is the only extant English poem of the Legend.79 Audelay begins the horror in typical medieval fashion, in a wood. The three kings are out hunting, when suddenly the sky clouds over and a storm is loosed upon them: When þai weren of þese wodys • went at here wyn, þai fondyn wyndys ful wete • and wederys ful wanne.80 (lines 27–8) [When they had gone into the woods and went at their pleasure, they encountered wet winds and dark storms.]

They seek cover and hope that the morning will lift the fog; otherwise, they fear, their lives are lost. When they have gone just a few steps, they find themselves in green pasture. Three figures appear from the fog, wasted with long bony legs, their lips and innards rotted away: With lymes long and lene • and leggys ful lew, Hadyn lost þe lyp and þe lyuer seþyn þai were layd loue.81 (lines 44–5) 77 78

79 80

81

Dunbar, ‘The Lament for the Makars’, 51.

Putter makes an extended argument against Audelay as the author. See Ad Putter, ‘The Language and Meter of “Pater Noster” and “Three Dead Kings”’, The Review of English Studies, new series 55, no. 221 (September 2004): 498–526. Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 241.

‘The Three Dead Kings’ (De tribus regibus mortuis), in Alliterative Poetry of the Middle Ages: an Anthology, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre (London: Routledge, 1989), 152. Ibid., 153.

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[With limbs long and lean and weak legs, They had lost the lip and the liver since they were laid low.]

The three kings dare neither to nod nor flee: ‘dorst bec nor bewe’. Their horses pant for fear, and the kings call upon Christ to aid them, crossing themselves and reciting the Creed. The first king shudders in fear, aghast at the ‘þre gostis ful grym’82 (line 58). As Susanna Greer Fein notes, their actions and words essentially follow the iconography and verse of the Legend.83 The third king fears they are ‘dewyls’84 [devils] (line 90). But the first dead says they are no fiends but rather the ancestors of the living kings, and warns them that as they abuse their subjects, so they themselves shall be tormented in eternity unless they atone for their sins (lines 96–7). To cement the horror, he shows the kings the worms eating his own innards as punishment for his crimes in life (lines 98–9). He then chastises the kings for not commemorating them with a mass (lines 104–5). The second dead extends the horror imagery by calling upon them to look at his ‘bonus þat blake bene and bare’85 [black, bare bones] (line 106), and cautions them against being seduced by the money and power they have in life, for in the end, they will die and rot like him, so abandon fleshly desires and look to Christ and his teachings for the right way to live. After a warning from the third dead to ‘Makis ᵹour merour be me’86 (line 120), the three dead glide away to their graves, and the sun comes out. The mirror had very specific resonance and meaning to medieval readers. It could be intended as a model for correct behaviour, to ‘mirror’ the actions of an exemplary individual, or, as in this case, an exhortation to view the subject of the poem or lyric as an example of the reader himself or herself, to see in himself the flaws of the character in the poem, and to learn from and amend them. The kings, relieved, ride away, change their ways, and commission the building of a church and the writing of this story on its wall for the profit of their people, though, Audelay writes, few people will believe it. Thus, even as the poem frightens with bleak language of death, it concludes with the didactically reassuring message of Resurrection doctrine: those who repent and submit to Christ, though they die, will live again.

82 83

84 85 86

Ibid.

See Susanna Greer Fein, ‘Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts’, Mosaic 35, no. 1 (2002): 83–8. Ibid., 155. Ibid.

Ibid., 156.

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With the advent of danse macabre in the first half of the fifteenth century, the dead take on a more malevolent character.87 Unlike in the legend, the living in the dance do not survive their encounter with the dead. That is the point, or at least part of it. One or more cadavers or skeletons lead away the living, usually against their strong objections.88 The first known Dance of Death was painted in 1424–25 on the walls of the cloister enclosing the cemetery of Les Saints Innocents in Paris, near a sculpture of the Legend carved on the doorway of the church at the orders of the duc de Berry in 1408.89 It pictured thirty people dancing with Death from all stations, including Pope, King, Baron, Merchant, Monk, Labourer and Infant. The meaning of the dance is manifold. It is a social leveller, a reminder that while some men achieve powerful earthly status, all are equal in death: Dethe spareth not/low ne hye degre Popes kynges/ne worthi Emperowrs When thei schyne/moste in felicite He can abate/the fresshnes of her flowres Ther briᵹt sune clipsen/with hys showres Make hem plownge/from theire sees lowe Maugre the might/of al these conquerowres Fortune hath hem/from her whele [y]throwe.90

It finds a prototype in the early fourteenth-century Vado Mori poem, in which members of different social classes all utter ‘Vado Mori’ (I go to die).91 The danse is a dramatisation of the idea of the dead dancing with the living. James Clark in his landmark study on the Dance of Death writes of dances taking place in graveyards where one dancer would imitate a corpse and the

87

88

89 90

91

Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Of Corpses, Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (2004): 61.

For discussion of possible Latin origins of the Danse, see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, ‘Latin Texts of the Dance of Death’, Modern Philology 8, no. 3 ( Jan. 1911): 399–410. Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse, 209.

All quotations from the Dance of Death are taken from MS Ellesmere in The Dance of Death, edited from Mss. Ellesmere 26/A.13 and B.M. Lansdowne 699, ed. Frances Warren, EETS, os, vol. 181 (London: Oxford University Press for the EETS), 1931. Beatrice White, ‘Introduction’, The Dance of Death, xii.

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other mourners would fall down, ‘dead’, then laugh and rise to dance again.92 Whistling past the graveyard indeed. The convention of dancing skeletons, like belief in the living dead, is ancient. Dancing skeletons have been found in antique relics, including on a tomb in Cumae and two antique cameos where a skeleton dances to the tune of a piper; and there was a popular belief that skeletons came out of their graves at midnight to dance and dragged anyone passing the cemetery into the dance and into their graves with them.93 However, the dead in dances of death and dances of the dead are usually, like those in the Legend, not skeletons but cadavers. Finally, the dance is a memento mori, a reminder that all will die, and it is here that the cadaver motif takes on a more sinister tone than in the Legend. At the end of the Legend, the living who have been confronted by the dead have a second chance to amend their lives. In the danse macabre, we witness the final moments of those who have been invited to the danse. They get no second chance. They are led away to death, regardless of the states of their souls. It is the viewer of the danse who benefits from the lesson. As discussed in the introduction (p. 3), while living in Paris in 1426, John Lydgate viewed the Paris murals and poem.94 Sometime after returning to London he composed his own version, which accompanied murals on the north cloister of Old St Paul’s Cathedral.95 It was placed before the Pardon Churchyard, which may have got its name from the belief that plague victims buried there would be absolved of their sins whether or not there had been time for last rites.96 In each stanza, Death invites a representative of a social class to the dance. Unlike some unwanted invitations, this is a summons the recipient cannot refuse. One of Lydgate’s principal aims is an admonishment against the love of worldly things, and particularly against pride, the greatest of sins. This is clear in the answer of the king to Death’s invitation to the dance. Death tells the king that though he was great in life and had many riches, he can take with him into death only a single sheet. The king answers:

92

93 94 95 96

James Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, Son and Company, 1950), 19. Robert Eisler, ‘Danse Macabre’, Traditio 6 (1948): 194. Beatrice White, ‘Introduction’, The Dance of Death, xxi. Ibid., xxii.

See, for instance, Amy Appleford, ‘The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the “Daunce of Pouls”’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2008): 302.

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I haue not lerned/here-a-forne to daunce No daunce in sothe/of fotynge so sauage Where-fore I see/be clere demonstraunce What pride is worth/force or hye lynage Deth al fordoth/this is his vsage Grete and smale/that yn this worlde soiourne Who is moste meke/I holde he is moste sage For [w] shalle al/to dede asshes turne.97 (lines 113–20)

The effect of Lydgate’s poem, then, is not horrifying but didactic, though the conjuration of Death coming to take the living on their final dance would be frightening enough to a medieval audience. Both the mural and poem at Les Saints Innocents and the Lydgate version at Old St Paul’s were destroyed, the St Paul’s Dance razed by Lord Somerset in 1549 to collect building materials for his palace.98 There were close to a hundred Dances in Europe, most of which no longer exist, including the Lübeck Dance of Death of 1463.99 After centuries of wear, it was painted over in the eighteenth century, and ultimately replaced altogether. It was destroyed by bombing in 1942. One that remains, though badly degraded, is in St Marienkirche in Berlin. Another, which is in a much better state of preservation, is in Tallinn, Estonia. This version is thought to be a close copy of the Lübeck Dance.

The Corpse as Bogeyman

We begin at this time to see the growing use of violence in the iconography of the macabre, as scholars such as Sophie Oosterwijk and Christine Kralik have observed.100 Even while images continued to be commissioned for Books of Hours and other illuminated religious manuscripts, and therefore had a didactic purpose, the visual depictions of cadavers took on a more horrific tone. This may be in part because the images lost their ability to shock, as Marco 97 98 99

John Lydgate, The Dance of Death, 14. Ibid., xxiv.

Edelgard DuBruck, ‘Death: Poetic Perception and Imagination (Continental Europe)’, in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, 300. See Oosterwijk, ‘Dance, Dialogue and Duality: Fatal Encounters in the Medieval Danse Macabre’, in Mixed Metaphors, 9–42; and Kralik, ‘Dialogue and Violence in Medieval Illuminations of the Three Living and the Three Dead’, in Mixed Metaphors, 133–54.

100

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Piccat has noted of the Legend,101 requiring the artists to increase the gruesomeness. It seems reasonable to suggest, though, that part of the reason for the increasing horror in the depictions is as a result of the natural progression of the motif itself. When its artistic expression was primarily in the hands of religious, its texts were kept didactic and morally profitable, its iconography fit for purpose. The more artists played with the images, however, the more they did what artists do: they found ways to dramatise and heighten the elements they found most compelling, and it would be hard to argue that the most compelling element of an image of a putrefying cadaver is not that it is hideously dead, and therefore terrifying. In the same way that Caravaggio painted figures in Biblical scenes wearing modern dress to make them more accessible to his contemporaries, so artists of the macabre highlighted the fearsomeness of the dead returning to claim the living, and what we know of popular beliefs about revenants suggests that medieval people liked that imagery as terrifying as they could get it. In early depictions of the Legend, such as that in the de Lisle Psalter, the three dead talk calmly with the living. One of the dead perhaps mocks his living counterpart by mimicking his posture but he is in no other way threatening him.102 The Legend is a non-fatal encounter of the dead by the living, meant as a warning to them to amend their lives.103 Transi tombs, too, though graphic, were essentially unthreatening reminders of the death to come and of the need to amend one’s ways. Unlike traditional tombs, which showed an idealised image of the deceased, transi (Latin, literally, ‘to pass over’; it is a depiction of the dead104) tombs depicted them as emaciated corpses ravaged by death.105 The double-decker tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele in Canterbury Cathedral, c. 1427, which features the archbishop in full regalia on the top half of the tomb but as a gaping, wasted cadaver on the bottom, is startling but without menace. Instead, it is rather sad. It seems to be meant as a reminder that even the great and the good of this world, like the Archbishop, will waste away and die. Then things take a more sinister turn. Cadavers begin to be seen wielding grave implements menacingly and carrying weapons such as spears and darts, such as in the Death and Mourning panel of the 101

102 103 104

105

Marco Piccat, ‘Mixed Encounters: The Three Living and the Three Dead in Italian Art’, in Mixed Metaphors, 155–68. ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, The Psalter of Robert De Lisle. Oosterwijk, ‘Dance, Dialogue and Duality’ in Mixed Metaphors, 23.

Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 2. Ibid., 1.

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early-fifteenth-century ‘Pricke of Conscience’ window (after the eponymous Middle English poem on the Four Last Things – death, judgement, Heaven and Hell) at All Saints, North Street, York, in which grinning Death waits with a spear as three mourners lament the passing of a man and his wife.106 In ‘Death With an Arrow, Rising from a Tomb’, Death smiles out almost coyly from the frame. In his right hand he holds a dart, and his grin suggests he is looking forward to meeting you, and that you will not enjoy the encounter. In ‘Death Attacking a Man’, Death drives his dart mercilessly at the chest of his fallen victim. Later depictions of the Legend also become more frightening. In the version in The Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Emperor Maximilian, three corpses in winding sheets attack a woman on horseback, possibly meant to be Mary herself, and her two male companions, a young man and a second man in white, who may be a priest. The woman has turned her horse to flee, and he charges, terrified. The young man has already fled ahead of her, and looks back, his hand in the air, perhaps to urge the woman to hurry along, or perhaps this is a wave goodbye signalling that he is prepared to abandon her to her fate. The cadaver who has gained on the woman hovers at her left side almost within striking distance, his dart raised for the kill. Another image in the Berlin Hours may be one of the most frightening images of Death in the Middle Ages. In Corpse with a Coffin and a Spear, which is shown on the cover of this volume, a blackened corpse in a winding sheet with a look of banal, mindless evil cradles a coffin under his left arm. His right arm, held aloft and poised to strike, clutches a spear, death’s dart. He is on the move, his right knee bent, his left leg almost dragging behind, as he lumbers forward in his single-minded pursuit of victims. His surroundings are desolate: a grey barren ground that looks almost rocky, like some alien world, with an orange sky, blazing from somewhere below. The distant glow of Hell, perhaps? We see the corpse in profile, but his gaze is not directed off to the left of the frame, in the direction he is travelling. He is not watching the path in front of him. His head is turned towards the viewer, and he gazes out at you with an unmistakable message. The person soon to be stabbed is you. The printer Guyot Marchant’s 1485 Danse Macabre woodcut series, thought to be versions of the murals of Les Saints Innocents,107 included depictions of the dead confronting the living menacingly or leading them away while Platt, King Death, 12.

106

Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Of Dead Kings, Dukes and Constables: The Historical Context of the Danse Macabre in Late Medieval Paris’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association (2008): 131–62.

107

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wielding implements of death and burial such as shovels and pick-axes. By the time Hans Holbein the Younger produced his 41 Dance of Death woodcuts in 1538, the violence is no longer merely implied. In the most overtly violent woodcut, a grinning cadaver is seen running a knight through with his own lance.108 He is grinning as he does so, happy to extinguish the knight, and it is this glee at being able to take a life more than anything that is so terrifying. In this chapter, we have seen how the motif of the cadaver was used to exhort readers and viewers to live Christian lives. This was done by the evocation of horror, by marrying the grotesque imagery of the cadaver to edifying messages about the health of one’s soul. But the potential of the motif was so great that as the horror increased, the moralite waned. A wasted cadaver might be the best possible way to communicate the message of memento mori, representing as it does a clear and potent depiction of death that would be understood by virtually anyone who saw it. But that same potency also made it the best way to express Timor mortis conturbat me not tied to any overtly religious message, and that potential would lead writers and artists to elaborate on the horror it evoked, first for moralising ends and then for the sake of storytelling, but always underpinning them both was the fear of death such motifs lent the power to express. In chapter 4, we will examine what happens to the revenant in the Protestant Reformation, both within and outwith the Church.

Holbein, ‘Les Simulachres . . .’, 136.

108

4 The Reformed Revenant t But what could her Apparition be? It behoved, either to be her reall Body informed and acted by the Devil (for her soul could not be brought back) or only the Devil taking upon him her shape and form, acting and imitating her to the life, which is more probable. ‘Relation XXI, Touching Isabel Heriot’, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, George Sinclair1

I

n a way, it was no surprise that Isabel Heriot should return from the dead. As was often the case with such marvels, Isabel had lived a bad life. She was proud and wilful and a poor student of Scripture. After some time, her employer, the local minister, dismissed her from his service. In the winter of 1680, Isabel took sick and died. If the minister was not immediately sorry at her passing, he soon would be, for several nights afterwards, a local woman saw Isabel, wearing her white burial robes, walking to town from the chapel in which she had been interred. She entered at the minister’s back gate and went into the stable. A few nights later, stones were thrown at the minister’s house, and a few nights after that, at the minister himself, and at a visitor. A servant man had his heel grabbed and another time had a horse-comb hurled at him. The assaults continued for some two months, until one night a certain Isabel Murray saw the dead woman with a pile of stones gathered about her, ready to throw. Murray conjured Heriot to say why she had come, to which Heriot replied that she returned because she had wronged the minister in life, had stolen money from him and done other things. Chiefly, she had consorted with the Devil.2 Isabel is the kind of revenant we get by the seventeenth century. No longer in that grey area in which the walking dead might actually be the person returning to the body they inhabited in life, the Reformed revenant is nothing 1

George Sinclair, ‘Relation XXI, Touching Isabel Heriot’, in Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (Reprinted from the original edition published at Edinburgh in 1685 by Thomas George Stevenson), Early English Books Online e-book, 153.

Ibid., 148–9.

2

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more than a corpse inhabited by the Devil – at least in Protestant Europe. Elsewhere things take a turn, at once back towards the medieval conception of the revenant and in a new direction altogether, but we will come to that later. As we have seen, medieval Christians were tormented by revenants and had built up a rich corpus of literature relating encounters of the living with the dead. By the late fourteenth century, for instance, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead was so well known that, as Philippa Tristram suggests,3 Geoffrey Chaucer could write in The Pardoner’s Tale of three men who set out to kill Death and perhaps count on an automatic association with the Legend in his readers’ minds.4 Chaucer could also write in The Prioress’s Tale, which reproduces a form of the ugly medieval tradition of blood libels against Jews, of another kind of revenant, that of a boy who has his throat cut by Jews but because he learnt the Alma redemptoris mater and sang it every day on his way to school, is blessed by the Virgin by the placing of a grain on his tongue to keep him singing until it is removed. When the local abbot removes the grain, the boy dies.5 This reanimated corpse hews to doctrine, as the dead boy’s continued animation happens through the permission of God through the Virgin. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation efforts to reclaim the Christian faithful, ecclesiastics identified new villains causing all the trouble and, by extension, of course, the old enemy, Satan. Whereas medieval Church leaders often not only accepted but retold revenant tales, Protestant churchmen found a new explanation for such apparitions, or rather, they dusted off the old Augustinian explanation that, according to doctrine, they should have been propounding all along: the devil makes them do it. But the break with the old ways of negotiating death and the dead left many feeling uneasy and seeking new ways to maintain their ties with the dead and to express their fear of death. Reformers sought to give people a new, simpler version of the gospel, and it did not include any relationship with the dead that people had experienced under Roman Catholicism. One of their biggest targets was Purgatory. Their main objection to the doctrine of Purgatory was that a place of purgation should be necessary at all; such a notion suggested that Christ’s passion alone 3 4

Tristram, Figures of Life and Death, 166.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 193–202. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Prioress’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, The Riverside Chaucer, 209–12.

5

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was not enough to save men’s souls.6 John Frith argued, in his response to Rastell’s arguments in favour of Purgatory: For let us inquire of all the proctors and fautors of purgatory, whether the souls that must be prayed for are departed in the Lord or not? And they must needs answer that they are departed in the Lord, for the unfaithful which die not in the Lord must not be prayed for; and, therefore, must they be upright Christian souls which are tormented, for the others are all damned. Now saith the text, that all such dead as die in the Lord are blessed: but what blessedness were that to broil in purgatory?7

In other words, Frith argued, those souls who died faithful believers in Christ do not need human prayers, for the spilling of Christ’s blood at the Crucifixion was enough to save all souls who believe in him and send them directly to Heaven without the necessity of post-mortem purgation beforehand. As for those souls who died without faith in Christ, no purgation can save their souls and they will go directly to Hell, where prayers will do them no good. Likewise, Tyndale in his Answer to More pointed to Scripture to prove that only Christ’s passion could purge souls: For I feel that the souls be purged only by the word of God, and doctrine of Christ; as it is written ( John xv.), ‘Ye be clean through the word’, saith Christ to his apostles.8

Reformers took decisive action to sever the links between living and dead. In England, the King’s Book of 1543 directed the king’s subjects to ‘abstain from the name of purgatory, and no more dispute or reason thereof ’.9 Edward VI’s Chantries Act of 1547 abolished intercessory institutions altogether and 6

7

8

Peter Marshall, ‘Fear, Purgatory and Polemic in Reformation England’, in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. W.G. Naphy and P. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 152.

John Frith, ‘An Answer to Rastell’s Dialogue’, in The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith, vol. 3, ed. Thomas Russell (London: Printed for Ebenezer Palmer by Samuel Bentley, 1831), 145.

William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, The Supper of the Lord After the True Meaning of John VI and 1 Corinthians XI and Wm Tracy’s Testament Expounded, ed. Rev. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1850), 141.

Peter Marshall, ‘Fear, Purgatory and Polemic in Reformation England’, 151.

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declared purgatory a ‘vain opinion’.10 Archbishop Cranmer’s final version of England’s Book of Common Prayer in 1552 removed any suggestion that the living could do anything for the dead.11 Some German Lutheran cities moved graveyards outside city walls to establish the separation between the living and the dead.12 The Reformed Church also sought to establish a simpler approach to dying. Gone was the drawn-out round of last rites. The dying were left increasingly in charge of their deathbed experience.13 On the one hand, this was probably liberating. The pressure not to commit the sin of despair was lifted; images of the invisible figures of the Archangel Michael and demons, standing by ready to do battle for one’s soul, dissolved. On the other hand, the lack of structure and of the guiding hand of an expert (the priest), who knows how all this is meant to go and who will steer you safely through the process, must have left some people feeling a bit alone. Reformers also tried to establish a less ritualised approach to burial. In Geneva, Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541 ordered that people conveying the dead for burial must swear an oath to prevent superstitious practices. French synods condemned prayers for the dead.14 Gone was the bell ringing to comfort the dead (or ward them off, in Natalie Zemon Davis’ view).15 In 1573, the church council of Naaldwijk ended the practice of bell-ringing at burials ‘to take out of people’s hearts the vulgar superstition of the Papists, who declare and teach that ringing is profitable to the deceased’.16 Gone too were the intercessory elements of the funeral service.17 Now the funeral sermon focussed on the transitory nature of life, the inevitability of

10 11 12 13

14

15

16

17

Ibid., 152.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2005), 577. Ibid.

Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘Death, Church, and Family in England Between the Late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 27. Andrew Spicer, “‘Rest of their bones”: Fear of Death and Reformed Burial’, in Fear in Early Modern Society, 168.

Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France’, Daedalus 106, no. 2, The Family (Spring 1977): 93.

A.Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 244. Ibid., 34.

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death, and the certainty of resurrection and eternal life for the elect.18 This could also be both positive and negative. Did the doctrine of predestination make things better or worse? Were you relieved of the burden of working for salvation through good works because it would not help anyway, or were you robbed of the chance to try? At heart the problem was that, as scholars such as Andrew Spicer have observed, the medieval Church’s complex round of services had offered ‘a cathartic approach to death’, and that by eliminating all of that the Reformed Church did not offer people an alternative means of coping with their fear of death.19 An indication that the Reformation did little to alleviate such anxiety is evident in the Protestant ars moriendi manuals that began appearing, such as Thomas Becon’s The Sicke mannes Salve, and the continual sermons of preachers against that very fear, such as ‘Exhortation against the Feare of Death’ (probably by Cranmer), which was included in the Edwardian Book of Homilies of 1547.20 Roger Edgeworth counselled Christians to live a good life while on earth and then: whatso¦euer occasiō we haue to die, we shal go out of this world to rest & quietnes that shall be without al feare of trouble, & shal neuer haue end.21

All these Catholic burial rituals were gone, it should be specified, in official practice, but not in the minds of all parishioners. The severing of the link between the living and the dead inherent in the Reformation must have left the living feeling disorientated, and perhaps with greater anxiety about the dead, particularly imagining them as angry at being neglected by the living. Unsurprisingly, people sought ways to continue expressing their anxieties over death and the dead. The difficulty much of the Reformed Church had in coping with fear of death is reflected in burial, where past rituals and superstitions hung on.22 Edwardian and Elizabethan Reformations, for instance, forbade the ringing of bells on All Saints, and Protestants condemned both the bell ringing and 18 19 20 21

22

Ibid., 37.

Spicer, “‘Rest of their bones”’, 178.

Peter Marshall, ‘Fear, Purgatory and Polemic in Reformation England’, 158.

Roger Edgeworth, Sermons very fruitfull, godly, and learned, preached and sette foorth by Maister Roger Edgeworth, doctoure of diuinitie, canon of the cathedrall churches of Sarisburie, Welles and Bristow, residentiary in the cathedrall churche of Welles, and chauncellour of the same churche: with a repertorie or table, directinge to many notable matters expressed in the same sermons (London: Roberti Cali, 1557), Early English Books Online e-book, Ppp.ii r. Spicer, ‘“Rest of their bones”’, 168.

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prayers for the dead as superstitious. But unlike some other Catholic rituals, the people persisted in these traditions, even in the face of punishment. Throughout the 1560s, people were cited in ecclesiastical courts for ringing the bells in all regions of England, villages and towns alike, and court records of York and Oxford dioceses show prosecutions for it in the same decade.23 Unsurprisingly, the stripping of ritualised elements that had alleviated fear of death had a knock-on effect with respect to the supernatural. Robert Scribner has remarked that Protestantism was unable to dissuade people from their belief in ghosts, poltergeists and revenants.24 In fact, he observed, the Reformation may have actually rendered Protestants more defenceless than their Catholic counterparts against the Devil’s power by stripping them of the ritual and traditional intercessions used to combat the diabolical.25 So, while the Reformation took hold in other areas of practice and belief, both Protestants and Catholics continued to believe that the dead could return to walk.26 In 1453, Richard Baynard of Messing, Essex gave false testimony in a land inheritance proceeding. This act of ill will was remembered and apparently ascribed as a cause when: with inne a while after as he went a hyntying with my lady of Bergeveney soddenly he felle downe and dyed with owte hosill [communion] and shrifte [confession] and a non after he walkyd and yit doth and hath don moche harme as it is opynly noysed and knowen in the contre there a boute.27

In the early sixteenth century, Richard Whitford said that many people had been raised from the dead, and that he had even spoken to one of them.28 Many preachers credited such beliefs as credulous superstitions of the 23

24

25

26

27

28

Ronald Hutton, ‘The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore’, Past & Present 148 (Aug. 1995): 104.

Robert W. Scribner, ‘Elements of Popular Belief ’, in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. T. Brady, H. Oberman and J. Tracy (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1994–5), vol. 1, 237. For Counter Reformation efforts to reform liturgical practice and recapture parishioners, see, for example, Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation, 401–41 and 474–84.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 706–8.

The Armburgh Papers: The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Essex, c. 1417–c. 1453, ed. Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 62. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14.

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uneducated. In about 1564, a young man (whom, it should be noted, many thought to be a lunatic) claimed to have spoken many times with a neighbour of his who had died four years ago. Bishop Pilkington of Durham, writing to Archbishop Parker about the case, said that the curate, schoolmaster and other neighbours also claimed to have seen him. ‘These things be so common here, and none of authority will gainsay it, but rather believe and confirm it, that every one believes it.’29 Popular belief continued to hold that a Christian burial was necessary to help the soul pass into the hereafter. Without proper rites, people believed the soul might walk.30 In 1743, Dorothy Rowland wrote to Lot Cavenagh, a highwayman awaiting execution at Newgate: I have endeavoured to assist you . . . to do that thing which you requested of me, touching the saving of your body [for Christian burial, yet] you speak threatening words to me, telling me, that if you can, you will trouble me after you were dead.31

In early modern England, suicides were buried at crossroads with stakes driven through their bodies because it was thought that the crossroads diffused the evil of such corpses in several directions, thereby diluting its potency, while the stake was meant to keep the dead from walking.32 Another practice meant to stop the dead walking was the use of winding sheets. They were tied at the top and bottom, and in the nineteenth century a cord was even tied round the corpse’s feet.33 Another custom meant to prevent the dead walking, this one from Wales and English border villages, was that of sin-eating. Recorded by John Aubrey in 1686–87, the custom entailed hiring poor people to take upon themselves the sins of the deceased: The manner was that when the Corps was brought out of the house and layd on the Biere; a Loafe of bread was brought out, and delivered to the SinneEater over the corps, as also a Mazar-bowle of Maple (Gossips bowle) full of beer, which he was to drinke up, and sixpence in money, in consideration

29 30

31

32 33

Ibid., 247–8.

Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 60. Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons’, in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1976), 81. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England, 73. Ibid., 112.

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whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they were dead.34

Nor did Catholic churchman always toe the doctrinal line regarding revenants. In 1608 Milanese priest Francesco Maria Guazzo told several stories to refute the contention that the dead could not return until Judgement Day. One was of a corpse who rose near Pavia in 1601, during his own funeral rites. He sat up in his coffin, told a relative to go to his house and retrieve a document he had secreted there and restore it to its proper place, and that it was because he suppressed the document that he was sentenced at death to Hell. Then he lay back in his coffin and resumed being dead.35

‘Spirits and Other Strange Sights, Be Not the Soules of Men’36

As we have seen, once they got rid of Purgatory Protestants had a problem. The laity continued to believe in ghosts and revenants. Protestant leaders, therefore, had to articulate a doctrine that got rid of apparitions but maintained the relationship between the living and the dead. So, they placed a new stress on angels.37 The most influential work on angels and ghosts in the sixteenth century was Das Gespensterbuch by the minister Lewes (Ludwig) Lavater. It was first printed in Zurich in 1569, and was translated into German, French, Spanish and Italian, and then English in 1572 with the title Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght. Lavater collected ghost stories from biblical, patristic, medieval and contemporary sources and explained them in a doctrinally sound way. He used Augustine in particular to demonstrate that when men die their souls are parted from their bodies and do not wander the earth: And in his notable worke de civitate Dei, the .xiij. booke and .viij. chapter he sayth: The soules of the John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. James Britten (London: W. Satchell, Peyton and Co. for the Folk-Lore Society, 1881), 35.

34

Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories, 69.

35

Lewes Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, 1572, ed. J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley (Oxford: Printed for the Shakespeare Association at the University Press, 1929), 98.

36

Bruce Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95.

37

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godly so soone as they be seuered from their bodies be in rest, & the soules of the wicked in torment, vntill the bodies of the one bee raysed vnto lyfe, and the other vnto euerlastyng deathe, which in scripture is called the second death.38

Popular medieval ghost tales held that the dead returned from Purgatory because their lives were not yet complete. Because reformed belief held that the dead cannot return to the living, Lavater concluded that ghosts cannot be the dead returning to this world. In Lavater’s theology, which returned to Augustine’s argument, the spiritual world is ultimately controlled by God, and all spirits exist only in relation to humans. What men and women see and hear, Lavater explained, are angels. They are not dead, but they can take the form of the dead in order to fool the living. There are good and malevolent angels, though ‘sometimes, yea and for the most part, euill Angels do appeare’.39 When such angels appear, it happens always with the permission of God – in the case of good angels to a good end, in the case of evil angels, as punishment. If good angels appear, it is often to warn the living of an impending event or to defend them against some ill; if evil angels appear, it is to humble the faithful and move them to repentance.40 Thomas Lodge wrote in The diuell conjured (1596) that evil angels appear either ‘imaginatiuely by mouing humours and blood (and thereby forme certain apparitions) or they appeare in assumpted bodies, appropriat to their intents’.41 Meanwhile, some Counter Reformation Catholic ecclesiastics took the tack that while some apparitions were brought on by melancholy or trickery, there were still true ghosts of the dead who appeared to the living.42 This evolving narrative of appearances of the dead to the living has about it more than a tinge of fear. As Norman Cohn has persuasively argued, while early Church fathers depicted Satan and demons as vastly inferior to God and felt absolute confidence that they would be defeated in the Last Days, 38 39 40 41

42

Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, 116. Ibid., 163.

Ibid., 175–6.

Thomas Lodge, The diuel coniured (London: Printed by Adam Islip for William Mats, dwelling in Fleetstreet at the sign of the Hand and Plough, Anno 1596), Early English Books Online e-book, 256. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 307.

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medieval churchmen grew increasingly anxious about the power of evil and depicted Satan and demons as formidable, almost unbeatable adversaries.43 Around 1270, Richalmus, abbot of Schönthal, wrote a book detailing all the insidious plots and schemes demons use to lead people into sin. The targets of much of this plotting – and the subject of his book – were monks. They incite them to complain when there is heavy work to be done; they place unsuitable thoughts in the mind of a priest just as he is about to celebrate mass; they put plasters on the ears of a lay brother so he cannot hear the rule of the order being explained to him. Richalmus himself was afflicted with an overpowering urge to doze while reading holy books, attacks of giddiness during mass, and flatulence.44 But we are not to assume from this that Richelmus is lazy or possessed of a more delicate constitution than other men. It is precisely because he is so holy that he is thus afflicted for, he writes, the more Christian charity a man has, the more the demons attack him. If he is not so good, they go easier on him. Cohn concludes that from this it follows that monks and priests were a particular target.45 This may also explain why medieval ecclesiastics were so susceptible to the visits of revenants.

Maleficium

The Church, increasingly anxious about Satan’s power on the one hand and humanity’s weakness on the other, found new (and at the same time ancient), more powerful bogeymen: witches. Witches, of course, are not revenants. They developed as an independent tradition going back to Roman antiquity.46 Still, they share certain similarities that might have encouraged people to site within them some of the anxieties they had previously expressed through revenants. They are therefore worth considering briefly here, in order to explore those anxieties, and what the increased power and varying activities ascribed to witches compared with revenants may tell us about the people who believed in them. Though witches are different to revenants – and far more powerful – they share such features as malicious personalities, the desire and ability to inflict harm on their neighbours, and the ability to cause illness and death. Whereas

43

44 45 46

Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt (London: Chatto: Heinemann for Sussex University Press, 1975), 67–73. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 72.

Ibid., 1–12.

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revenants could inflict only bodily harm, and that crudely, witches could perform maleficium, harm to their neighbours through use of the occult.47 In exchange for the pact by which a witch pledged himself or herself to his service, the Devil supplied the witch with the supernatural power to perform maleficium. The witch could bring sudden illness, mental disorder, maiming accidents and death, make a woman sterile or cause miscarriage, make a man impotent, make cattle sick or die, cause hailstorms or unseasonable rain to ruin crops.48 So, as revenants could spread plague and pestilence, witches could cause unexplained illness in their communities, but to a much greater extent. A revenant spreads illness through contagion caused by putrefaction. A witch does so with the active use of maleficium. From this increased malevolent power, we can perhaps conclude that, in line with Cohn’s argument, evil is growing stronger. At the end of the sabbat (sic) we see what could be a remnant from the danse macabre: the witches conclude their gathering with an orgiastic dance to the sound of trumpets, drums and fifes. Then the Devil has sex with every man, woman and child present.49 Another attribute of the witch forms a bridge between the ecclesiastical revenant tales we have explored and the secular imaginative writing we will discuss later: a growing sense of the requirements and possibilities of narrative. Witches needed supernatural power to attend the witches’ sabbat, the periodic gatherings at which they had orgies and reported on the maleficium they had performed since last they met. Regular sabbats were held locally, but the larger ones were often held at the top of some famous faraway mountain, so witches had to be able to travel long distances very quickly. They did this by flying. They anointed themselves with a magic salve, then flew right out of their bedrooms, sometimes on demonic rams, goats, pigs, oxen or black horses, sometimes on sticks, shovels, spits or broomsticks. The witch’s husband or wife remained asleep. Sometimes the witch laid a stick in the bed to assume his or her place and sometimes even physical appearance. They could thus deceive their spouses for years.50 In these explanations we can observe the developing of narrative imagination, of storytelling, of problem-solving. How did witches get to the top of the mountain and home by cock-crow? Well, they flew. Did their spouses not notice their absence? Well, they bewitched a stick and put it in their beds. The people creating the world of these witches are asking and answering the same questions storytellers ask themselves to resolve narrative 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 100. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 101.

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incongruities, a skill we will see put to use in the imaginative literature we will examine in chapter 5. James VI and I, formerly sceptical of witchcraft, became a believer after a group of East Lothian witches claimed to have tried to kill him and his new queen by brewing up storms to sink their ships. After their marriage by proxy in August 1589, Anne made several attempts to reach Scotland as part of a Danish fleet, but storms and leaking ships drove them repeatedly back to Norway. James decided to join her there and managed to arrive safely in Oslo in late October, but only after his own stormy voyage. On 26 April 1590, the couple sailed for Scotland. Again, the passage was stormy, but they arrived in Leith on 1 May. In later examinations, an accused witch called Agnes Sampson claimed credit for the storms and indeed confessed so many other outrageous things that James called her and the other accused witches ‘extreme liars’. In order to prove the truth of her claims, Agnes took James aside and repeated to him the precise words that he and Anne had spoken to each other on their marriage night in Oslo. The king was very impressed by her occult powers and, it seems, converted to belief.51 The events, writes Peter Maxwell-Stuart, led James to write Daemonologie, a book justifying witch hunting.52 By using the doctrinal explanation for animated bodies of the dead, he both gives licence to the existence of revenants and explains them through diabolical agency, ‘when the Devill carryes it out of the Grave to serve his turne for a space’.53 Demons or the Devil himself may inhabit the bodies of the dead in order to gain entry to a house or perform other physical actions, which they could not do as disembodied spirits, so they can haunt the living. ‘And that the Devill may use aswell the ministrie of the bodies of the faithfull in these cases, as of the un-faithfull, there is no inconvenient; for his haunting with their bodies after they are deade, can no waise defyle them: In respect of the soules absence.’54 In the late sixteenth century, Henri Boguet wrote that the Devil sometimes uses the body of a hanged man to interact with a witch.55 Similarly Italian friar 51

52

53

54 55

David M. Robertson, Goodnight My Servants All: The Sourcebook of East Lothian Witchcraft (Glasgow: The Grimsay Press, 2008), 6.

Peter Maxwell-Stuart, ‘The fear of the King is Death: James VI and the Witches of East Lothian’, in Fear in Early Modern Society, 222. James VI and I, Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue, Diuided into three Bookes (Edinburgh: Robert Walde-grave, 1597), Early English Books Online e-book, 59. Ibid.

Henri Boguet, An Examen of Witches, trans. E.A. Ashwin, ed. Montague Summers (London: Frederick Muller, 1971), 21.

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Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, writing in the late 1600s, asserted that a demon has sex with a witch or warlock by assuming the body of a corpse.56 In 1595, the French judge Nicolas Rémy wrote in Demonolatry, his handbook for witch hunters, that apparitions raised by incantations were not bodily but in the spirit only, or if there was indeed a solid human body, it was a corpse being moved by a demon inhabiting it.57 It makes sense, therefore, because demons as ‘foul and unclean spirits’ would be happiest lodging in ‘stinking corpses’.58 He also attacks as ‘foolish and impiously pagan’ the popular belief that souls hover round their bodies hoping to re-enter them, since Christian teaching shows that the departed already have designated places to which they go. As further proof that the risen dead are merely the counterfeits of demons, Rémy tells the story of Petrone Armentarius who, at Dalheim in 1581, was forced by his succubus Abrahel to fulfil a promise he had made her to kill his only son. Once he had done the deed, he could not endure the loss and was driven nearly mad by guilt. Abrahel promised that if he ‘implored her with supplication and adoration’ she would bring the boy back to life. For the next year she used magic to make the boy seem alive again. This was shown to be deception and illusion, though, when the boy suddenly died again without any previous signs of illness, and ‘immediately began to stink so abominably that it was impossible to look at him except from a distance, and that with the nostrils pressed close together’.59 There is an attempt here at narrative detail, in trying to evoke the horrible stench of the corpse and the reaction to it, but Rémy has confused the senses of smell and sight, as it seems unlikely that looking at the corpse from a distance would make the smell more bearable. It is clear, of course, what he means, but the clumsiness of the description undermines his efforts at narrative detail. In an interrogation by the Privy Council in 1662 after his methods had become suspect, the ‘witch-pricker’ John Kincaid said that he could tell a witch by their unpleasant smell, which resulted from having sex with the Devil. ‘They said’, reads the record of the interrogation signed by John Cunigham, ‘this was because the Devil put on and inhabited a dead corpse.’60

56 57

58 59 60

Sinistrari of Ameno, Demoniality (Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1879), 31.

Nicolas Rémy, Demonolatry, trans. E.A. Ashwin, ed. Montague Summers (London: John Rodker, 1930), 88. Ibid.

Ibid., 89–90.

John Kincaid Questioned, Edinburgh, 4th April 1662, Justiciary Court Records, Box JC26/36, in David M. Robertson, Goodnight My Servants All, 425.

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It was not only witches to whom revivifications were attributed. The Quaker prophet James Naylor was said to have raised a woman from the dead. Naylor rode through Bristol city gates on a horse with an entourage singing ‘Hosanna’ and ‘Holy holy’ and other songs. After riding to the high cross and processing through town, they rode to a house. The magistrates, hearing of this, summoned them and imprisoned Naylor and six others.61 Among the claims associated with Naylor was that he had raised from the dead a woman called Dorcas Erbury in Exeter jail, where he was at that time imprisoned, in 1656. As part of an investigation into Naylor, magistrates conducted an examination of Erbury, who confirmed it and because of this believed Naylor was Jesus. ‘I was dead two days, and he laid his hands upon my head and said, “Dorcas arise”. And from that day to this, I am alive.’62 If true, this would be categorised as a true resurrection and Erbury would not be a revenant but more a Lazarus figure. For the purposes of scholarly rigour, however, let us assume that Erbury was not in fact raised from the dead; and at this remove, it is impossible to tell whether Naylor was messianic madman or charlatan, still further whether Erbury believed she had been resurrected or was a willing accomplice.

The New (Old) Revenant

So far witches. But there begins to appear in the late sixteenth century another monster more closely resembling the medieval revenant, and after wreaking havoc across Eastern Europe, he will spell the end of institutional support for things that go bump in the night. Gábor Klaniczay favours a definition of vampires that focusses on the concept that emerged in early modern Central and Eastern Europe and writes that, according to the accounts of folklorists, the vampire synthesises traits from five different sets of magical belief: revenants, nightly pressing spirits, the bloodsucking stryx of antiquity, witches from Slavic and Balkan territories who were said to persevere in malign activities after their deaths, and the werewolf, a human being who could take the form of a wolf to kill and eat people.63 There 61

62

63

Ralph Farmer, Satan Inthron’d in his Chair of Pestilence (London: Printed for Edward Thomas, 1657), Early English Books Online e-book, 1.

Ibid., 18–19; for another account, see William Grigge, The Quakers Jesus (London: Printed by M. Simmons, and are to be sold by Joseph Cranford, at the sign of the Kings-Head, in Pauls Church-yard, 1658), Early English Books Online e-book, 2–5 and 10–11. Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen

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are a few scattered medieval accounts, but the first clear vampire cases were reported from Silesia in 1591, from Bohemia in 1618, and also in the form of upierzyca from Poland (near Kraków) in 1624.64 As with revenants, those who become vampires were often regarded as difficult when alive.65 They were also usually deviant or abnormal in some way, died in irregular circumstances such as suicide, or died unbaptised or excommunicated. They cause infestation, kill men and animals. One common sign of a vampire’s presence is if the members of his household, his family and his livestock (maybe the livestock of the entire village) die off rapidly.66 To destroy them, one must exhume their bodies, which, unlike the revenant, are undecayed, and either stab them with a pole or similar object or behead them, then remove the heart and burn it.67 Ironically, it was this new public panic about vampires that prompted Empress Maria Theresa of Austro-Hungary to outlaw not only claims about vampires but witch-hunting as well. After an explosion of accounts, people began reporting in 1755 in Hermersdorf, a village near the Silesian–Moravian border, that the corpse of Rosina Polakin, who had died a few months before, had turned vampire and was attacking them at night. She was exhumed by local authorities and found to be uncorrupted (as befits vampires), with no signs of decomposition and with blood still present in her veins. In line with local custom, her family was forced to drag her corpse, by a hook attached to a rope, through an opening in the wall of the graveyard. Outside the walls she was beheaded and burnt.68 Maria Theresa heard about the incident and sent two court doctors to the town to make a report. That report in hand, she asked her chief court doctor, Gerard van Swieten, what to do. All three doctors advised her to ban such superstitions, so in March 1755 she issued a Rescriptum forbidding any traditional measures connected with the magia posthuma (vampirism), and a few months later, she sent a letter to all the parishes and legal courts in Hungary, prohibiting other superstitions besides vampire belief, including soothsaying, digging for treasure, divination and persecuting witches.69 (Louis XIV had

64 65 66 67 68 69

Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 178.

Ibid.

Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 9.

Agnes Murgoci, The Vampire in Roumania’, Folklore 37 (1926): 324. Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 178. Ibid., 170.

Ibid., 170–1.

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already issued royal decrees ending witchcraft persecutions in 1682, Frederick William I in 1728.)70 It was then that science and the clergy took up the study of vampires. Van Swieten wrote a tract against belief in vampires, suggesting instead natural causes for the phenomena people described. He explained medically the bodily fluids found in corpses that resembled blood. He posed scientific arguments about factors, such as chemical elements and lack of air, which could cause a corpse to remain undecayed for months, years or even decades. As for the reports of people who blamed nightmares on vampires, he put these down to ignorance, lack of education, and indoctrination fostered by fairy tales.71 Other doctors studied the phenomenon to see if they could find an explanation. P. Gabriel Rzacynski discussed Polish accounts of vampires in Historia naturalis curiosa regni Poloniae in 1721. Many medical treatises advanced arguments similar to those of van Swieten. The most detailed medical analysis of the period was by a Hungarian doctor called George Tallar, who studied vampires in Serbia and Romania for decades. He observed the exhumation of vampire corpses, examined people who complained of illnesses – fever, digestive problems, pallor and general sickness – that they blamed on being bitten or touched by a vampire. They tried to cure themselves by smearing their bodies with the blood of exhumed corpses and in other magical ways. Tallar attributed the illnesses to the diet of the Orthodox Church and treated these patients, apparently with some success.72 In other words, science made the vampires go away. Religious polemicists had their own reasons for attacking belief in vampires. The blasphemous parallel of the undecayed vampires with uncorrupted saints, to say nothing of the similarity between vampires who rise from the dead and the resurrected Christ, forced them to refute vampire belief in order to defend Christian doctrine.73 A Benedictine abbot, Dom Augustin Calmet, wrote a tract called Treatise on the apparitions, bad spirits and vampires of Hungary and Moravia (1751), in which he defended Christian doctrines such as the resurrection and miracles as signs of God’s omnipotence, while denouncing accounts of vampires and witches’ sabbaths as ‘illusion, superstition and prejudice’.74

70 71 72 73 74

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 174.

Ibid., 180–1. Ibid., 181. Ibid.

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It is not, however, that people stopped seeing vampires. It is simply that the institutional apparatus of church and state stopped countenancing such stories. In the early eighteenth century, French botanist Pitton de Tournefort observed the dissection of a corpse on Mykonos in Greece whom locals believed to be a revenant. He commented that the uneducated onlookers interpreted as signs of revenancy things he knew to have simple explanations: Their imagination, struck by the spectacle, filled with visions. They took it into their heads to say that a thick smoke was coming from the body, and we did not dare say that it was the incense.75

Lest we from our modern perspectives minimise the effect such beliefs had on the people who held them, consider the account of Serbian gypsies returning from a burial recorded by Alexander Petrovic in 1937: This return home often looks like a real flight. They all go at a run, nobody daring to look back, because if the coxano sees him, he will think that the one who has looked back is calling him, and will then hurry after him.76

The Jump from Reality to Fiction

The beliefs and concerns of the people were now denied by both their spiritual heads and their secular leaders. They had been stripped of their ties to their dead, formerly maintained through suffrages, masses and prayers for the dead, and deprived of their ability to express their fear of death through the soothing round of liturgical rites for burial. They worried that their dead were angry, and they had fewer ways to express their anxieties about their own fates after death. Where did such emotions go? One of the most productive places these emotions went was into imaginative writing. Most of it will be discussed in the next chapter, but some pieces are worth discussing here as they still bear the imprint of the religious practices of their immediate past. We see vestiges of the beliefs discussed in this chapter especially in many of the ballads and stories that developed during the period. Let us take first the ballads. Passed down orally or written by non-ecclesiastical authors, they are often confusing or fragmentary or feature characters who lack motives for their actions. Nevertheless, they bear the marks of witchcraft and revenant belief still common among the laity. 75 76

Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, 21–4.

Alexander Petrovic, ‘Contributions to the Study of the Serbian Gypsies, no. 9’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 16, new series 1, no. 2 (1937): 17.

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In ‘The Suffolk Miracle’, found by Francis James Child in a book of ballads dated 1723 and included in his staggeringly comprehensive collection of English and Scottish ballads, a young man falls in love with a farmer’s daughter, but the farmer disapproves so he sends the girl to his brother’s house until she changes her mind. The young man dies of grief. A month later he appears at the uncle’s house saying he was sent by the girl’s father to bring her home. As they ride, he complains of a headache, so the girl gives him her kerchief to tie round his head. When they reach the father’s house the young man goes to stable the horse. At the farmhouse door the father is surprised to see his daughter and asks how she got there. Did you not send my lover to bring me back, she asks? The father, knowing the young man to be dead, is shocked. He and his daughter go to the stable and see no sign of the young man, but find the horse broken out in a sweat. The father and uncle speak to the sexton and have the grave opened. On the young man’s corpse, right where he had tied it, is the girl’s handkerchief. The father and uncle report this to the girl, and on hearing it, she dies.77 This revenant, unlike his medieval counterparts, is not violent, but like many of them, has returned because he has left behind unfinished business: in this case, the marrying of his bride. And in this last detail of the girl’s death, the story is like medieval revenant tales in which people die shortly after encountering a revenant. There are many versions of the tale, some from England, especially Cornwall and the West Country, as well as Ireland, and many from the Continent, including a French version that is almost a verbatim copy of ‘The Suffolk Miracle’.78 In a West Country version more in keeping with the violence of medieval revenant tales, the girl notices while on the horse that the young man is in grave clothes. She screams for help, and a blacksmith stabs at her dress with a hot iron as she and the young man pass. The blacksmith pulls her to the ground, but the horseman holds onto her and the blacksmith and the girl are both dragged along. Near the churchyard the horse stops, and the blacksmith takes the opportunity to cut the girl’s dress free from the horseman’s hold. The horseman rides on to the grave where he had been buried. In this version, too, the girl dies shortly afterward.79 A similar tale of a dead man coming to carry away his girl, who is inconsolable with grief at his death, was widespread in

77

78 79

‘The Suffolk Miracle’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, compiled by Francis James Child (New York: The Folklore Press, 1956), vol. 5, 66–7. Ibid., 59. Ibid.

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Serbia, where, Child writes, it seems to have originated, and with Austrian Germans. There are many other versions all over Europe.80 Some of the reasons for the dead man coming back, though Child does not remark on this, seem to have Christian overtones. One ends, ‘Let this be a warning to you, says Our Lady to the girl, never to mourn so much again for the dead, for he had a hard journey to make.’ In others the dead man comes back resentful that he has been disturbed by the girl’s excessive grief: ‘Since you have wept so much for me, creep into my grave’; while in another, ‘Another time do not long for my dead body.’81 A warning against excessive grief was one of the reasons medieval dead returned to the living in exempla, such as those in The Golden Legend. (This belief was also extant, of course, before the advent of Christianity.) In a very touching version found among Serbians, Bulgarians, Greeks and Albanians, the subjects of the tale are brother and sister. A mother has nine sons and one daughter. When it comes time for the daughter to marry, the mother and eight of the brothers want her to marry someone nearby, but the ninth brother, Constantine, wishes to marry her to someone from a distant country (often Babylon). He promises to bring her to his mother in the event of some special occasion. All the brothers subsequently die of plague (or in some versions, war). The mother chants laments at the graves of her eight sons, but at Constantine’s grave she curses him for causing her daughter to be far away. God takes pity and the stone over his grave (or board or shroud or even a nearby cloud) is transformed into a horse. The dead Constantine rides for his sister and tells her she is wanted by her mother. On the way back, the sister notices that Constantine is grey with mould, or smells of earth, his skin is black, his eyes are dull, his hair full of dust, his teeth fallen out, and why is this? Constantine gives some reason or other to deflect her concerns. When they reach their mother’s house, he tells his sister to go on and excuses himself, saying he must run some errand or other and cannot join her. At the door, the girl knocks, and after giving assurances that it is indeed her, the mother opens the door and, overjoyed, takes her daughter in her arms. As the two embrace, they die.82 Only fragments remain of the early eighteenth-century Scottish border ballad, ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, but in it we see the motifs of excessive grief and the feature of the dead who come in three. In this tale, a woman at Usher’s Well has three sons who go to sea. After about a week, she receives word that 80 81 82

Ibid., 60–2. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 65.

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they have been lost. In her grief she utters what could be a simple wish, but could also be an incantation: I wish the wind may never cease,   Nor fashes in the flood, Till my three sons come hame to me,   In earthly flesh and blood.83 (stanza 4)

Near Martinmas, the sons return indeed, with hats of a bark, which, according to the A version of the ballad, grows nowhere but at the gates of Paradise.84 The sons stay the night but as the cock crows, the eldest tells the youngest it is time they were away. They bid their mother farewell and leave.85 The fragments give no indication why they returned, but it seems likely in the A version at least that it is the mother’s desperate wish to see her sons that called them back for one last night in their mother’s home. ‘The Unquiet Grave’ demonstrates the belief that outrageous displays of grief keep the dead from resting, and, whether an overt warning against necromancy or simply a caution against excessive mourning, offers an abject lesson against seeking to commune with the dead. The A version was told to Folk Lore Record, I, as written down from an oral version by a girl in Sussex. Other versions came from Ipswich, Suffolk.86 The basic story is that a lover mourns his or her dead lover and vows to grieve for twelvemonth and a day. At the end of the time, the dead speaks: Oh who sits weeping on my grave, And will not let me sleep?87 (stanza 3, A version)

The lover identifies himself or herself and asks only for one kiss. The dead usually responds that one kiss from their lips and the lover would not live long. In the slightly more menacing B version, however, the lover, a man, does kiss the girl, and only afterwards, when she comments on the coldness of his lips, tells her she will not live:

83 84 85 86 87

‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 2, 238. Ibid.

Ibid., 239.

The Unquiet Grave’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 2, 236. Ibid.

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‘Your lips are cold as clay, dear love, Your breath doth smell so strong’; ‘I am afraid, my pretty, pretty maid, Your time will not be long’.88 (stanza 5, B version)

In ‘Willie’s Fatal Visit’, a gruesome little tale included in Child’s collection, a young man called Willie pays nightly visits to his lover Maggie, and each morning has slipped out and travelled the road home with no trouble. But this night, the cock crows an hour early, and the lovers mistake the moonlight for the morning sun. Willie dresses quickly and makes his way along his accustomed route, but this night he meets a ‘great and grievous ghost’ who ‘would fear ten thousand men’. In his words to Willie, the revenant seems to be delivering a Christian message against sin: ‘Aft hae ye travelld this road, Willie,   Aft hae ye travelld in sin; Ye neer said sae muckle for your saul   As My Maker bring me hame!’89 (stanza 15)

As punishment for his transgressions, it appears, the ghost tears Willie to pieces and hangs a bit of flesh on every seat of Mary’s kirk, placing Willie’s head right above the pew of poor Maggie.90 One more ballad bears discussion, as it seems to deal with some of the Christian questions about the afterlife addressed earlier in this book. The dead in ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’, though essentially a ghost, seems in some versions to have corporeality, grey as he is with clay from the grave. Version A was printed in Ramsay’s Ten Table Miscellany, 4th volume, 1740. Some versions are English, some Scottish.91 The essence of the tale is that a dead lover returns to ask for the return of his unfulfilled troth. The girl, not realising he is dead, says she will only give this if he comes into her bower and kisses her. In a similarity with ‘The Unquiet Grave’, the dead lover responds that if he kisses the girl, her days will not be long. In some versions the girl follows the dead man back to his grave and asks if there is room for her but is turned away. In one version

88 89 90 91

Ibid., 237.

‘Willie’s Fatal Visit’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 4, 416. Ibid.

‘Sweet William’s Ghost’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 2, 226.

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she dies at his grave for grief. The tale is very similar to a Scandinavian ballad, which has many versions, including Danish and Swedish.92 The Christian connotations come in a popular German ballad which features elements of this one, ‘Der todte Freier’, in which a dead man calls to his betrothed at night from her window. She does not recognise him and tells him he smells of the ground. He has been eight years in the ground, he says, so that may be. In the B version, the woman asks what becomes of women who die while travelling, to which the dead lover replies that they go to Heaven.93 In this perhaps we have, in a lingering concern of Catholicism, a question about what happens to those who die without shrift and housel. In the D version, the woman asks what becomes of children who die unbaptised, to which the lover responds that they, too, go to Heaven.94 And in this we find ourselves returning to Augustine’s treatment of questions about the fate of unbaptised infants, except that in this Protestant context, they go not to Limbo but to Heaven. Other ballads feature revenant figures or the Devil himself, returning to take revenge on or punish the living or, in the case of the Devil, to deceive them and thus reap their souls.95 Turning away from orally transmitted tales to those written by identifiable authors, let us look first at Robert Burns’ Tam O’Shanter. The story is mostly about witches, but in one passage Burns combines the witches’ sabbath with their practice of necromancy, and gives us cadaver imagery as well, when Tam, riding home drunk, stumbles upon a coven of witches and warlocks dancing in the graveyard while the Devil plays the bagpipes: Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantraip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light,– By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer’s banes in bigget airns; 92 93 94 95

Ibid. 227.

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 231.

See ‘James Harris (The Dæmon Lover)’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 4, 360–9; ‘The Cruel Mother’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 1, 218–27; ‘The Twa Brothers’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 1, 435–44; ‘The Fause Knight Upon the Road’, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 1, 20–2.

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Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae the rape, Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape.96

The corpses also brandish instruments of murder reminiscent of the tales from The Golden Legend of corpses wielding weapons in the churchyard – rusted tomahawks, scimitars ‘wi’ murder crusted’, a garter that had strangled a baby, a knife used to slit a father’s throat.97 With Thrawn Janet (1881), Robert Louis Stevenson wove elements of revenancy and the witchcraft accounts of his Scottish childhood into a tale so terrifying that when he read it to his wife he frightened even himself and afterwards they ‘crept down the stairs clinging hand in hand like two scared children’.98 It is certainly possible that it was merely the exquisitely wrought horror of the story that frightened him, but it seems likely that he would not have been so fearful had there not been a vague notion within him that the stories he had heard as a boy had in them a kernel of truth. For, in a certain way, nothing is ever so frightening as the things we feared as children. The story opens on the weary, now-aged minister of Balweary parish, the Reverend Murdoch Soulis, who on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, delivers a sermon on 1 Peter, 5:8 which counsels the faithful to be sober and vigilant, ‘because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’.99 This is not only a prime example of the later Christian fear that the Devil was everywhere, which we discussed earlier, but also a foreshadowing of what we will soon discover in the story: that the minister once saw a horrifying thing, and it left him with a very keen sense of the omnipresence and power of Satan. What happened was this: the minister hires a village woman called Janet M’Clour to be a servant at the manse. Like medieval revenants in life, she is ill-tempered and solitary, and there have long been whispers that Janet was a witch. The townspeople denounce her and drag her down to the water of Dule, ready to give her the water test.100 When Soulis turns up and rescues her, the townspeople tell him she is a witch, but she denies it. To test the case, Soulis 96

97 98

99

Robert Burns, ‘Tam O’Shanter’, in The Devil in Scotland: Being Four Great Scottish Stories of Diablerie (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1934), 43. Ibid.

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Prefatory Note’, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, vol. 8 (London: William Heinemann, 1924), xii–xiii. Peter 5:8.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Thrawn Janet, in The Devil in Scotland: Being Four Great Scottish Stories of Diablerie (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1934), 83.

100

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asks her to renounce the Devil and his works. Janet gives a strange grin, and her teeth chatter, but she raises her hand and does so.101 The next day, the townspeople become terrified: For there was Janet comin’ doun the clachan – her or her likeness, nane could tell – wi’ her neck thrawn, an’ her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit, an’ a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp’. From that day forward, she ‘couldna speak like a Christian woman, but slavered an’ played click wi’ her teeth like a pair o’ shears; an’ frae that day forth the name o’ God cam’ never on her lips.102

In Janet’s transformation after the utterance of Christian allegiance, she becomes like a revenant – a corpse outwith the grace of God. Despite the fears of his parishioners, the minister insists it was palsy and fulminates from the pulpit against the cruelty of the townspeople, who he says brought it about.103 At the end of July, a strange spell of uncanny weather arrived in Balweary the likes of which no one had ever seen. It was hot but blustery, with great gusts of hot wind and sudden downpours. Here we see another common feature surrounding witches. Often in the early modern period, when there was a freak storm that damaged crops or did other damage, people accused locals of whipping up the storm through witchcraft.104 A storm may also accompany the death of a witch, as we shall see. Coming home one day not long afterwards, the minister sees ‘a man, or the appearance o’ a man, sittin’ in the inside upon a grave. He was of a great stature, an’ black as hell, and his e’en were singular to see.’105 This is another common feature of descriptions of the Devil: that he is jet black. This is in line with an extensive medieval tradition, perhaps stemming from racism, perhaps having to do with the discoloration of corpses being associated with the Devil because of the eternal death associated with him. The black man runs off, and the minister gives chase, down the hill, over the Dule water, and to the manse. But when the minister reaches the walk, the Black Man is gone.106 Later that day, the minister sees Janet washing the clothes. She turns round and the minister sees her face, and a cold chill runs through him, for it comes upon him then what the townspeople had been saying, ‘that Janet was deid 101 102 103 104 105 106

Ibid.

Ibid., 84. Ibid.

Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 100, 247. Stevenson, Thrawn Janet, 86. Ibid., 86–7.

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lang syne, an’ this was a bogle in her clay-claud flesh’.107 She was tramping around, and talking to herself, and kept looking sidelong down at the ground. The night of the seventeenth of August, 1712, Soulis heard feet stamping in Janet’s room, then a loud bang. A wind gushed round the four quarters of the house, then it fell silent. Soulis went to Janet’s room. At first, he saw nothing. Then, his heart stopped. Janet hung dead from a single nail by a single worsted thread for darning hose. Soulis fled, locked the door behind him, and ran downstairs. Then he heard a laugh and footsteps in her room. Janet’s door opened, though Soulis knew he had locked it. He heard a step on the landing, and it seemed to him that the corpse was looking over the rail and down at him. He ran outside. Then he heard the ‘unhaly footstep’ plodding down the stairs inside the manse.108 The footsteps came through the doorway, and the minister heard a hand skirting along, as though feeling for its way: an’ there stood the corp [corpse] of Thrawn Janet, wi’ her grogram [grosgrain] goun [gown] an’ her black mutch, wi’ the heid eye upon the shouther, [shoulder] an’ the girn still upon the face o’t – leevin’, [living] ye wad hae said – deid, as Mr. Soulis weel kenned [knew] – upon the threshold o’ the manse.109

She walked slowly towards the minister. Soulis charged her by the power of God to be gone – ‘if you be dead, to the grave – if you be damned, to hell’.110 And at that moment . . . the auld, deid, desecrated corp o’ the witch-wife, sae lang keepit frae the grave and hirsled round by de’ils, lowed up like a brunstane an’ fell in ashes to the grun.111

Thunder clapped, and rain came roaring down. Here is another common belief about witches: that practitioners of the black art, those who had used it to hurt others, or those guilty of some horrible act that had remained secret, ‘died amid the roar of the tempest in the dead of night’.112

107 108 109 110 111 112

Ibid., 88. Ibid.

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 92.

Ibid., 92–3.

Walter Gregor, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland (London: Elliot Stock for the Folk-lore Society, 1881), 136.

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There was little doubt amongst the townspeople that it had been him, the Black Man, the Devil, who had lived so long in Janet’s body, but now he was gone, and (in a conclusion we will remember from many of the revenant tales we examined in chapter 2) ‘sinsyne the de’il has never fashed us in Ba’weary’.113 And, in a circumstance we will remember from Rudolf von Schlettstadt’s ‘On Henry’, the minister Soulis lay for a long time afterwards raving in his bed. From that day forward he is the troubled, superstitious man we meet at the start of the story. Thrawn Janet is an apt example of the intersection of religious and popular belief and imaginative writing. The character of Janet was most likely influenced by a story told to Stevenson by his childhood nurse, Alison Cunningham.114 She was born (1822) and raised in Torryburn, Fife, where a woman called Lillias Adie, in a trial held between 29 July and 20 August 1704, confessed to entering a pact with the Devil, having sex with him and denying her baptism. She died shortly thereafter – whether at home or judicially is unclear – and was buried between the high and low water-marks at Torryburn.115 However, Stevenson is possessed of the narrative skill many previous (and subsequent, as we shall see) tellers of revenant tales lack, and he uses it to imbue the story with the terror so available in the motifs of the reanimated dead. As we have seen, the dramatically reduced set of liturgical practices surrounding death and the dead caused the laity to evolve the expression of their beliefs and fears into extra-doctrinal practices and superstitions. And popular belief in revenants endured. People continued to tell stories of friends and neighbours risen from the dead. Though some churchmen, even Catholics, supported these beliefs, most adopted the new explanation for such marvels: they were either the work of tricksters or demons inhabiting dead bodies from which the souls had departed. People also relocated revenant beliefs in a new creature: vampires. Those beliefs were also debunked by the elite, this time with scientific explanations. In other words, revenant belief simply would not die. When religious and secular leaders no longer supported their beliefs, people began telling their own stories, through ballads and then in imaginative writing, still clinging in their narratives to some of the religious doctrine that underpinned them in the past. So, in a figurative sense, revenants continued to rise from the dead, in the minds of the people who believed in them and

Ibid., 93.

113

Coleman O. Parsons, ‘Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in “Thrawn Janet”’, Studies in Philology 43, no. 3 ( July 1946): 559.

114

Ibid., 560.

115

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told their stories. Their power as artistic expression outweighed attempts by religious and secular leaders to kill them off. In the next chapter we will examine what might be called purely secular imaginative writing: those stories that bear little overt trace of religious belief and yet give vent to the same fears people had formerly expressed to their religious and civic leaders.

5 The Dead Rise – in Literature t Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis1

T

he pagan gods, Lewis wrote, only became beautiful to us, and useful as poetry, when we ceased to believe in them. In classical poetry they are worshipped, feared, hated and sometimes even laughed at, but rarely are they explored as objects of interest to man for purely aesthetic rather than religious reasons. It is that religio, Lewis wrote, that separated us from the gods. In order for us to begin to write about them as approachable characters, the stuff of secular stories and poetry, there must be, besides the religion, ‘a marvellous that knows itself as myth’.2 This, I suggest, is what became of medieval revenants. They became entertaining to us as subjects of fiction when we stopped believing in them. Thus far we have examined the undead in the religious context that pervaded medieval life, and then traced what became of them after the Reformation, when churchmen and scientists sought other ways to explain accounts of revenancy. We will look now at these banished revenants, and efforts by people to resurrect them, divorced from the overt ecclesiastical perspective through which they had previously been mediated, in literature. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, skeletons began to replace cadavers in church-sanctioned painting. The Church, keen to teach respect for the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, could not countenance its being brutalised in art.3 Taking into account beliefs regarding lingering life in the corpse until it is fully decomposed, this effectively – in iconography, at least – banished the revenant from the Church. In any case, over time, having been made more graphic and horrifying as the motif developed, images of the Legend C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 82.

1

Ibid., 83.

2

Marco Piccat, Mixed Encounters: The Three Living and the Three Dead in Italian Art, in Mixed Metaphors, 164.

3

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had lost their ability to shock.4 On top of this, as we have seen, scientists began proffering rational explanations for many of the natural phenomena people had blamed on revenants and other supernatural beings. People sought ways to re-establish the bonds with the dead – previously maintained through the Roman Catholic system of suffrages, masses and encouragement of stories of apparitions for didactic purpose – which had been broken by reformers and scientists. As asserted earlier, that system of suffrages was in part a way of managing the dead, keeping them at a distance so that they did not breach the boundaries between this world and the next. In the early eighteenth century a spate of literature explored the occult, mystical, spiritualist and psychic explanations for the ‘forces of human fantasy’.5 Séances became popular soon after, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, Mesmerism emerged.6 Attempts to reclaim the connection between the living and the dead were also expressed in literature. At a time when science and medicine began to demystify many of the phenomena people had ascribed formerly to supernatural explanation, poets and prose writers began to resurrect those old beliefs, those ancient fears, in literature, clinging stubbornly to the pre-Enlightenment suspicion that the dead did not always remain dead, and indeed, in some of the texts we will consider, that science itself could account for their existence. Every circumstance we have explored up until now – the developing preoccupation with the dead body and its ability to rise and interact with the living; ecclesiastical chronicles using heightened suspense in their accounts of revenants; the growing use of violence in cadaver iconography; and the fear of death that underpins it all – all of it has led to this literary moment: the revenant as modern horror story. Quite how so many motifs with such striking similarities to their medieval predecessors migrated into modern literature would require extensive further study, which still may not yield any answers as it is nearly impossible to determine with any certainty what is in the mind of a writer when she writes, and in any case is outside the scope of this book. For now, we will examine some of the tales with the most striking similarities to medieval ecclesiastical chronicles, lay accounts of the visitations of revenants and medieval imaginative revenant literature and art such as the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead and danse macabre. This account does not intend to advocate the literary quality of these stories. Some are excellent, many are not. Our concern is the relationship of these 4 5 6

Ibid., 167.

Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 182. Ibid.

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tales to their ancestors: historical, theological, folkloric and literary. They are, essentially, medievalisms, but medievalisms of a certain type: each text takes up a motif of the revenant literature discussed in previous chapters.7 But they are also not medievalisms, but are perhaps less than (or more than, or different to) medievalisms, in the sense that they appropriate the motif of the revenant, without regard to its origins, in the same way that medieval writers did, to try to say something about the world. The reason they chose this motif is that it represented the thing they feared, death. The tales began to appear with the advent of gothic literature, specifically within one of the most prominent types of gothic literature: that of terror.8 As Fred Botting has observed, the often gloomy and mysterious atmospheres of the gothic repeatedly signalled the return of the past on the present, provoking terror.9 Gothic literature, Botting wrote, ‘condenses the many perceived threats to [enlightenment and humanist] values, threats associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption’, and corpses and skeletons were among the stock features of gothic fiction.10 Much as strange accounts of marvels allowed medieval listeners the opportunity to refresh their minds, as we have seen Gervase of Tilbury observe, the strange and unfamiliar world opened up by gothic stories allows readers to contemplate notions that might otherwise be unacceptable and to consider in the light of these fantastic horrors the more terrestrial anxieties of daily existence, such as political and social upheaval, changing cultural norms, and death. The tales to be discussed in this chapter could be categorised in several different ways. For instance, some tales use revenants to humorous effect, perhaps to laugh in the face of death. This might suggest its own category. Others set the stories in locales far distant in geography, culture and religion from the medieval western world of the revenant tales considered in previous chapters. This might suggest another. Perhaps by assigning the tales to a ‘primitive’ culture such as that of Haiti, or the occurrence of a risen corpse to the evil On medievalism, see, for example, Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007); and David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015). For the influence of Old English specifically on twentieth-century poetry, see Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

7

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition, vol. 1 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 13.

8

9

Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 1.

10

Ibid., 2.

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magic of the Leopard Men, these writers in their own way, like the medieval ecclesiastics before them, sought to assign the inherent evil, non-doctrinal or unbelievable elements of these stories to an ‘other’, and having absolved themselves of the burden of lending credibility to such beliefs by placing them in an alien context, left themselves free to tell the tales. In a way, though, the stories are self-selecting by virtue of the type of revenant in the tale. It has been decided, therefore, to categorise them in the following way: a) traditional revenants, b) vampires, c) scientific revenants, d) hoax revenants and e) those that are difficult to categorise. A number of texts have been omitted that might have suggested themselves for inclusion as they feature encounters of the living with death in some form and also feature motifs of either the Legend or danse macabre. In The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Enoch Soames, for instance, the main character of each unexpectedly encounters a bringer of death as do the living in the Legend. But in these modern novels, the figure encountered is not a dead man but the devil himself.11 Using the same logic, Beowulf and the modern masterpiece told from the monster’s perspective, John Gardner’s Grendel, have also been excluded from this study.12 Both feature bringers of death, but these bringers are not dead, or rather undead; they are monsters. (They are, however, monsters who in some ways depict the monstrous in man, and in this sense share some ‘DNA’ with revenants.) As the remit of this book is revenants, some tales have also been left out in which a character encounters Death personified, notably The Appointment in Samarra, by W. Somerset Maugham, as Death is not a dead person as a revenant is but rather the state of death itself embodied in physical form.13 Enoch Soames is still worth mentioning, however, in that, while the bringer of death is not a revenant, Soames himself is depicted in ways that make him sound suspiciously dead. Soames, a frustrated writer, sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for the opportunity to visit the reading room of the British Library one hundred years from the time of the story (therefore, 1997) to learn if his self-perceived genius as a writer, ignored in his own time, has been recognised by future generations. (Spoiler alert: it has not.) Beerbohm describes Soames in terms that suggest a revenant: ‘stooping’, ‘shambling’, ‘very pale’, an 11

12 13

James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987); Max Beerbohm, Enoch Soames, in Seven Men and Two Others, Introduction by Lord David Cecil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 3–44. John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Vintage, 1989).

W. Somerset Maugham, Epigraph, Appointment in Samarra (London: Vintage, 2008).

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‘apparition’, ‘dim’, cloaked in a grey cape, with a ‘toneless voice’ and ‘weak white hands’. The narrator’s friend Rothenstein, an artist, says of Soames: ‘Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?’14 Upon a second meeting with Soames, the narrator has trouble recognising him, as though he were a spectre. Even the cover of Soames’ book of poems, ‘Fungoids’, is pale grey, with silver lettering, the very book itself almost a ghost. And at the close of an exhibition of Rothenstein’s, which includes a watercolour of Soames, the narrator says, ‘He, who had never looked strong or well, looked ghastly now – a shadow of the shade he had once been.’15 Significantly, the word ‘ghastly’ comes from the Old English gæstan (gast – to terrify). Having now spoken much about texts of which we said we would not speak, let us proceed to the tales we will examine.

Traditional Revenants

It is fitting that we begin with Teig O’Kane, a folk tale translated from the Irish by Douglas Hyde, as it adumbrates lingering anxieties about propitiating the dead and the concern with providing proper burial to create peace in the afterlife and stop the dead returning to the living. It also retains a trace of the moralising elements of some of the earlier ecclesiastical tales, as the lad’s ordeal comes as punishment for impregnating a local girl and resisting his father’s order that he marry her. Because of these elements, it serves as a bridge from the medieval to the modern revenant tale. Teig is a lazy, womanising, card-playing Irish lad forced to bury a sentient corpse at the behest of ‘little people’ whilst the corpse clings stubbornly to his back. Though doctrine forms the background for the tale, particularly in Teig becoming a target as he is living a bad life, the horror nascent in some of the ecclesiastical tales, particularly those of Thietmar of Merseburg, is on full show here. As Teig lugs the corpse on his back looking for a place to bury him the corpse moans a disturbing refrain, ‘Bury me now, bury me now; there is a spade and turn the ground.’16 This is reminiscent of the witches’ eerie refrain in Macbeth, ‘Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble’.17 Another corpse who occupies the grave where Teig tries to bury 14 15 16

17

Max Beerbohm, Enoch Soames, 9. Ibid., 20.

Douglas Hyde, Teig O’Kane and the Corpse, in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ed. W.B. Yeats (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2008), 47.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardii/full.html [accessed September 2019].

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the first one rises up and shouts, ‘Hoo! Hoo!! Hoo!!! Go! go!! go!!! or you’re a dead, dead, dead man!’18 The dead here have very particular ideas about where they should – and should not – be buried, and as with medieval spirits whose bequests for the health of their souls have not been executed to their satisfaction, they make their displeasure known to the living. Teig trudges from graveyard to graveyard looking for a site at which to bury the corpse, but at each place his way is barred by various supernatural means. Finally, though, he finds a graveyard that will receive the corpse and, after his horrifying brush with the dead, comes home a changed man. He marries his girl and never gambles or goes catting about after that, and in a reverse of the refrain we often read of a village having no more trouble with a revenant after destroying him, the tale of Teig ends thus: ‘It’s he was the happy man from that day forward, and it’s all I wish that we may be as happy as he was.’19 In Thomas Burke’s The Hollow Man (1933), we see an inversion of the God/ Satan paradigm, in which the mysterious but evil Leopard Men (Satan in our paradigm) damns by resurrecting the dead and the murderer (God) saves by killing his victim a second time. It is interesting, too, that the man who murdered the revenant is given the enigmatic name ‘Nameless’, with its echoes of the ancient Hebrew use of the name Yahweh for God, as they refused to speak His name for fear of blaspheming by pronouncing or spelling it incorrectly. In this tale, the dead man, Gopak, does not follow the medieval pattern of a revenant who returns to wreak havoc. He behaves more like a ghost, who generally returns seeking help from someone he knew in life. In Gopak’s case, the help he seeks is to be killed again, and the person he turns to is the person who originally killed him. In the tale, Gopak travels from Africa to London in search of his former friend Nameless, who murdered him and buried him in the jungle fifteen years ago. Again, unlike revenants in medieval tales, who rest uneasily in their graves and rise to walk about and wreak havoc, Gopak was at peace in his grave until the Leopard Men raised him from the dead. In this we see a modern depiction of the ancient idea of death as analogous to sleep.20 Gopak longing to be returned to death can perhaps be seen as another expression of the peace that comes with eternal rest. We also see an example of the ‘othering’ of revenancy by locating its origins in a primitive locale. Burke lays the blame for the revenant on the Leopard Men, mysterious conjurers in 18 19 20

Ibid., 48. Ibid., 54.

See, for instance, Daniel 12.2: ‘And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake . . .’; and Deuteronomy 31.16: ‘And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers . . .’.

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an African village who raise the dead for nefarious purposes. Having located the revenant’s origin in some dark place where evil things might happen, he can safely tell his tale. All Gopak wants is to be returned to rest, to be dead, and for some reason he cannot explain he knew that the only person who could help him was the person who had killed him – Nameless. Nameless has no idea how to help Gopak, so for weeks the revenant remains in his restaurant. He disturbs the diners, who eye him nervously as they eat, sensing that something about him is not quite right. (We can see in this a remnant of Augustine’s almost outraged bafflement that death, which is not our natural state, should exist.) He sits in a chair in the corner, his arms hanging lifeless at his sides, and stares at the floor. One by one, Nameless’s customers stop coming, too unnerved by the strange man to eat. The only person who can rouse Gopak from his reverie is Nameless’s daughter, and when she enters he watches her intently. But rather than her perking Gopak up, he begins to drag her down. Soon the girl grows listless. She turns quiet, and pale, and sits about. The wife notices. How long is your friend going to stay, she asks.21 This echoes the medieval motif in revenant tales in which those who come in contact with the revenant die. Finally, Nameless has an idea. As he was the one who killed him, does Gopak think it would help if he killed him again? Yes, that is what he has been waiting for, he says. So Nameless takes a knife and kills Gopak a second time.22 It is difficult not to see in this the theological ‘second death’, whereby the soul of a body that has already died is permanently separated from eternal life. It is unlikely that Burke’s thinking was this direct with regard to any of the religious metaphors mentioned, but in a culture awash in two thousand years of Christian teaching and symbolism, it would not be surprising that it should crop up subconsciously in his work. In W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw (1902), which relates the horrifying consequences of receiving a talisman that grants a man three wishes, one could see a justification of the Reformation’s permanent severing of the living from the dead, as well as the admonition against intemperate grief in the bereaved. The first wish of the man who gets hold of the monkey’s paw is for £200. His wish is granted, but in the form of compensation paid by a firm for the death of his son in their employ. The second wish, urged on him by his wife, is for his son to be alive again. In the middle of a windy night, a persistent knocking on the door tells him the wish has been granted. So apparently confident is Jacobs in the familiarity and terror of the revenant motif that he seems 21 22

Ibid., 30. Ibid., 31.

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to have felt it unnecessary to even show the revenant of the couple’s son to his reader. The mere sounds of its approach are enough. The reader’s imagination is allowed to do the rest, and imagine it we do – its bloody knuckles still encrusted with grave mould dragging down the wooden door with each knock, its burial shroud dirty and tattered from its struggle to escape the grave, its head perhaps lowered at the door as it has not life enough to fully lift it. Terrified, the husband rushes to the paw to make the third wish – to undo the second – before his wife can unbolt the door and admit what he knows will be the mangled, rotting corpse of his son.23 The message is clear: do not seek to commune with the dead. It is unnatural and can only lead to ill. In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Sir Walter Scott explores the fear of the dead having the propensity for malevolence that underpins so many of the revenant tales explored in this study. He relates the ‘wild fiction’, which he attributes to Saxo Grammaticus, of two Norse princes who formed a brotherhood in arms so powerful each vowed that should the other die first, the survivor would be buried alive with his comrade.24 It transpired that Asmund was the survivor destined to be buried with his dead companion, Assueit. The deed was accomplished, a large stone was rolled over the mouth of the tomb and, reminiscent of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a century passes before a group of strangers, having heard the story, open the tomb, partly hoping to scavenge the grave goods buried with the princes. They lower a soldier down on a rope, but when they pull the rope up, it is not their comrade holding on, but Asmund, still alive all these years later. No sooner had he been buried one hundred years ago than Assueit’s corpse rose, tore to pieces and devoured the horses that had been buried with them, and then turned on Asmund. Asmund took up his sword to defend himself against the demon that had possessed Assueit’s corpse and, finally laying him low, he drove a stake through his body, stilling him for good.25 Scott himself points out the similarities with Greek and Turkish practices regarding vampires, as well as the English custom of driving a stake into a suicide to stop the corpse walking.26 Whether Guy de Maupassant’s The Hand (1880s) can be called a revenant tale depends on whose explanation of the events in the story one chooses to accept: that of the narrator, who offers a perfectly rational reason for what occurred, or his listeners, who insist that there had in fact been a visitation of 23 24

25 26

W.W. Jacobs, The Monkey’s Paw, The Harpers Monthly (September 1902): 634–9.

Sir Walter Scott, Excerpt: Letter Three, in Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (Ware: Wordsworth Editions in association with The Folklore Society, 2001), 67. Ibid., 69. Ibid.

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the undead. However that may be, de Maupassant must have understood the value of terror-inducing stories as a way of exorcising fear of death, and for that quality, the story has been chosen for inclusion here. He makes a kind of game of it, giving the reader two choices of explanation, just as the narrator gives his listeners two choices within the story. In doing so, de Maupassant makes a clever double comment on society, what we choose to believe, and what those choices say about our fears – one within the story and one from him as author to us as readers. During a previous posting at Ajaccio, the narrator, a Judge Bermutier, made the acquaintance of an Englishman, Sir John Rowell, who one day showed the judge a hand hung on his wall, black and shrivelled, its yellow joints, bare muscles and dried blood visible at the stub, where it seemed to have been severed as if with a hatchet. The hand was not only hung but bound with an iron chain riveted and soldered to the hand and looped through an iron ring on the wall.27 It was the hand of his worst enemy, Rowell explained, and he kept it so securely bound because it was always trying to escape. The hand being that of his worst enemy suggests either that the man who owned the hand had lived an evil life – a recipe for revenancy – or that Rowell himself had lived a life evil enough to make such a mortal enemy. Either way, under the rules of medieval belief, revenancy is bound to ensue. The judge little credited his tale and thought no more about it. A year went by, and then his servant woke him to say that Rowell had been murdered in the night. When the judge arrived at the house, Rowell lay dead, strangled, on the floor, the chain that had held the hand dangling broken, the hand itself gone. The judge bent to examine Rowell’s corpse, and in between its clenched teeth found one of the fingers of the vanished hand, bitten off at the second joint.28 His lady listeners, horrified, exclaim that he cannot leave the story there, but must tell them his theory of what happened. You will be disappointed, he says: his theory is simply that the man whose hand Rowell had cut off was not dead at all and had come looking for revenge. The ladies, hearing this, dismiss the explanation out of hand. The judge smiles, confirmed in his suspicion that they did not want a rational explanation. Even though they are offered a reason why the event might have occurred, his listeners prefer to believe that the hand in question belonged to a revenant, and in doing so, choose the cathartic value of fear over the safe but emotionally unsatisfying idea that the man whose hand had been severed had returned for revenge. The 27

28

Guy De Maupassant, The Hand, in Selected Short Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 254–5. Ibid., 256.

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rational explanation would deny them the opportunity to experience fear in the safe space of the drawing room in which they have heard the story. The supernatural one allows it. The poems we will examine next draw directly on the medieval iconography of and popular belief behind the danse macabre, that of the first poet for a lighter purpose, those of the second poet for a darker. Goethe’s 1815 poem ‘The Dance of Death’ (Totentanz) takes its name from its medieval forebear, but Goethe’s is a less doleful and more playful take on the theme and might express both the early modern rejection of the moralising medieval Roman Catholic themes of memento mori and an attempt to rob death of its power by mocking it. In Goethe’s version, the dead being who chases the living through the graveyard does so not to carry him off to his death but to retrieve the burial shroud the warder of the churchyard has stolen from him.29 The poem observes the traditional superstition that the dead leave their graves at midnight to dance, drawing unwitting passers-by into the dance and thence, of course, into the grave. Goethe chooses words with awkward or slightly strange sounds to reproduce through language the medieval iconography of the dance as a discordant, clumsy affair, with shrill piping and heavy, arrhythmic banging of drums, the dancers leaping high in japes, a riot of thrusting knees and jabbing elbows: Now waggles the leg, and now wriggles the thigh,   As the troop with strange gestures advance; And a rattle and clatter anon rises high,   As of one beating time to the dance.30

The dancers in their enthusiasm have stripped off their cerements and strewn them about. The ‘tempter’, then, ever conscious of an opportunity to make mischief, creeps up to the warder as he watches the dance and whispers in his ear: ‘Seize one of the shrouds that lie yonder!’31 The warder snatches one up and runs for cover behind the church door. Eventually, the dance dies away, and the dead collect their shrouds and return to their tombs. One dancer, though, gropes about in search of his shroud. Then he sniffs the air and, catching the scent, follows it right to the church door. He takes hold of the knob and rattles the gate. The warder cowers behind the door. But the dead must have his shroud before he can rest, so he takes hold of the gothic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘The Dance of Death’, in The Poems of Goethe, ed. Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), 130–1.

29

30 31

Ibid. Ibid.

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ornamentations of the gate and begins to climb. The warder’s doom, it seems, is sealed, as the dead dancer climbs up the gate. In a last bid to save himself, the warder thinks to return the shroud, but as he lifts it, the cloth is caught on a tooth of the gate and cannot be disentangled. The warder’s time has run out, it seems, when just then, the witching hour ends and the skeleton’s fate is as it must be for the dead found outwith their tombs behind their time: the bell strikes one and the skeleton falls to dust. In this danse, unlike its medieval predecessors, the dead does not carry off the living, but is deprived of his victim and himself turns to dust, a pretty neat thumb-of-the-nose to death from a poet perhaps hoping for some comfort from his fiction. It also changes Satan from the formidable wicked figure of the Middle Ages and Reformation into the trickster who tries to stir up trouble, but in the end can accomplish little against the living. Like Goethe, Charles Baudelaire also used medieval death motifs, but for a darker, and often more heretically sexual, purpose. His 1857 volume Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) includes a number of poems dealing with the dead. As a poet who considered himself a Catholic, though others thought him extremely unorthodox or even lapsed, Baudelaire is a good example of the tension between the Church’s teachings on death and the dead and the laity’s appropriation of those ideas and images for their own purposes. Perhaps it is the same impulse that drove him to write so extensively in the collection about the Devil that drove the poet, whom critics otherwise characterise as so modern, to write so many poems about the dead. If Baudelaire’s work about the Devil is meant to suggest that perhaps it is we ourselves who are the source of evil, as Jonathan Culler suggests in the introduction to the edition used in this study, perhaps the ‘corpse poems’ perform a similar function, by allowing Baudelaire to explore the dark side of human nature. Many of the corpse poems are derived largely from Soul and Body poetry, and so do not directly fill the remit of this chapter to examine revenant literature. Still, a few are worth mentioning. ‘A Fantastical Engraving’, for instance, depicts the cadaver with his cheap crown, a common medieval illustration, and describes the corpse riding a horse as does the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.32 ‘Skeletons Digging’, which was inspired by drawings of skeletons, is reminiscent of dance of the dead art. In it, ‘skeletons and skinless men’ dig, and Baudelaire, in a moment perhaps indicative of his Catholicism, wonders whether they portend a denial of eternal rest for the faithful: ‘Do you . . . intend to show/That in the pit we may not know/The sleep we have 32

Charles Baudelaire, ‘A Fantastical Engraving’, in Flowers of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141.

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been promised there.’33 ‘Danse Macabre’ was inspired by a statuette by Ernest Christophe, and describes a common medieval depiction of a once-beautiful woman as a wasted cadaver with the remnants of her luxurious garments covering her skeletal frame.34 Baudelaire describes ‘the frill that plays along her clavicles/As a lewd streamlet rubs its stony shores.’35 In the sixth stanza, in an example of the clash between Roman Catholic doctrine regarding the dead and the lay belief in the sentient corpse, he describes the cadaver as memento mori while at the same time toying with the idea that she is not entirely dead and, even more heretically, perhaps still capable of human sexuality: Do you display your grimace to upset Our festival of life? Some ancient fire, Does it ignite your living carcass yet, And push you to the Sabbath of Desire?36

Makis Your Merour Be Me

We move now to several writers who used the motif of the revenant to comment on the political circumstances of their times. In this respect they perhaps fit better with Schmitt’s notion of ecclesiastical ghost stories told for political reasons than with such overtly horrifying tales as those told by William of Newburgh or the Monk of Byland Abbey. None is particularly frightening; indeed, they are rather melancholy, and we are left at the end of each with the idea that the historical events for which their revenancy are metaphors are stains on humanity, secular examples of lives lived badly. The undead woman in Washington Irving’s The Adventure of the German Student (1824) falls under the category of revenants created because of something that was done to them,37 and Irving uses the thing that was done to her to comment on the horrors of the French Revolution. One stormy night, young German student Gottfried Wolfgang is returning to his Paris lodgings. The blood has been running in the streets, and his sensitive nature is shocked by so much death. Irving takes care to draw a portrait of Wolfgang as one who keeps company with the dead – writers. He spends his time in the libraries

33 34 35 36 37

‘Skeletons Digging’, 189–91.

Ibid., ‘Dance Macabre’, 197–200. Ibid., 197. Ibid.

See Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death, 29.

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of Paris, ‘those catacombs of departed authors’.38 He is, in a sense, ‘a literary goul [sic], feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature’.39 It is perhaps no surprise, then, what befalls him. In another holdover from medieval literature, the young man’s first inkling of something amiss comes to him in a dream, when he sees the face of a woman of ‘transcendent beauty’. She visits his dreams by night, and haunts his thoughts by day, until he is utterly enamoured of her. On the stormy night we mentioned above, Wolfgang makes his way through the streets of the Marais. As he enters the Place de Grève, the scene of so much of the Reign of Terror, Wolfgang rears back in horror to discover that he is hard by the guillotine. He sickens and begins to turn away, but just then spots a shadowy figure huddled on the steps of the scaffold. Wolfgang approaches. She looks up. It is the woman from his dream. She has no friend on earth, she tells him, no home but in the grave.40 Wolfgang takes her to his lodgings, and because he loved her before they ever met, to his bed. ‘I pledge myself to you for ever’, he says. ‘For ever?’ she asks. ‘For ever’, he says.41 The next morning he leaves his bride sleeping and goes in search of larger rooms. When he returns, he finds her lying with her head hanging off the edge of the bed. He approaches and takes her hand, but it is cold, and her face is pale and ghastly. She is, in fact, a corpse.42 He summons the police, and as the officer enters the rooms he starts back. The woman in the bed, he says, was guillotined the day before. He steps forward and undoes the black collar round the neck of the corpse, and her head rolls onto the floor. Wolfgang begins to shriek. He is certain an evil spirit had reanimated the dead body in order to persuade him to pledge his soul. He goes distracted and is confined to a madhouse, where he dies.43 In Irving’s revenant tale, all those who participated in the Reign of Terror have lived a bad life, and all those who come in contact with them are tainted by its evil. Though Alexander Pushkin’s dead in The Coffin Maker (1830) do not dance, they do accept the undertaker’s invitation to a feast at his house, and Pushkin uses them as a different kind of social comment to the message of the medieval danse that no matter what their station, all people must die. Insulted by the 38

39 40 41 42 43

Washington Irving, The Adventure of the German Student, in Bracebridge Hall; Tales of a Traveller; The Alhambra (New York: Library of America, 1991), 419. Ibid.

Ibid., 421. Ibid., 423. Ibid.

Ibid., 424.

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drunken toasts at a party that seem to him to demean his profession, Adrian Prokhoroff stalks home and declares that instead of inviting his neighbours to a feast as he intended, he will invite the people for whom he works: the dead. He boldly invites all those he has buried to a feast at his house the following night.44 The next evening as he nears his house, he sees someone open his gate and disappear within. Then another figure approaches his gate, but before he can enter he sees Prokhoroff approaching and removes his hat. The man looks familiar, but Prokhoroff cannot place him. He invites the man in and they climb the steps. Inside, Prokhoroff hears people walking about in his rooms. He goes to investigate but at the threshold is stopped in his tracks. The room is full of corpses. Prokhoroff recognises with horror that they are all the people he himself had buried: the dead he had so recklessly invited the night before. Just then, Prokhoroff is approached by a skeleton. It is Peter Petrovitch Kourilkin, the first person Prokhoroff ever buried, and, he reminds Prokhoroff, in a cheap coffin instead of oak. This, of course, is Pushkin’s project, at least in part: to highlight the privations of the Russian people because of the depredations of those in positions of power. That he chose the medieval motif of the danse macabre, which was used to express the equality of all social classes, is a sign both of his understanding of the artistic power of death and the potential of that power to be used for purposes other than those sanctioned by the Church. The skeleton stretches out his bony arms to Prokhoroff, but the coffin-maker, repulsed, pushes him away. The skeleton staggers, falls and crumbles to bits. The other corpses become indignant and rise to avenge their fallen comrade. They close in on Adrian, threatening and shrieking, till they nearly crush him to death. Prokhoroff, unable to bear the horror, passes out.45 He wakes to the sunlight shining on him in his bed. It was all a dream. He had come home drunk from the party at which he had been given offence, passed out and just now awakened. But unlike the medieval victims of such experiences Prokhoroff – like the privileged Russians he is meant to stand in for – shakes the whole thing off and calls for his tea.46 G.W. Hutter uses the danse macabre motif in Salt Is Not for Slaves (1931) to dramatise the abuses of the colonial system of slavery in Haiti. An old woman, Marie, tells the story to a guest of a hotel on the island. Marie, her 44

45 46

Alexander Pushkin, The Coffin-Maker, in The Prose Tales of Alex Poushkin, trans. T. Keene (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1911), 388. Ibid., 391. Ibid., 392.

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lover Tresaint and all the other slaves on the plantation they worked were kept cowed by their master, who told them if they ate of the salt in his stores, they would die. But one day a man called Christophe in the north of the island began preaching freedom. Christophe became Emperor of Haiti in 1804. That would make Marie nearly 150 years old. It was impossible. Still the guest listened. Tresaint and the other slaves were taken up in the movement for freedom. While their master was away, Tresaint broke open the wine cellar and distributed bottles all round, then decided to fetch the salt. Tresaint and five of his friends run off to the stores to break down the door. Marie sits frozen in fear. Soon all goes quiet, and then she begins to hear a curious sound: the pattering of bare feet. She creeps to the storeroom. There she sees Tresaint and the other five skipping around the room, waving their arms but making no sound. Tresaint’s eyes did not move, there was no sign of breath, and his face was drawn and rigid. His ribs stood out through his torn shirt – bare bones. Marie screamed, for she knew. They were all dead. ‘They were corpses treading a fantastic dance of death.’47 Then, in a fulfilment of the medieval iconography and popular fear that the dead draw the living into the dance, Tresaint’s cold fingers close hard round Marie’s hand, and she is pulled into the dance. They dance out of the villa, down the road and through the town. People scatter in terror as they pass, six corpses leading a live woman in a dance of death, the dead with their ‘fleshless arms raised, threshing the air’48 and in the discordant music of the medieval dance of the dead, ‘the shrill, deep unearthly yells that came from still throats’.49 They dance all the way to the graveyard. Marie tears desperately at the skeletal hands of Tresaint clutching at hers. She breaks free and falls back on the grass, and faints. When she awakes, the bodies of Tresaint and the other five lie nearby, stiff and dead. The townspeople recover their courage and enter the cemetery. As they lift the bodies, they find that beneath each one the soil is loose: a grave has been prepared for each. Just six graves, Marie tells the guest, and that is why she survived. She did not eat of the salt, and when Tresaint saw that only six graves had been dug, he let her go. The effects of colonial slavery knock on, however. Earlier that afternoon, another worker had spilled a container of salt, and a few grains touched Marie’s tongue. From that moment, she knew, the curse was upon her and she would 47

48 49

G.W. Hutter, Salt Is Not for Slaves, in Zombie, Stories of the Walking Dead, ed. Peter Haining (London: Target, 1985), 47. Ibid., 49. Ibid.

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soon die. Now she touches some of the salt that lay still on the ground, brings her hand to her mouth and licks it, hoping to speed her end. The guest, like the many who turned a blind eye to or participated in colonialism, dismisses her suffering and leaves, but realises he has left his cigarettes behind. When he returns to the patio, he finds Marie, her flesh melted away, nothing left but bones.50 Hutter’s message is clear: though slavery has ended, the suffering it caused cannot, and must not, be forgotten. The damage done to its victims will continue to plague their descendants for generations. We will tack two more tales under our moralising header as, though they are more light-hearted, both have a message to convey. In Mark Twain’s A Curious Dream (1907), the narrator encounters an exodus of corpses from a cemetery with their coffins slung over their shoulders because they are unhappy with the upkeep. The subtitle of the story is ‘Containing a Moral’, but it is a very different moral from those of medieval revenant tales. In this case, the moral is to look after the graves of one’s kin. In a sense, however, it is also similar to one particular medieval concern in that it seems to illustrate vestiges of the responsibility to honour the dead through proper burial, tomb monuments and other services. The Roman Catholic system of suffrages is gone, but the message endures: remember your dead. Many of the elements of Twain’s story – whether consciously or not – have medieval analogues. In keeping with Augustine’s theory of apparitions, and also reminiscent of so much medieval romance, the encounter happens in a dream.51 In a whiff of the Legend, the narrator initially encounters three corpses. Their visages, too, smack of medieval danse macabre iconography: their eyes are ‘cavernous sockets’, and they grin strangely.52 One of the dead eyes up the narrator and decides he is worth complaining to. Settling himself beside him, he tells his tale of woe. When he was first interred, the cemetery was out in the country, ‘in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods’. Graves were kept beautifully, monuments maintained, rosebushes and shrubbery trimmed. But now, the corpse says in a grievance suggestive of the medieval chastisement against kin who fail to pray for the souls of their ancestors or fulfil their bequests, ‘Our descendants have forgotten us’.53 His grandson lives in a stately mansion, while the corpse whose money built it now lives in ‘a neglected grave

50 51

52 53

Ibid., 53.

Mark Twain, A Curious Dream, in Sketches, New and Old, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 192. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 195.

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with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them nests withal!’54 Gnawing vermin, a rent burial shroud: more medieval touches. Near the end of the tale, it is possible to imagine a nod to the dance of the dead, when the corpse sees some of his old friends the Bledsoes also upping sticks and takes leave of the narrator to join in with them.55 Thurnley Abbey (1908) by Perceval Landon is unabashedly a horror story for the sake of horror itself, but although it seems at first a typical Victorian ghost story – a reputedly haunted pile; its new lord a scoffer until he sees the spectre himself; the noble friend called in to assist – its surprise comes in the revelation that the spirit is actually corporeal. The friend, Colvin, wakes in the middle of the night to the sight of a rotting corpse at the foot of the bed, watching him, still in its burial shroud, its eyes and flesh rotted away. This creates a primal terror in the reader not only because of the presence of the corpse, but because of the absence of its eyes, one of the main markers of ‘personhood’, which would be among what anthropologist Pascal Boyer has termed violations of the ontological category of ‘person’.56 Colvin strikes at the corpse. It crumbles beneath his fist, cutting Colvin’s hand to the bone. Convinced now that the apparition is a hoax perpetrated by his friend Broughton, Colvin smashes the thing to bits.57 He takes a bit of the skull and storms across the hall to Broughton’s room. But Broughton’s terror tells him it is no hoax of his. He screams and screams, then takes the bone and paces the room. He trips, falls face down on the carpet and the bone flies from his hand and lands near the door. Then they hear footsteps. Broughton turns out the light and they hide their eyes in terror. The footsteps enter the room. A moment later, the footsteps recede, out of the room, and back down along the oak floors. Colvin runs to the door, then looks down. The bone that lay on the floor is gone.58 The next morning, they go together to Colvin’s room. Where he had left the corpse smashed in a million pieces on the floor, nothing remains but the smears of his own blood on the bed and the carpet. What began as a classic ghost story ends as an example of belief that a revenant will return to retrieve a part of its body taken from it. 54 55 56

57

58

Ibid.

Ibid., 200.

Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 65. Perceval Landon, Thurnley Abbey, in The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 475–6. Ibid.

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The Story of Baelbrow (1898) is another example of an unapologetic horror story, though its overblown nature makes it far less effective than Thurnley Abbey. For the authors, it was not enough for their creature to be undead: it had to be a mummy possessed by the spirit of a vampire (much like demons were said to inhabit dead bodies in the doctrinally sound explanation of revenants, though I do not think this is what Augustine had in mind). There is little of interest for our purposes in the sensational tale save the fact of the undead villain itself. The disembodied spirit haunting the mansion – that of a vampire, as it turns out – had no body with which to attack before, but once the mummy arrived courtesy of Baelbrow’s heir Swaffam, an amateur scientist, the vampire took possession of its corpse and began to attack the house’s occupants. The creature is destroyed with several gunshots to the face and then a burning at sea.59

Vampires

We move now to the newer, more dangerous incarnation of the revenant discussed in the previous chapter: vampires. A comprehensive survey of vampire literature will not be undertaken here, both because such a thing is virtually impossible and because the vampire is only one species of revenant – and that much altered from its medieval predecessor – and therefore should only be briefly treated in a study whose remit is revenants.60 In one of the first depictions of the vampire in literature, the 1813 poem The Giaour, Lord Byron spins a tale based on the Turkish custom of throwing a cheating woman into the sea in a sack. Though it is not central to the story, the giaour (infidel) who kills the man who drowned his lover is condemned to turn vampire after death and kill his own kin by draining their blood, even his own son: But one that for thy crime must fall – The youngest – most belov’d of all, Shall bless thee with a father’s name – That word shall wrap thy heart in flame61 59

60

61

E. and H. Heron, The Story of Baelbrow (originally published Pearson’s Magazine, April 1898, reprinted in Pearson’s Magazine Vol. V, January to June, 1898, London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1906), 375. For a more extensive survey of vampire literature, see Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960), 271– 340; for literary analysis of Dracula and other major vampire literature see, for instance, Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 144–54.

Lord Byron, The Giaour, in Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 227.

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We could read in this passage Adam’s responsibility as the father of man for the first death by eating the fruit offered to him by Eve. Byron extended the vampire motif – or tried – during the ghost-story contest in the cold rainy Geneva summer of 1816 that produced Frankenstein.62 Byron never finished A Fragment, but in its first pages he expressed a sentiment (tangential to his story but worth noting in the larger context of our discussion) that I contend fuels much of the speculation regarding the afterlife that turned the unknown into the worst kind of sufferings and terror: ‘Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil.’63 It could be argued that much of theology was produced in the spirit of that statement. Theology, like literature, is a work of the imagination, and where early Christians, like their forebears, stared into the void of the afterlife, they saw mystery and therefore, the potential for evil. To combat it, they wove a cosmology in which good battles and ultimately triumphs over evil. As views of evil evolved, theology was massaged and rewritten to address those perceived dangers. But evil crept back in; in the case of the texts we are examining, in the form of revenants. So too, then, literature: it is our secular way of addressing the mysteries of life and death. In the particular case of death, which is so mysterious, myriad writers built a store of tales employing revenants to explain, and hopefully combat, that mystery and the evil in it. John Polidori’s The Vampyre; a Tale (1819) was also a product of the ghoststory contest, and completes the story Byron had begun with A Fragment.64 For various reasons, including the story’s false attribution for a time to Byron, the tale gained fame, spawned dramatisations, and therefore became the basis for many later treatments of the vampire theme.65 In Polidori’s story, the vampire, Lord Ruthven, is a decadent aristocrat who beds and kills women by sucking their blood. He also encourages vice and profligacy of every kind in the people he encounters, and therefore leaves in his wake a pestilence of a different kind to that of medieval plague – vice and penury. On a grand tour of Europe, the main character, Aubrey, watches Lord Ruthven sicken and die, but on his deathbed, Ruthven extracts a promise that Aubrey will not breathe a word of his death for one year. Aubrey vows it, but on his return to 62

63

64 65

James Rieger, ‘Introduction’, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), xvi. Lord Byron, A Fragment, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 261.

James Rieger, ‘Introduction’, in Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, xvii. Ibid., xvii.

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England is stupefied to discover Lord Ruthven alive and making the rounds at a drawing-room. Before Aubrey can react, he is seized by the arm, and hears Ruthven’s voice in his ear: ‘Remember your oath.’66 Aubrey’s affliction over keeping his vow is increased when Ruthven begins courting Aubrey’s own sister. Unable to bear the strain, he suffers a breakdown and is confined to his bed. To his horror he learns that his sister and Ruthven are to be married, and that the nuptials are scheduled for the day before his vow is set to expire. The marriage is solemnised, and Ruthven and his bride leave London. The clock strikes midnight, and Aubrey immediately tells what he knows. His guardians believe him without hesitation and rush to protect Miss Aubrey, but it is too late. Ruthven is gone, and the girl is found dead.67 The story is one of several we will consider in which a male hero is unable to save his female ward – in this case, his sister – from the attacks of the vampire (read: the seductions of a male suitor). This is both an amplification of the power of a revenant similar to the new powers ascribed to the witch and an expression of anxiety over a loss of male control over sexuality. Ironically, the asserting of sexuality by one male means the loss of power over it by another. The story is different from other vampire tales in that Ruthven escapes in the end, and his ‘rape’ of the helpless female is not avenged. The characterisation set by Polidori of the male aristocratic vampire would largely hold sway throughout the nineteenth century. We turn now to The Amorous Corpse (1836), in which Théophile Gautier uses the motif of revenancy to explore the taboo of sex with the dead that had begun to be explored in late medieval and early modern literature. The idea of the living having sex with the dead is seductive perhaps because it suggests both continued congress between the living and the dead and also the idea that life might be passed to the dead from the living, just as Augustine thought original sin was passed from one generation to the next through the act of sexual intercourse. The Amorous Corpse is an example of the convention in which a lover is seduced by a demon in human form, much like seventeenth-century witches who had sex with the devil inhabiting a corpse. In this case, however, the victim is no ordinary man but a priest, and the tale can be seen as an example of the special assaults by demons against holy men or as a metaphor for the corruption of the clergy. The amorous corpse, Clarimonde, is in fact a vampire, but Gautier does not stress this in the story. Unlike in Carmilla, in which the 66

67

John William Polidori, The Vampyre; a Tale, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 282. Ibid., 287.

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vampire is sexually insatiable and obviously vampyric to all but the inhabitants of the tale, Clarimonde is portrayed merely as a seductive female, her deadness hinted at only, and the predatory nature of a vampire all but omitted. The tale therefore seems intended more to explore necrophilia and the corruptibility of the priest than sexual predation. The affair continues until the priest is almost wasted away. He can only be convinced that the woman he loves so passionately, Clarimonde, is dead and a vampire by a midnight sojourn into the graveyard with his abbé. Hunting amongst the tombstones, finally the abbé finds the one he is looking for. He raises his lantern to the slab, and by its light the priest reads the epitaph: Ici gît Clarimonde, Qui fut de son vivant La plus belle du monde.68 [Here lies Clarimonde Who was in her lifetime The most beautiful in the world.]

The priest, convinced, stands by as the abbé destroys her. The instant holy water touches her body, Clarimonde crumbles to dust.69 With Carmilla (1871), we see another early depiction of the highly sexual vampire (and one of the rare examples of a female vampire). In depicting the vampire as sexually insatiable Le Fanu draws on the popular belief that vampires could have sex with the living. The first association of sexuality with the vampire was in the 1718 account of a merchant called Kaszparek in the town of Lubló on the Hungarian–Polish border who, after stealing the fortune of a Polish customer, soon died and began returning at night to his widow, presumably on conjugal visits.70 Contemporary accounts also commonly describe vampires as having erections, a circumstance in fact caused by the bloating of sexual organs during decomposition.71 Depicting the vampire as female, however, was unusual. Very few revenants in medieval accounts were women. As we have seen, there were a few depictions in poetry, such as in the Awntyrs, but the female dead tended to return as ghosts, who by their nature sought help from the living they visited. This placed them in a subservient – female – position. It was almost always men 68

69 70 71

Théophile Gautier, T., The Dead Leman (La mort amoureuse), trans. Andrew Lang and Paul Sylvester (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1903), 64. Ibid., 65.

Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 179. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death, 9.

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who returned as revenants, which probably is largely due to the belief that those who had lived a bad life would walk after death, and since most violence was committed by men, in war, but also in their daily lives, they were more likely candidates for bad lives. In later popular accounts of vampires, they too were mostly male. This no doubt is a continuation of the medieval belief of the bad life leading to revenancy but has also to do with the biting of the victim being an act of penetration mirroring male penetration of the female during sexual intercourse. It may also be wishful thinking: for all its violence, a vampire is powerful, and men like being depicted as powerful. Depicting a vampire as female, on the other hand, as Le Fanu does Carmilla, may be tied to male anxieties about increasing female power. Depicting that power as sexual and dangerous is a potent comment. The medieval Church fulminated constantly against the weak and wicked female leading men into sin. As the Roman Catholic Church moderated its language after the Counter Reformation, perhaps the message that no longer had such strong religious expression found outlets in literature. Whether Le Fanu would have consciously intended such a message is unclear. However, his wife suffered a hysterical attack in 1858 after years of struggling with anxiety and died the next year. It seems possible that guilt and repressed anger over his wife’s mental illness and death might have found their way into Le Fanu’s characterisation of Carmilla, who frequently runs on in almost unintelligible musings about her love for her intended victim, Laura, and their future bliss together in death. Laura, though English, lives with her father and governesses in an ancient castle in Styria. Parents, especially mothers, are peculiarly absent in the story. Laura’s mother died many years before, and her father is a rather ineffectual, though loving, sod who seems incapable of acting to help her even as he sees her deteriorating – in a sense, feminine. The same is true of his friend the general, guardian of another orphan – his niece – who lost both her parents. The general, too, stands by as his ward grows weak, pale and wastes away. He does not act in time to save her, and within days she is dead. The vampire Carmilla displays an interest in Laura bordering on sexual obsession. She kisses her, caresses her, and speaks to her so intimately that Laura, at the same time that she is mysteriously entranced by Carmilla, is made very uncomfortable and even wonders if a boy has sneaked into the house dressed as a woman to try and seduce her.72 No one thinks it odd that Carmilla locks her door at bedtime and admits no one, and does not emerge from her room until late in the afternoon, nor that she eats nothing but 72

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, in In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 263–5.

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chocolate (quite why chocolate is fit for vampires is never explained), and that even a brief walk out of doors exhausts her and she takes quickly to benches amid the shade of the trees.73 The family do have concerns about the large number of mysterious deaths in the area, of girls who grow listless, waste away and die. For quite some time, the only person who does notice anything odd about Carmilla is a hunchback who comes round from time to time to entertain Laura’s family with fiddling and outrageous antics. The choice of a hunchback as the only person who can see the truth about Carmilla contains echoes of historical belief that dwarfs and hunchbacks were people of special talents or abilities, sometimes even deities. Court jesters were often dwarfs or hunchbacks, and, as the King’s fool, could speak uncomfortable truths forbidden to everyone else to utter. ‘Of at least equal importance with his entertainer’s cap was the jester’s function as adviser and critic’, writes Beatrice K. Otto. This is what distinguishes him from a pure entertainer who would juggle batons, swallow swords, or strum on a lute or a clown who would play the fool simply to amuse people. The jester everywhere employed the same techniques to carry out this delicate role, and it would take an obtuse king or emperor not to realise what he was driving at, since ‘other court functionaries cooked up the king’s facts for him before delivery; the jester delivered them raw’.74 The hunchback spots Carmilla from the off, as does his dog, who – as dogs often do in the presence of revenants – begins to howl at the site of her. He first persuades Laura to buy an amulet to ward off the oupire (the Polish word for vampire), which, he hears, has been rampaging through the woods of late. He then unrolls a leather case full of odd steel instruments. Professing expertise in dentistry, he takes up a file. Your friend, he tells Laura of Carmilla, has the longest tooth, long and sharp as a needle: Now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases.75

Carmilla berates the hunchback violently, and his attempt to defang her fails. Soon Laura has a nightmare in which a sooty-black creature creeps into her room and springs onto her bed. She feels a sharp pain in her throat then, like two needles piercing her flesh. From that night on she begins to have 73 74

75

Ibid., 265.

Beatrice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 244. Ibid., 269.

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disturbing, erotic dreams in which she is being caressed and kissed. The kissing reaches her throat and concentrates there. She begins to feel cold and then becomes insensible. Her health deteriorates, and she begins to exhibit the same symptoms as the other girls in the area who have died. She grows tired, and listless, and pale. Her father summons the doctor, who examines her neck and finds the same two puncture wounds as on the necks of the other victims. He expresses his theory to Laura’s father, that the girls are victims of a vampire, but the father scoffs. Soon, though, the general arrives, whose own ward has recently been carried off by the mysterious illness. They locate the lost tomb of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. They open it, and inside find Carmilla. This is where she goes after she has locked her door at night. She goes abroad, feeds, then crawls into her tomb to hide till the sun declines and she can return to her room and emerge as if she has only just awakened. They stake her, strike off her head, place it and her body on a pyre, and burn it to ash. They throw the ash into the river to be carried away downstream.76 The death of the vampire ends with the words that accompany so many other accounts of the ends of revenants: ‘And that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.’77 Dracula (1897) is an untidy blend of motifs from previous vampire literature and Eastern European vampire belief. Its plot offered an opportunity for men to reassert themselves as dominant at a time when their role in society was changing, and while Harker’s wife Mina provides noble assistance in the form of transcribing conversations, diaries and the like, she also becomes a victim of the vampire, and it takes all the men in her life to save her. Dracula continued and extended the eroticism of earlier vampire tales, and the story’s virile male vampire so captured imaginations that the vampire became almost exclusively male for decades afterwards. Though it may seem inappropriate to the length of the work, we will spend less time on this text (and on Frankenstein) as it has been treated extensively in literary criticism and will confine ourselves mostly to its inheritance from medieval accounts of revenancy and later vampire belief. Though it is almost the twentieth century when Jonathan Harker departs London to visit his firm’s client, Count Dracula, it is evident that he has entered the old world from the moment the proprietors of the Golden Krone Hotel in Transylvania learn he is on his way to Dracula’s castle. Both husband and wife cross themselves.78 This is a medieval Roman Catholic world, where 76 77 78

Ibid., 315–16. Ibid., 316.

Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Vintage, 2007), 4.

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the Church provides the only protection against evil. They beg him not to go, trying to persuade with the popular belief that midnight is the evil hour. ‘Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?’79 When they cannot dissuade him, the wife gives him a rosary and a crucifix.80 On the coach, Harker’s fellow passengers learn his destination, and he consults his dictionary to translate the words they utter: Ordog (Satan), pokol (Hell), stregoica (witch), vrolok and vlkoslak (werewolf or vampire).81 As the coach pulls away, the crowd that has formed round the inn door to watch Harker depart to his fate make the sign of the cross and point two fingers at him. A fellow passenger tells him what the gesture means; it is a charm against the evil eye.82 As the coach travels, Harker sees many crosses by the roadside, and as they pass, his fellow passengers cross themselves again.83 As they approach Dracula’s castle, the road plunges into a forest, where, as we will remember from chapter 3, supernatural things are prone to happen. A strange carriage approaches then, and the horses of Harker’s coach begin to snort and plunge wildly, as animals always do in the presence of the dead. The carriage overtakes them, driven by a tall man in a great black hat that hid his face, gleaming eyes, very red lips and sharp teeth. A passenger turns his face away, crosses himself and makes the sign against the evil eye.84 The carriage is Harker’s conveyance to the castle, and once he is aboard, it bolts away. As it cuts through the forest, somewhere nearby a dog begins to howl, then another and another, as dogs always have for revenants.85 The rest of the story is familiar to readers. Dracula only appears late in the day and eats no food; his castle contains no mirrors. In medieval Eastern Europe, mirrors were often covered as they were thought to be a passageway through which the dead could return. In Stoker’s mythology, of course, the mirrors are absent because they are unnecessary; vampires cast no reflections. When Harker realises what Dracula is and tracks him to his resting-place, he finds him very much as Eastern European accounts describe vampires: his

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8.

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12.

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flesh swollen, bloated as if gorged with blood, and lying like a ‘filthy leech’.86 Dracula is finally killed with a bowie knife to the heart, and crumbles to dust. Significantly, it is the men who save the day, and the weakened, vulnerable woman Mina returns to herself as sweet, mild, dutiful wife. Dracula was received on its publication as a good story and received critical praise, but it has since come to be seen as an influential text both as the standard for the genre and as a watershed in Victorian literature. The account of The Vampire of Croglin Grange (1900) perhaps does not belong here as it is relates a purportedly true story, but it is for that reason that it is included: it is an example of vampire belief into the twentieth century (though rare in England; vampire belief thrived mostly on the Continent). Augustus J.C. Hare recorded the story in his autobiography The Story of My Life, as told him by a Captain Fisher, who said the events had occurred in connection with his own family.87 The incident took place at the family home, Croglin Grange, in the historic county of Cumberland, in what is now Cumbria. When the Fishers outgrew the home, they let it to two brothers and a sister. One very warm night, the sister on retiring did not close her shutters, hoping to cool the room. As she lay in bed, she became aware of two lights flickering amongst the trees that separated the manse lawn from the churchyard. The object drew closer and closer. The sister wanted to scream but felt somehow paralysed. Extending the motif of the vampire as sexual conqueror of women, the girl’s paralysis and inability to scream suggest that she, like all women, is powerless in the face of male sexual desire. It is a way both of absolving her for succumbing and flagging up the male’s prowess. Soon she heard ‘scratch, scratch, scratch’ at the window and saw a ‘hideous brown face with flaming eyes glaring in at her’.88 The thing was trying to get in. The parallel with the male suitor seeking entrance to the female bedchamber is obvious here. Making no headway, it began picking away at the lead of the casement. A pane of glass crashed to the floor, and a long bony finger reached in, turned the latch and opened the window. It moved so quickly then the woman had no time to scream. It clutched her hair, forced her head violently over the edge of the bed and bit her hard on the throat. She found her voice then and screamed as loud as she could. Her brothers came running, but her door was locked. (Men are not driven merely by sexual urges, of course, and the brothers depict the heroic side of the male character, that of protector of women and 86 87

88

Ibid., 57.

Augustus J.C. Hare, The Vampire of Croglin Grange, in The Story of My Life, Vol. IV (London: George Allen, 1900), 203. Ibid., 205.

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preserver of their virtue.) By the time they forced it, the creature had fled and their sister lay unconscious, hanging off the side of the bed. The vampire had ‘had’ her. One brother gave chase, but the creature scrambled over the wall into the churchyard and vanished.89 The woman’s brothers took her to Switzerland to recover. After a while, though, they returned to Croglin Grange. One night in March, the sister awoke to that same horrible ‘scratch, scratch, scratch’ at the window, and opened her eyes to see the same hideous face. This time she had no trouble finding her voice and screamed as loud as she could. Her brothers, ready this time, came running with pistols drawn. The creature ran away across the lawn. One of the brothers fired and hit it in the leg, but it managed to again scramble over the churchyard wall and disappeared into the vault of a long-extinct family.90 The next day, the brothers gathered a group of neighbours and they all went together to open the vault, where they found the creature that had attacked their sister. They took the traditional measures for destroying a vampire or revenant – they burnt it to ash.91 The story perhaps survived in modern belief as it continued to express the anxieties depicted in Dracula over the need for men to protect their women from the evils of the world (sexuality). For the Blood Is the Life, which originally appeared in Collier’s on 16 December 1905, is another example of a person who turns vampire because of something that was done to them.92 In this case, the woman, Cristina, is murdered by robbers and buried in a shallow grave after she catches them in the act of burying money they had stolen from a dead man. She rises at night to drain the blood of the man’s son, Angelo. Every day Angelo goes to work more and more lethargic, but in these modern days, the villagers who might in an earlier age have seen his sickness for what it was now ascribe it instead to lovesickness, as the loss of his father’s fortune meant the loss of the girl to whom he had been betrothed because of his wealth. As with the medieval tales of old, it takes a priest to rid the village of this evil. But again, these are modern days, and the priest has no experience of such things. He has only read in old books, he tells Antonio, the man who has come to report the vampire, ‘of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in 89 90 91 92

Ibid., 206.

Ibid., 207–8. Ibid., 208.

The phrase originates in Deuteronomy 12.23: ‘Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.’ It is also spoken by Renfield in Dracula. For the folkloric belief on a person turning vampire because of something that was done to them, see note 25 above.

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their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood’.93 Still, he agrees to come that night to the grave. When they arrive, they see Angelo stumbling along and the vampire Cristina flitting beside him, her lips at his throat. The old ways are so ill remembered that the priest can barely complete the rite. He stumbles over his Latin, but he shuts his eyes tight and showers Cristina with holy water and raises his voice to a scream. Antonio stakes the vampire as the priest recites the Latin. The tale, which has been told to a guest by the homeowner on his property where the event took place, ends with the narrator commenting wistfully that such beliefs were common throughout the island, and never tells his guest that he can see the ghost of the vampire hovering over the grave even now as he concludes his tale. The times may be modern, and he tries hard to deny it, but the old truths are still there, flickering before our eyes, if only we will acknowledge them. The final vampire tale we will discuss is The Tomb of Sarah, which originally appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in December 1910. The appearance of this tale in a popular magazine rather than an ecclesiastical text demonstrates that at least some of the attraction for medieval tellers and listeners was surely the frisson of fear provided by such tales. This is the thrill of the Gothic, exciting the senses rather than educating the soul, and, stripped of its moral purpose, it can be told in a magazine for what it is, a horror story. At the same time, in The Tomb of Sarah, we see an almost sentimental longing for a time when unexpected death was easily explained and evil easily recognised, and men existed who knew how to stop it. We also see an expression of the anxieties around the family that were often expressed through Gothic fiction. In the nineteenth century, the Gothic often became subsumed in human, domestic subjects. As Fred Botting put it, ‘the family became a place rendered threatening and uncanny by the haunting return of past transgressions and attendant guilt on an everyday world shrouded in strangeness’.94 While moving a tomb as part of renovations to the chancel of an old church, the restorer and his workmen find this inscription on one of the ancient tombs of the Kenyons, an old family extinct for centuries:

93

94

F. Marion Crawford, For the Blood Is the Life, in Uncanny Tales (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 191. Botting, Gothic, 11.

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SARAH 1630 For the sake of the dead and the welfare of the living, let this sepulchre remain untouched and its occupant undisturbed till the coming of Christ. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.95 Soon farmers checking their flocks of a morning discover dead sheep, their throats punctured and blood drained. The restorer, who for reasons never explained has knowledge of such ancient ills and how they are to be cured, enlists the help of the rector of the church to destroy the vampire. They wait in the church for Sarah to return from her nightly sojourn and, when she enters her tomb, the rector reads the burial service, the restorer makes the necessary responses, and when the ceremony is finished, he drives a stake through her heart and kills her.96 Perhaps the most interesting thing about this tale is the question the rector asks when he finally accepts that the dead Sarah is indeed a vampire: ‘How can [unholy forces] work in the sacred precincts of a church?’97 He may just as easily have asked the larger question that looms behind it, and behind all human desperation in the face of suffering and wickedness: how can such things happen in a world where we are told there is a God?

Scientific Revenants

We may not think of the Monster in Frankenstein (1818) as a revenant, as he has not risen through any of the circumstances we discussed in previous chapters. Yet he is a revenant nonetheless, raised by the god of the Enlightenment – science – and this extraordinary circumstance of a man raised from the dead is used to ask perhaps the largest question we can ask: why am I here? More than that, the creature who is resurrected acts as a surrogate for man himself, shaking his fist in rage at the uncaring creator who has left him to suffer. In the previous chapter we examined how science made vampires and revenants go away through the investigations of doctors and scientists into accounts of vampires and witches. With Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft 95

96 97

F.G. Loring, The Tomb of Sarah, in The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 431. Ibid., 441. Ibid., 436.

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Shelley used science to resurrect them, and in doing so created a wholly new kind of revenant, one made by the hand of man. In a sense, this is a return to the ancient use of necromancy to raise the dead for doing harm to one’s enemies, but the dead man here is revivified in the spirit of the Enlightenment project of scientific progress in the quest for knowledge.98 But it is the use of reason to account for the existence of a being that should be considered unreasonable – a revenant – that turns the Enlightenment idea on its head. This may not have been part of Shelley’s project – with her allusions to Paradise Lost and her parallels between Frankenstein and the Monster on the one hand and God and Man (and the Devil) on the other – but from the perspective of our project of following the trail of the revenant from the medieval to the modern, it is the point of interest for us. If one of the purposes of science is to eliminate the mysteries of life, which this study argues is also one of the purposes of religion, Shelley’s creation uses science to explore one of the biggest mysteries – what happens to us when we die – and indeed to challenge the finality of death altogether (and the science that would seek to overcome it). If the largest mystery is what becomes of us when we die, Shelley’s doctor uses science towards the ends of a kind of magical thinking, to say we need not die at all. In the preface to the original edition, written from his wife’s perspective, Percy Bysshe Shelley voiced one of the most compelling reasons for any story of revenancy: However impossible as a physical fact, [the plot] affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.99

Though it is quite plain that the Monster has not risen because of a bad life or through the agency of evil angels but was revivified by Frankenstein with scientific processes, Shelley has both Frankenstein and Walton refer to his creation repeatedly as a demon. This is very possibly residual influence from the book of ghost stories that inspired the competition, but it does ally this very human creation with its demonic medieval ancestors. Frankenstein conceives the very idea that the dead could be revivified from the medieval writers he read in his youth (Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486–1535), a scholar of occult sciences; Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493–1541), a Swiss physician and mystic; and Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), a German 98 99

Punter, The Literature of Terror, 23.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6.

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monk and scholastic philosopher).100 Frankenstein’s very notion that he could render man invulnerable to death proceeds from the same impulse that drove so many ecclesiastical and lay writers to believe and record accounts of revenants, a dread of death and a desperate desire to believe that, somehow, it is not in fact final. We can see also a connection between Frankenstein’s fateful experiment and the Christian eschatology of death. The death of Frankenstein’s mother, as the first he has ever experienced, functions much the same as the first death of man after the sin of eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It brought death into Frankenstein’s world, where previously it had not existed. It is shortly after this shock that he conceives his project of bringing a man back to life. Once Frankenstein embarks on preparations for his plan, he develops a very medieval interest in the decay and corruption of the human body, and the very medieval practice of visiting charnel houses, though not to deposit bones but to observe the decomposition of bodies.101 (Once he begins building the body he intends to revivify, he returns to the charnel houses to collect bones.)102 Shelley even gives us a description of Frankenstein observing worms devouring the eyes and brains of corpses.103 It is even interesting that he works at night, when a revenant walks, as though in the process of trying to create one, he becomes a type of revenant himself. (As the Monster’s rampage heightens, Frankenstein ‘wandered like an evil spirit’, as though every show of the Monster’s strength drains the life more from Frankenstein.104 He becomes an ‘unquiet thing that wandered restless’.105 In the Orkneys, he ‘walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved, and miserable in the separation’.106 The only state in which he is comfortable is solitude, ‘deep, dark, death-like solitude’.107 By the time he is near his end on Walton’s ship amidst the ice, he sits, ‘his eyes half closed, and his limbs hanging listlessly’,108 much like the revenant in The Hollow Man.) And, as we have seen so frequently when

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, 32–3.

100

Ibid., 47.

101

Ibid., 50.

102

Ibid.

103

Ibid., 85.

104

Ibid., 87.

105

Ibid., 167.

106

Ibid., 86.

107

Ibid., 211.

108

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the dead return to life, it happens on a rainy night.109 (A storm will also herald the presence of the Monster later, when Frankenstein spots him at Secheron after the murder of his brother, and when the Monster confronts Frankenstein to demand a female companion.) And when the Monster wakes, Shelley gives him to us not as a man with blood pinking his skin and life inhabiting his eyes, but in the figure of the revenant we have read in so many medieval accounts. His skin is yellow and stretched tautly over his frame, showing the muscles and sinews beneath; his dun eyes are watery and pale; his complexion is shrivelled and his lips black.110 Also like the medieval revenant, the Monster makes his visitations on family and friends (as Frankenstein can be considered his father, Frankenstein’s family is his family as well), and where the revenant walks, he leaves death in his wake. Ultimately, of course, the deaths of William, Elizabeth and Clerval show that Frankenstein cannot subvert death. When the Monster’s death finally comes, which he tells Walton it will by his own hand, it will be in the tried-and-true medieval method for killing a revenant: he will collect a funeral pile, throw himself on it, and burn his body to ashes.111 Frankenstein is now considered by many to be the first work of science fiction, and it has been the progenitor of an entire genre of horror. Written while on holiday with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, two of the greatest of the Romantics, it reflects the mistrust of unchecked scientific advancement common in Romanticism. The novel’s subtitle is The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity as civilisation, and he is sentenced by Zeus to eternal torment for his crime. In Frankenstein, Victor steals the power of life and death from God and uses it to create a man, and his punishment is the loss of everybody he loves and, ultimately, his own life. We move now to a story in which science is used not to bring a dead man back to life, but to prevent one from dying at all. In Edgar Allen Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), the narrator is a practitioner of mesmerism keen to experiment with the effects of hypnotising a person on the point of death (in articulo mortis).112 He obtains the permission of an acquaintance, M. Valdemar, who is close to death with tuberculosis, and succeeds in placing him in a state of suspended animation for seven months, in which all breathing and pulse have ceased, but the man can speak, if only to say he is dead. At the Ibid., 52.

109

Ibid., 52.

110

Ibid., 220.

111

Edgar Allen Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, in Poetry, Tales, & Selected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1996), 833.

112

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end of the story, the narrator and Valdemar’s doctors decide they should try to wake him. The narrator rouses him from his mesmerised state and the man’s body immediately dissolves beneath the touch of the narrator’s hand: ‘shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands’.113 This of course has parallels with the fourteenth-century poem St Erkenwald, but with any moralising or doctrinal purpose removed. Poe’s tale ends with a similar dissolution of the body as that of the dead judge when St Erkenwald’s single tear baptises him, but Valdemar turns to ‘a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity’, and there the story abruptly ends.114 The moral, if there is one, has nothing to do with Christianity or church doctrine. If anything, it seems the story might have been Poe’s way of negating through fiction his grief over his wife Virginia’s suffering from the same disease (which also killed his mother). Virginia died two years after the story was published.115 The putridity is detestable because, for Poe, death itself is as well. We should mention briefly A Thousand Deaths (1899), though not for its literary quality, which is not what we might expect from Jack London, but as another example of the use of science to create a revenant – in this case, over and over and over again. A ne’er-do-well young man of English stock (even in an American writer the need to draw on England for such a story, as if in a nod to the land whence revenants arrived from the Old World to the New) has gone overboard deserting his ship and, about to drown in San Francisco Bay, is plucked half-dead from the waves and revived by two crew-men pumping air into his lungs with a strange device. When the captain enters the cabin, the man is shocked to see the father who sent him packing years before with a thousand pounds and the declaration that he would never see him again.116 The son is so changed the father does not recognise him, and the son resolves not to reveal his true identity until he can demonstrate that he is a changed man and win his father’s approval. He soon repents of his decision, however, when he discovers that his father plucked him from the ocean only to convey him to a remote island where he holds him prisoner and medically induces death on him in dozens of ways so that he can revive him with his scientific 113 114 115

116

Ibid., 842. Ibid.

Molly Schwartzburg, ‘Curator’s Choice: Among 200 Poe Objects, This One Stands Out’, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, http://blog. hrc.utexas.edu/2009/12/15/curators-choice-among-200-poe-objects-this-onestands-out/ [accessed May 2015].

Jack London, A Thousand Deaths, in The Complete Short Stories of Jack London, vol. I, ed. Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III and I. Milo Shepard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 75.

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inventions.117 The fact that the young man now reveals he is the captain’s son moves him not at all; he is a cold man of science. The father kills his son in countless and increasingly outrageous ways: with a variety of poisons, by electrocution, suffocation, drowning, gassing and morphine, each time reviving him with machines designed for the purpose.118 The son finally effects his escape by a preposterous invention of his own: a machine that instantly disintegrates organic matter. He places the machine at the entrance to his room and one by one, as his captors enter, first his night guard, then the day guard sent to relieve him, then finally his father, each evaporates, leaving only their clothes behind.119 Like Shelley with Frankenstein, London pays no attention at all to the mechanics of the science, makes no attempt to give it plausibility. His project, if there is one beyond sensationalism and the desire to play around with the form, is to imagine circumstances in which modernity allows humanity to overcome death.

Hoax Revenants

Several hoax revenant tales are so preposterous that they simply do not merit inclusion in a scholarly study. Among these is Wake Not the Dead by John Knox, in which a spurned lover fakes his own death and the death of others in order to win the object of his affection from the undertaker to whom she is betrothed. However, there is one tale we cannot overlook. The revenant in Sleepy Hollow (1820) is not conclusively a hoax, as the story’s events derive from the long-standing local belief in the Headless Horseman, but was what Ichabod Crane encountered on his lonely horse-ride home truly the Horseman, or a more human harasser using Ichabod’s fear for other purposes (much like a writer uses human fear to lend power to his stories)? The tale concerns a dead mercenary, decapitated by American soldiers during the Revolutionary War and buried in the churchyard, who walks abroad nightly in search of his head. This motif falls into a long tradition of revenants who return to fetch a part of their body left behind.120 The story type is listed in Thompson’s Motif-Index as E235.4.5, a subset of the same type as The Golden Arm – a

117 118 119 120

Ibid., 79.

Ibid., 81–2. Ibid., 83.

Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 58.

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revenant who returns to inflict punishment – in this case for the theft of a skull.121 In this case, Irving ‘others’ the environs of Sleepy Hollow, New York into a place that continued ‘under a drowsy, dreamy influence’, and ‘the sway of some witching power’, perhaps bewitched by a German doctor or still under the spell of the pow-wows held there by an old Indian chief.122 This uncanny atmosphere led the people to believe all sorts of marvellous things, see all manner of strange sights. As in other tales examined in this chapter, by attributing to the locals a stubborn superstition outmoded elsewhere, Irving gives himself license to tell his improbable tale. It is essentially this: that Ichabod Crane, the local schoolmaster who is most drawn to and terrified by tales of the supernatural, rides out chagrined from a party after losing his suit for the lovely Katrina Van Tassel to his rival, Brom Van Brunt, and at the bewitched covered bridge, encounters the Headless Horseman. Irving takes care to build suspense, relating Ichabod’s fear on hearing a noise, then a tramping by the side of the bridge, and then ‘something huge, misshapen, black and towering’ that ‘stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveller’.123 Ichabod demands to know who he is, but the creature does not answer. Ichabod breaks forth ‘with involuntary fervour into a psalm tune’ to calm himself. As if to counter its effect, the creature puts itself suddenly in motion and, with one bound, stands in the middle of the road, and Ichabod sees that it is the Headless Horseman on a large black horse. It makes no sound, but as Ichabod spurs his horse, the Horseman moves as well, silently, calmly, pacing Ichabod on the far side of the road. When Ichabod quickens pace, the Horseman does the same. When Ichabod pulls up, hoping to fall behind, the Horseman slows also.124 Irving adds another medieval touch by imbuing the horse, who fears to cross the bridge and starts at the approach of the Headless Horseman, with the same terrified reaction animals have to medieval revenants.125

Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: a classification of narrative elements in folk-tales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends, Vol. 2 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1932–6), 357.

121

Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 313.

122

Ibid., 331.

123

Ibid., 336.

124

Ibid., 335.

125

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The familiar story is soon over. As they mount on rising ground, Ichabod sees that the Horseman holds in his hands his own severed head. Ichabod spurs his horse, but as they gallop, the Horseman hurls his head. Ichabod dodges, but too late, and the object collides with his own head with a terrible crash. Both the Horseman and Ichabod’s own horse gallop away, and the next morning, Ichabod has vanished, and all that remains on the road is a shattered pumpkin.126 That Irving makes the Headless Horseman a Hessian mercenary for the British during the American Revolution is another sort of medievalism. It is tantamount to saying he had lived a bad life, for to a man of Irving’s generation, writing with the war still within living memory, a Hessian was about as close to a villain as one could imagine besides the British themselves, and the British being so recently considered countrymen, the Hessian was the next best thing. Irving also daubs his narrative, whether knowingly or not, with other touches of medieval ghost and revenant lore. In most villages at that time, he writes, there is no encouragement for ghosts, as the inhabitants move so quickly, the ghosts soon have no acquaintances left to call on.127 Medieval ghosts and revenants, we will remember, most often visit those they knew in life, particularly family and spouses.

Revenants that are Difficult to Categorise

The dead in the tales considered in this section are murky figures; it is unclear whether they are revenants or ghosts. But as they are used to explore the themes discussed throughout this study – fear of death, regret for things left undone, love of life and havoc wrought by the angry dead – they have been chosen for inclusion despite their inconclusive nature. Lafcadio Hearn’s 1880 sketch ‘The Name on the Stone’ explores regret and longing for the beloved dead by playing with conceptions of dark magic and the ability of a witch to lure her lover to join her in the grave. In this way it is reminiscent of some of the tales collected in the Child Ballads, in which the dead lure the living into the grave. Try as he might to forget her, the narrator does indeed return, and she, placing upon his lips a finger ‘white as the waxen tapers that are turned at the feet of the dead’, leads him among the headstones of the churchyard to her grave.128 In an echo of Orpheus and Eurydice, or of Ibid., 338.

126

Ibid., 331.

127

Lafcadio Hearn, Fantastics and Other Fancies, ed. Charles Woodward Hutson (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 99.

128

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Lot’s wife who looked back and turned to salt, the narrator’s dead beloved mutters to him, ‘Look not behind you even for an instant, or you are lost.’129 But he does not listen and insists on turning to read the name on the headstone. There is a flash of lightning then and a quaking of the earth, and a white shape rises from the grave. Its lips brush his, and the last words we read, likely the last he hears, are ‘Love, love is stronger than Death! – I come back from the eternal night to save thee!’130 If these are the last words he hears, though, there is comfort in them, for, unlike Orpheus, who lost Eurydice permanently to the world of the dead by looking back, this narrator by doing the same has found his love. Hearn’s ‘A Dead Love’ (1880) is likewise short and impressionistic, but this time the subject is not the living longing for a dead love, but the dead longing for a living one. In the context of grief, this makes sense. A grieving lover will surely hope that their dead longs for them as much as they do for their dead. This indeed underpins the medieval Roman Catholic system of suffrages for the dead. By keeping them well prayed for, the living could help the dead find peace in the grave and long less for the world. One is tempted to call the subject of the sketch the ‘narrator’, as the piece is written from an intensely close third-person perspective that can both give omnipotent details of the world remaining outside the tomb and intimate knowledge of the keen suffering of the dead within. We hear him long for life, and see him watching, through a fissure in the wall of the tomb, the summer sky blazing like amethyst, the palms swaying in the breezes from the sea’.131 He hears ‘the voices of women and sounds of argentine laughter and of footsteps and of music, and of merriment’.132 And one day the woman whose name was on his lips as he died comes to his tomb, and even in death he senses her presence: And he knew the whisper of her robes; and from the heart of the dead man a flower sprang and passed through the fissure in the wall of the tomb and blossomed before her and breathed out its soul in passionate sweetness.133

We hear in his attention to every detail of her presence the longing for life medieval and early modern people both indulged in and counselled against. Ibid., 100.

129

Ibid., 100.

130

Ibid., 101.

131

Ibid., 121.

132

Ibid., 122.

133

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But this dead is not a dead who can interact with the living. The woman is completely unaware of his presence. She passes by, and walks away from him forever, and we are reminded of Julian of Vézelay’s’s twenty-first sermon, in which he speaks of sadness at leaving behind ‘the wonderful things of the earth’.134 In ‘The Cross-Roads’ (1916), Amy Lowell treats the crossroads burial and stake through the heart for suicides and deftly explores a number of questions at once, chiefly the thought that must have been on the minds of those who employed the method: how long will such a measure work? And is the thing staked to the ground immobile, or aching to break free? And when it stirs, is it revenant, vampire or something less tangible, and even more frightening? But also, what affect does the presence of the living have on the dead? The dead being in the prose poem died of a bullet to the heart at dawn. On the table nearby lay a letter from a woman. An estrangement, perhaps? The suicide is buried at a crossroads to disperse the evil. Buried, but perhaps not entirely dead, for his ‘gazing eyes glitter’, as those of vampires sometimes do in Balkan and Hungarian lore.135 Six months on, his body has bloated and begun to rot, and patches of blue have appeared on his skin, but the stake continues to hold him. The anxiety of the un-quietness of the dead is expressed, however, when a pretty woman in a carriage passes the gravesite, and the jostling of her carriage seems to threaten to release the corpse.136 At the same time, it may not be the jostling of the carriage that disturbs the corpse but the identity of the woman herself. Is it she who wrote the letter? And what impact will her passing have on the staked man? The stake holds firm, but the body writhes and struggles to be free. The blue spots widen as the skin stretches, the flesh tears. Is it the presence of the beautiful woman that stirs the dead man staked to the ground, the tremor of the horse’s gallop, or the gale?137 As we have seen, sudden storms are often harbingers of evil about to walk. As years go by, the stake still holds, though the body has been worn to powder. Various travellers disturb the terrain with their passing, and each trembling of horses’ hooves loosens the stake a bit more, but still the body is held to the ground. One day, though, twenty years later, the body by now nothing but powder and clay, and a few flakes of bone, a storm rises, and under 134

135

136 137

Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Scolar Press, 1984), 202.

Amy Lowell, The Cross-Roads, in Men, Women and Ghosts (Boston, MA: BiblioLife, Massachusetts: 2008), 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid.

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the black sky a funeral procession rides the Tilbury road. They roll over the place where the corpse lies buried, ‘feet and wheels – feet and wheels’.138 And now, finally, the feared thing happens – the stake looses its hold on the suicide: The bones in the deep, still earth shiver and pull. There is a quiver through the rotted stake. Then stake and bones fall together in a little puffing of dust.139

According to medieval belief, this should be the end of the corpse. But Lowell refuses us that peace. It is even worse than we imagined. The dust of the corpse blows like smoke in the wind, and the language, by giving his decomposed body actions to perform, gives him continued human form even in his formlessness, continued sentience even in his utter decomposition: ‘His fingers blow out like smoke, his head ripples in the gale.’140 He stands, this disembodied suicide turned to dust, under the signpost and watches another figure down the Wayfleet road and streams after it. The figure flickers in amongst the trees, and so does he. The wind blows them both now, around and around, and through the trees comes a wailing of fear, then laughter.141 In its disembodied state, has the suicide now become death? Has it become evil itself ? And how far will it spread? Or has he been re-united with his lost love? These questions go to the heart of medieval and early modern fear of suicides. Russell Hoban’s masterful Pilgermann (1983) features a pilgrimage of the dead to Jerusalem, as well as a character called Bruder Pförtner (Brother Death), whose insatiable sexual appetite leads him to have sex with every living person he encounters, resulting in their deaths.142 Ironically, the last text we will examine, Pedro Páramo (1955), brings us full circle, back to the earliest depictions of the corpse who speaks from within the tomb but cannot leave it. The book contains depictions of bodies speaking from within their coffins or their graves. (In this respect, it echoes the slightly earlier Cré na Cille or Graveyard Earth [1949], by Máirtín Ó Cadhain [rereleased in an English translation in 2016 as The Dirty Dust], which consists almost entirely of talkative corpses conversing in a graveyard in Connemara.) In Pedro Páramo, Juan Preciado goes in search of his father in fulfilment of a promise to his dying mother. He finds a town inhabited solely by the dead, who died of starvation long ago when the patron (who turns out to be Preciado’s father) 138 139 140 141 142

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Ibid., 60.

Russell Hoban, Pilgermann (London: Bloomsbury, 2002).

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stopped working the lands that fed the town in revenge for their failure to mourn the death of his wife. A few dead walk the earth – whether corporeally or not is unclear, but in form solid enough for him to believe his landlady is a living human being and not a wraith. Others lie conscious in their graves, talking to their neighbours and straining to hear other corpses speak farther off: What happens with these corpses that have been dead a long time is that when the damp reaches them they begin to stir. They wake up.143

Two of the corpses ruminate on where their souls are (the answer is doctrinally Catholic: probably wandering about looking for people to pray for them). We also see remnants of Soul and Body poetry in the corpse’s worry that perhaps its soul hates it for the way it treated it.144 And in some distinctly medieval touches, one corpse speaks of watching her soul leave her body via her mouth at the moment of her death: And I opened my mouth to let [my soul] escape. And it went. I knew when I felt the little thread of blood that bound it to my heart drip into my hands.145

The book explores the old Catholic idea that the dead could affect the living, even harm them, and in a town where every inhabitant has died because of the vengeance of its leading citizen, that old idea seems to find new currency.

The Revenants Are Us

It would be illuminating to close this study with a discussion of The Girl with All the Gifts. The 2016 film, based on the 2014 book by the same author who wrote the screenplay, Mike Carey, is another post-apocalyptic story in which a mysterious illness leads to an outbreak that turns the infected into flesh-eating ‘hungries’ and wipes out most of humanity. The film is set against a bleak landscape with depleted resources, where virtually the only living things that walk the earth are hungries. They haunt the landscape like revenants, stumbling mindlessly along until they encounter a living creature, and then they attack. A small group of survivors – soldiers and a few civilian medical personnel – are fenced inside an army base in the south of England. Imprisoned in underground cells are a group of second-generation hungries, adolescent children Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 77–8.

143

Ibid., 65.

144

Ibid.

145

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who crave flesh just like the hungries outside the fences but have retained their humanity. They are being experimented on by a doctor in the camp, Dr Caroline Caldwell, who is trying to use the hungry children’s bodily tissues to develop a vaccine against the virus. In class at the army base, the teacher, Miss Justineau (‘Miss’ is being used instead of ‘Ms’ here to refer to Justineau as that is how Melanie herself refers to her), tasks the students with writing a story. Melanie writes an interpretation of the myth of Pandora by Hesiod. In the myth, Zeus, the king of the gods, takes vengeance on Prometheus after he stole fire from heaven by presenting Pandora as a gift to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus. While in his care, Pandora opens a jar and unleashes its contents on the world – previously unknown ills such as sickness and death. Pandora quickly tries to close the jar, but it is too late. The sufferings in it have been released to plague humanity. One thing remains in the jar, however – hope.146 (The word is usually translated as hope, but an alternative meaning is ‘deceptive expectation’.147) In Melanie’s version, a beautiful and kind woman is walking in ancient Greece when she is attacked by a monster (‘a friggin’ abortion’, the soldiers’ term for the child hungries). Melanie is the hero in her story, as a girl who rushes from the forest to the help the woman: ‘She was like Achilles because she couldn’t be hurt, except in one place she kept secret.’148 She saves the woman, who calls her ‘my special girl’. Melanie chooses to depict the human part of herself, not the monstrous, ‘hungry’ part, and conceives her as capable of love and bravery, in essence, of humanity. Justineau, moved by Melanie’s humanity and desire to protect her, reaches out and caresses Melanie’s hair. Melanie closes her eyes at the feel of Miss Justineau’s hand, the warmth of simple human touch, and is moved not to monstrosity but to love. This vision of a hungry as not monstrous is displaced. On seeing Justineau touch Melanie, Sergeant Parks, the commander in charge of the soldiers, storms in. To demonstrate that the children are not really children at all but monsters, he wipes off the ‘blocker’ that prevents the hungries from detecting the humans’ scent and holds his arm before the face of one of the other children. The boy is stirred by the smell of human flesh Hesiod, ‘Works and Days’, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1914), www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A 1999.01.0132%3Acard%3D42.

146

147

148

Jenny Strauss Clay, ‘Works and Days: Tracing the Path to Arete’, in Brill’s Companion to Hesiod, ed. Franco Montanari, Chr. Tsagalis and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 77, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047440758_005. Mike Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts, feature film, directed by Colm McCarthy (London and Burbank, CA: Warner Bros UK, 2016).

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and transforms from an unthreatening child into a monster, chomping and straining to tear into Parks’s arm with his teeth.149 The transformation spreads to the other children as the smell reaches them, and soon the entire class is transformed into a frenzy of hungries trying to feed. All but Melanie, who watches in horror and fear as her classmates are transformed, while she seems unaffected by the smell of flesh. The human part of her is more pronounced in her personality than the hungry part. As viewers we need no convincing. We are already persuaded of Melanie’s essential goodness and see in her what Sergeant Parks and the other soldiers as yet do not, what Melanie herself feels – her own humanity. As the film progresses, Melanie becomes more and more aware of the ‘hungry’ part of herself and is repulsed by it. After feeding, she slips into a vague, semi-conscious state, seeming at once a beast stupefied by a large meal but also, and more so, almost confused by her own primal hunger. When a group of hungries attack the base and breach the barrier, the soldiers and staff flee the barracks, and Melanie, left unattended, wanders into the yard. The hungries are creating carnage, and Melanie, instead of joining them in attacking the soldiers, watches, horrified. As the base is overrun, Justineau carries her on board an escaping truck with Parks, Caldwell and a few soldiers. By the time the group reaches London, Parks is more convinced that Melanie does not want to harm them and allows her to go on scouting expeditions. The group find an abandoned mobile lab and take refuge there. When one of the soldiers, Kieran, goes off on a foraging mission and is endangered by a group of feral second-generation hungries, Melanie returns to warn Parks and the others, and they set out to rescue him. They are too late, and Kieran is killed and eaten by the feral hungries, but the episode has changed Parks. He is now fully persuaded of Melanie’s humanity. While Parks is away, Caldwell sees the opportunity to complete her vaccine using Melanie’s body. She dons a mask and releases sedating gas into the pod, rendering Melanie and Justineau unconscious. But Melanie wakes more quickly than Caldwell expected. Still, Caldwell persuades Melanie to submit to the procedure, even though she understands that it will cause her death. When Dr Caldwell suggests that without a cure, Miss Justineau will also turn into a monster, Melanie cannot bear the thought. Her humanity is the strongest part of her, her love for Miss Justineau greater than anything else and more important to her than her own existence. This is the place she can be hurt, the place where all humans can be hurt. Her Achilles heel is her heart. As she is preparing herself for her end, Melanie remembers a note Dr Ibid.

149

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Caldwell recorded in her log about Melanie: ‘Exquisite mimicry of observed behaviours. Question mark. Do you still think that, Dr Caldwell?’ Caldwell is forced to admit that she does not. Melanie is stunned by her response. ‘We’re alive?’ she asks, referring to herself and the other second-generation hungry children. ‘Yes’, Caldwell replies. ‘You’re alive.’ ‘Then’, Melanie responds, ‘why should it be us who die for you?’ It is interesting to consider this alongside Freud’s theory of the death drive.150 While it seems to me that all the evidence of biology and our instinct for survival disproves the idea that we have a secret drive towards our own destruction, the very state of the human condition itself, like that of Melanie and the other second-generation hungries, is a dual one. We are constantly in two states; we are living, but as our death is inevitable and as, unlike other animals, we are aware of it, that state of death is perpetually part of our understanding of ourselves and our identity. So, in a sense, even as we live we are always, in part, in a state of death, just as, under the doctrine of resurrection, even as we are dead, we live. Melanie is an example of what Stephen Sacco has observed: like dwarfs, the child as a liminal figure in storytelling.151 Children exist in a state of betweenness, ‘neither one thing nor another; or maybe both’, as Turner puts it.152 ‘It is this element of indefinability, yet, not completely unfamiliar, which gives the freaks/children an uncanny quality’, Sacco writes.153 Their liminality often gives such characters the ability to see truths other people cannot see, just as Huckleberry Finn sees what all the adults around him cannot see: that slavery is incompatible with humanity. As the film closes, we see Justineau awake, safe but trapped for the rest of her life inside the mobile lab. Justineau greets her class, and we see that the feral second-generation hungries and Melanie’s former classmates from the army base are seated on the ground outside the pod, ready for their daily lesson. With a stern hand, Melanie subdues the feral children. She will help them to suppress the monsters in themselves and become as human as she

Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 316.

150

Stephen Sacco, ‘The Emancipating Dwarf: Fairy Tales, Carnival, and Laughter as Leveller’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2019).

151

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 97.

152

Sacco, ‘The Emancipating Dwarf ’, 65–6.

153

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herself is. As class begins, Melanie asks the most human of questions: ‘Can we have stories?’154 What becomes clear from the texts we have examined is that many of the themes and motifs of modern revenant literature bear a ‘strange likeness’ to their medieval forebears, to borrow the title of Chris Jones’ book (itself borrowed from hymn twenty-nine in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns).155 As mentioned above, quite how these elements migrated from the medieval to the modern is outside the remit of this study and part of a much larger study which should be taken up. Some of the writers were English, French and German, whose cultures are rich in revenant folklore; others are American, who brought that lore with them to the New World. Some of the writers were Catholic and perhaps were exposed to ecclesiastical chronicles in their studies. It certainly seems plausible that even those who are not will have caught snippets here and there, from a grandparent’s story, from an old book in a family bookshelf, of the stories told in times past. Certainly, Mark Twain, who famously travelled Europe, could have heard all kinds of old tales from which he constructed his own versions. In whatever ways such stories and themes are handed down from one generation to the next, from Church to laity, from art to literature, there are enough similarities between them to conclude that modern revenant literature is the inheritor of its medieval ancestors. The common thread connecting them is death: fear of it, how to conquer it (either through eternal life, revenancy, science or other means), and the use of that fear by various people for various ends throughout history. The larger question is not if, but why. For what reason have writers from the Middle Ages to the present day found revenant tales so productive of didactic purpose, fiction and poetry? Much of it has been discussed in these pages. We will examine it a bit further in the conclusion.

Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts.

154

Chris Jones, Strange Likeness, 4.

155

Conclusion

T

t

he preceding pages have sought to demonstrate that the development of revenant literature was heavily influenced by the Church, first through the doctrine of resurrection and the cults of the body and of the saints, then through ecclesiastical efforts to use revenant stories to deliver didactic messages for the cure of souls. I have tried to show also that the message the Church intended and the message the laity received were not always – or at least not completely – the same. Where churchmen offered a message of memento mori to spur parishioners to amend their lives, the laity often responded more to the macabre language and images with which the message was presented, for it spoke to their own inner fear of death. Indeed, ecclesiastics were themselves sometimes so taken with the sheer pleasure of the fantastic that they seemed to relate tales with no discernible moralite simply for the joy of the story itself. When the Church began discouraging the laity from telling such stories and allied themselves with scientific views debunking claims of revenants through rational explanations or ascribing them to the work of demons or tricksters, people persevered in telling the tales without institutional support, through ballads and imaginative literature, for a variety of purposes social, political and artistic. As we have seen, that instinct drove a proliferation of stories of the risen dead, some following the lead of the classic medieval revenant and others branching off in new and sometimes surprising directions. Stories and novels were joined by films and television programmes, and paramount among modern receptions of the medieval revenant is the modern zombie story. We return now to the larger question. Why did people insist on maintaining belief in revenants despite efforts by Church and secular authorities to dissuade them? Why is revenant art and literature so fecund a subject matter? Why has it captivated ecclesiastics and laity, writers and poets, painters and even composers, from the Middle Ages to the present? As we have seen, revenant tales in different historical circumstances have coincided with specific ills. In many accounts in England, for instance, revenants were blamed for outbreaks of plague. The dramatic rise in the number of tales starting around the year 1000, while certainly driven in part by the renewal of autobiographical writing and other related reasons (as Jean-Claude

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Schmitt has suggested),1 may also have been motivated by millenarian anxieties that the end of the world was upon them. Presently, stories about zombies seem to be extremely attractive vessels through which to express our anxieties. We are living, for good or ill, in something of a golden age of zombie stories at the moment. Zombies, of course, are not revenants as the figure was understood in the medieval or early modern imagination. The modern zombie, as it has been understood by twentieth- and twenty-first-century television and movie audiences, was born in the Caribbean. The same fears that led medieval people to believe that they saw the risen dead stalking through their villages led people in Haiti, the West Indies and other regions to imagine the zombi as something which ‘makes disorder at night’, ‘who make all those noises at night one cannot understand’.2 People in these regions believed that the dead rise and, for instance, bar the path past a graveyard, but the zombi was not dead. It was something else altogether. It was a stand-in for things that could not be understood, things that were frightening, unknown figures one encountered on a road at night and could not quite see. During his travels in Martinique, Lafcadio Hearn became fascinated with the idea of the zombi, and spoke to many people trying to understand what it meant. A woman called Thérésa attempted to explain, and Hearn translates her explanation thus: ‘You pass along the high-road at night, and you see a great fire, and the more you walk to get to it the more it moves away: it is the zombi makes that . . . Or a horse with only three legs passes you: that is a zombi.’3 According to Roger Luckhurst, two writers were primarily responsible for bringing the zombi to the attention of the world: Hearn and William Seabrook.4 After many iterations in service of a variety of storytelling aims, to include condemnation of colonialism and other sins, the zombie was seized upon by film-makers and has evolved into the gory, cannibalistic figure that transforms from a human being into a zombie after being bitten by another zombie. It has been further developed in recent years to reflect specific and highly localised modern fears, such as in the French television series Les Revenants (first broadcast in November 2012), in which the resurrected dead are othered in the same way as the country’s Muslim and immigrant populations, though this is never specified; David Freyne’s The Cured (2017), in which Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 35.

1

Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies (Oxford: Signal Books, 2001), 145.

2

Ibid., 146.

3

Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 14–22.

4

Con c lusion    165

zombies who have been cured with a vaccine are used as a device through which to explore the possibility of reconciliation after The Troubles in Ireland, though this is also never said; and the post-apocalyptic 28 Days Later (2002), which explores the life of a band of survivors after a zombie apocalypse in a way that reflects anxieties about climate change, followed by its sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007). Some films are less serious in purpose, such as the comedy The Dead Don’t Die (2019). The very fact that the term ‘zombie apocalypse’ has now entered the lexicon is evidence of the saturation of the public consciousness by the zombie motif. Indeed, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia harnessed fascination with zombie outbreaks to educate the public about hurricane and disaster preparedness by playfully disguising the tips as preparation for a zombie apocalypse.5 In the introduction, we discussed one of the most successful iterations of the zombie story, The Walking Dead, an evolution of medieval revenant tales and modern zombie storytelling into a logical descendent driven by post-modern anxieties. In The Walking Dead, we ourselves are the monsters, all infected, no matter how good or how bad we are. We are carriers of whatever mysterious disease creates ‘walkers’, mindless automatons with no higher brain function, predators with no thoughts, no feelings, only the relentless drive to kill and eat. It is there under the surface, only waiting for our hearts to stop beating to assert itself in our reanimated bodies. It is not difficult to see in this an anxiety about human beings as the destructive consumers driving climate change, devouring all the resources the environment has to offer with no regard to the havoc we wreak. It is also not difficult to see the metaphor for the destruction we unleash on a more interpersonal level, through our private and public interactions – in relationships, in political discourse, and in public policy. At a time when leaders seem more concerned with using public office for personal gain, when members of the US Congress block gun legislation even in the wake of the repeated carnage of mass shootings in the interests of the gun lobby from which they receive millions of dollars in donations, it is easy to see why anxieties about destructive figures over whom we have no control would be haunting our imaginations. Whereas in early anxieties about our humanity the monster was without – demons tempting us to sin, our deceased loved ones suffering purgation, damned souls in Hell – the monsters began to inhabit us, and we crawled out of our graves and wreaked havoc on the living. Then, the monsters were the other – immigrants, oppressors or whatever else was the bogeyman of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse’, 16 May 2011, https://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/prepar edness-101-zombie-apocalypse/.

5

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moment, until more recently, with The Walking Dead, the monster was us. In The Girl with All the Gifts, the monster is us, but only a part of us. Melanie is human. She feels love and curiosity, and she desires human interaction and physical contact. When she smells flesh, she transforms, like Mr Hyde, but the transformation is involuntary, and brief. Once danger has passed, or she has fed, her humanity quickly reasserts itself, and she is disgusted by the monster within her. That is us. Our humanity makes us capable of great love and care towards others. It is threatened by our baser desires – for money, or possessions, or achievement – but our humanity breaks through, and, usually, we are ashamed of the things we have done in pursuit of our baser needs. The monster in each of us, with all its terrifying, destructive cravings, lives alongside the human, uncomfortably and inseparably, and we have to learn to live together, with the monstrous in ourselves and in others, to keep that monster at bay and exert what is most human. The revenant is a persistent motif. It has endured through centuries, and it appears across high and low culture. Its power to shock, to frighten, to repel and to draw us in lies in the fear it provokes, fear of the monstrous and, ultimately, fear of our own deaths. This emotion is primal, and we should not discount it just because it is too simple an explanation. As in the medieval exempla that reminded parishioners that, no matter what wealth they accrue, they go to their deaths naked and wanting, when all of our accomplishments are stripped away – our learning, our discourses, our wit – we are animals, with all of the survival instincts animals possess. It is only sensible that we should fear death. Unlike animals, we are aware of our own mortality, so our survival instincts include a fear of death. The revenant is a complex motif. It has been employed in many guises to express a variety of themes for manifold purposes, so no one explanation of its function will be satisfactory. The texts we have considered vary widely in subject matter and theme, their purposes variously religious, didactic, political, literary. One thing all of the texts have in common is that the revenant figure is the other, a monster, or is othered by those around them (in the case of Isabel Heriot, who did not match seventeenth-century conceptions of a good Christian; or Les Revenants, in which the dead show more humanity than many of the living who ostracise them; or Frankenstein, in which the monster ends up becoming a man and Victor – in his actions against his creation – becomes a monster). In those cases, those who seek to destroy or ostracise the revenants are the monsters. In both cases, in other words – the other and the othered – the monster is us. Perhaps that is another reason for the endurance of revenant tales, in elite culture and lay, in high art and low entertainment. These tales allow us to acknowledge the monster in each of us, and in doing so, slay it.

Envoi: In the Time of Plague

I

t

finished this book in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. At the time of writing, the death tolls stand at 39,369 in the United Kingdom and 107,530 in the United States. Other countries that acted more swiftly and more vigorously have much lower death totals: New Zealand: 22; Australia: 102; Ireland: 1,658; Vietnam: 0. It may be possible that we have flattened the curve, terminology now familiar to nearly everyone in the world to mean controlling the infection rate and the spread of the virus – and hopefully the death toll – by sheltering in place. It is also possible that this will turn out to be only the outbreak’s first wave, and, as some countries lift their lockdowns too soon, the infection rate will soar, and with it the death rate. Some places that have long been neglected by the western world are now facing rises in the curve, and they are even less well prepared economically to meet the crisis. In Uganda, for example, as the chaplain at the University of St Andrews, the Rev Dr Donald MacEwan, wrote in one of the daily emails he has been sending since the lockdown began, Uganda has a population of 42 million people and only fifty-five intensive care beds. Never in our lifetimes has the memento mori that so humbled people in the Middle Ages been more understandable or more frightening: remember that you are going to die. We also find ourselves experiencing some of the same fears medieval people felt about the body as the seat of corruption, the potential carrier of disease. The Black Death was a source of some of the most frightening medieval accounts of revenants, and, in at least one story, the revenant himself even passed the plague on to others. Great swathes of medieval art depict the violence inflicted on the living by Death – piercing them with darts, running them through with swords, dancing them away to the next world, or carrying away people they love while they stand helplessly by and weep. That is what we are facing now. Just before I sat down to write this, I prepared the dough for sourdough bread. It is now resting, and in four hours, I will transfer it to the refrigerator to rise overnight. Like many people in the midst of this crisis, I find myself grateful for what I have. And yet that has not turned out to be a new dress or a cute pair of boots. It is fresh bread. It is visiting with family and friends, even if it’s on video chat to maintain social distancing. It is books and music. It is fresh vegetables. Toilet paper. Running water.

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Thus, we have also learned in the COVID-19 pandemic what they learned after the plague in the Middle Ages: that it is the labourers who make the world run. When so many people died during the Black Death that there were fewer workers to plant the fields, the landlords had to offer higher wages to get workers to till the soil and to persuade them not to move in search of more lucrative work. They learned that labour has great value and that they would have to pay higher wages to have their work done. For us, it is postal workers and delivery drivers, bus drivers, grocery clerks and food chain workers who keep our world supplied with all the things we need. It is the people who collect the garbage and the people who keep the lights on and the water running. And, of course, it is doctors and nurses and healthcare workers. If we learn one lesson from this, let’s hope that it’s the value of our workers. 2 June 2020 St Andrews

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Illustrations Colombe, Jean. Death with an Arrow, Rising From a Tomb. Frances, Bourges. Late 1470s. The Morgan Library, MS 677, fol. 245. Dance of Death mural. St Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn. Reproduced on The Dance of Death website. www.dodedans.com/Eest.htm. [accessed August 2015]. Death and Mourning, Pricke of Conscience Window. 1410. All Saints, York. Detail of a miniature of the Three Living and the Three Dead, Psalter of Robert de Lisle. 1308–40. Arundel MS 83 II, Folio 127, British Library. Detail of Dance of Death mural. St Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn. Reproduced on The Dance of Death website. www.dodedans.com/Eest.htm. [accessed August 2015]. The Ghent Associates. Corpse with a spear and a coffin. Miniature in the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I. 1480. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett-SMPK (Staatlichen Museen und Preußischer Kulturbesitz. MS 78 B 12, fol. 221r). ——. The Three Living and the Three Dead. Miniature in the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I. 1480. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett-SMPK (Staatlichen Museen und Preußischer Kulturbesitz), MS 78 B 12, fol. 220v. Holbein the Younger, Hans. The Child. Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort. Lyon: M. et G. Trechsel, 1538. Reprinted in The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger, A Complete Facsimile of the Original 1538 Edition. New York: Dover, 1971. ——. The Knight. Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort. Lyon: M. et G. Trechsel, 1538. Reprinted in The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger, A Complete Facsimile of the Original 1538 Edition. New York: Dover, 1971. Maître François. Death Attacking a Man. Paris, France. 1475. Walters Art Museum MS 214, fol. 91. Marchant, Guy. Bishop and Esquire. Dance of Death woodcut. 1486, reprinted in The Dance of Death. www.dodedans.com/Exhibit/Image.php?lang=e&navn=f16. [accessed August 2015]. Provost, Jan. Death and the Miser. 1515–21. Groeninge Museum, Bruges, Belgium. Photo by author.

Index Alcuin 5 Alphabet of Tales  61, 68–9 ‘Als I lay in a winteris nyt: the Debate between the Body and the Soul’ 68 Amorous Corpse, The 138–39 angels  10, 34, 36–7, 41, 62, 99–100 Apocalypse of Peter  28 Ars moriendi  23–4, 96 Aubrey, John  99–100 Augustine of Hippo  17, 22–3, 24, 29–30, 33–4, 47, 61, 62, 75, 77, 93, 99–100, 138 Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn 9, 79, 139 Baudelaire, Charles  129 corpse poems  129 ‘Danse Macabre’  130 ‘A Fantastical Engraving’  129 Baudouin de Condé ‘Li troi mort et li troi vif ’  2, 69–72 Bede, the Venerable ‘Vision of Drycthelm’  5 Beerbohm, Max Enoch Soames 122–23 Bernardino of Siena  12, 22 Bible 1 Corinthians 15:21–2  27 n.50 15:35  16, 28 15:52  27 n.49 Daniel 12:2  25 n.36 Ezekiel 37:5–6 28 37:12–14  25 n.35 Isaiah 26:9  25 n.34 35:10

John 11:1–44  26 n.43 19:30  26 n.46 Luke 7:11–17  26 n.42 23:46  26 n.46 23:55  26 n.47 Mark 15:37  26 n.46 15:46–7  26 n.47 Matthew 27:50  26 n.46 28:5–7  19 n.1 28:13–5  27 n.48 1 Peter 5:8 114 Psalms 103:16 22 Blickling Homily X  67–8 Burial practices  32 post-Reformation 95–9 Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541  95 sin-eating 98–9 of suicides  98 Burke, Thomas The Hollow Man 124–25 Burns, Robert ‘Tam O’Shanter’  113–14 Byron, Lord  136–37 A Fragment 137 The Giaour 136–37 Caesarius of Arles  67 Caesarius of Heisterbach  50 See also Dialogus miraculorum under revenants, in chronicles Carmilla 138–42 See also Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan

1 8 6    I n d e x Chaucer, Geoffrey ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’  93 ‘The Prioress’s Tale’  93 Child, James  10–11 English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The (Child Ballads) ‘The Cruel Mother’  113–14 ‘James Harris (The Dæmon Lover)’ 113 ‘The Suffolk Miracle’  109–10 ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’  9–10, 112–13 ‘The Unquiet Grave’  111–12 ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’  110–11 ‘Willie’s Fatal Visit’  10, 112 Christianity, Cult of  16, 21, 31 Chronicle of Lanercost  8–9, 54–5 Coffin-Maker, The 131–32 Crawford, F. Marion For the Blood Is the Life 145–46 Cross-Roads, The 156–57 Cured, The 164–5 Dance of Death/Danse macabre  2, 3, 14, 46, 86–8 in art Guyot Marchant  90–1 Holbein, Hans the Younger  91 Les Saints Innocents  2, 86–7, 88 De Maupassant, Guy The Hand 126–28 ‘De Tribus Regibus Mortuis’  9, 84–5 ‘Death & Liffe’  76–8 death and the dead in art  74, 75–6 Death and Mourning panel, ‘Pricke of Conscience’ window  89 ‘Death Attacking a Man’  90 ‘Death With an Arrow, Rising from a Tomb’  90 transi tombs  89 conceptions of  20–1, 27–8, 65 pagan  20–1, 62 fear of  7–8, 12–13, 21–3, 34, 62 and judgement  75–6

revivification  20, 40–1 Apollonius 20 Meroe the lamia  20 Metamorphoses 20 Ovid 20 James Naylor/Dorcas Erbury  105 ‘Disputacione betwyx the Body and Wormes’ 69 Dracula 142–44 Dunbar, William ‘Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’ 82–3 ‘Lament for the Makars’  83–4 Edgeworth, Roger Sermons very fruitfull etc. 96 Epicurus 20 ‘Erthe Upon Erthe’  24, 69 Farmer, Ralph Satan Inthron’d in his Chair of Pestilence 105 Four Last Things  22–3, 74–5, 90 Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus  14, 147–50 Frith, John ‘An Answer to Rastell’s Dialogue’ 93–4 Gautier, Théophile La mort amoureuse (The Dead Leman) 138–39 Gervase of Tilbury Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor 61–2 Gesta Romanorum  39, 59–60 Girl with All the Gifts  158–62, 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von ‘Dance of Death, The’  128–29 Golden Arm, The 152–53 Golden Legend, The 56–8 ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’  57 Gothic, the  121–22, 146 Gregory the Great  30, 33, 44 See also revenants, in chronicles

In dex   187 Hearn, Lafcadio  164 A Dead Love 155–56 The Name on the Stone 154–55 Two Years in the French West Indies 164 Henryson, Robert ‘The Thre Deid Pollis’  81–2 Holbein, Hans the Younger  91 See also Dance of Death/Danse macabre, in art Icelandic sagas  54 Eyrbyggia Saga (Story of the EreDwellers)  38, 56 Laxdæla Saga  8, 37–8, 56 Irving, Washington Adventure of the German Student 130–31 Legend of Sleepy Hollow 152–54 Jacobs, W. W.  125–26 Jacobus de Voragine  58 See also Golden Legend, The James VI and I  17, 103 Daemonologie 103 Julien of Vézelay  22, 156 Justin Martyr  36 Kincaid, John  17–18, 104–5 Lavater, Lewes  99–100 Lazarus  20, 24, 25–6 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan  140 Carmilla 138–42 Lodge, Thomas  100 London, Jack A Thousand Deaths 151–52 Loring, F. G.  146–47 See also Tomb of Sarah Lowell, Amy  156–57 Lydgate, John  81, 87 ‘Dance of Death’  87–8 ‘Fiftene Toknys Aforn the Doom’  81 ‘Legend of St. Austin at Compton’ 81 ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’  81

Map, Walter  38, 46, 48 See also De nugis curialium under revenants, in chronicles medievalism  121, 154, 162 memento mori  7–8, 32, 67–9, 74, 80, 87, 91, 128, 130, 163 Mirabilis, Christina  60–1 See also revenants, in chronicles Mirk, John  60 Mirk’s Festial  57, 60–1 Monkey’s Paw 125–26 Office of the Dead  21, 26 Orderic Vitalis  45 Origen 29 Pedro Páramo 157–58 Peter Lombard  29–30 Plague  50, 61, 69, 73–4, 102, 163 Plato Myth of Er 5 Poe, Edgar Allen The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar 150–51 Polidori, John William  137 The Vampyre; a Tale 137–8 Purgatory  24, 34, 37, 58, 74–5, 93–5, 99–100 Chantries Act of 1547  94–5 England’s Book of Common Prayer 95 King’s Book of 1543  94 Pushkin, Alexander  131–32 Rémy, Nicolas Demonolatry 104 resurrection  1–2, 7, 11, 15, 16, 22–3, 25–33, 36, 41, 42, 49, 55, 57, 62, 75, 76, 81, 85, 96, 161, 163 Jesus  19–20, 26–7 revenants  1–7, 8–10, 13–15 in art  74–5 Danse macabre 74 bodies reanimated by the devil or a demon  8, 18, 49, 51–2, 60, 103–4

1 8 8    I n d e x revenants (continued) burial of  46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 97, 98 in chronicles Alphabet of Tales 61 baker of Brittany  60 Christina Mirabilis  60–1 Chronicle of Lanercost 54 Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg 33, 41–3 Dialogus miraculorum 50–2 Gesta Regum Anglorum 43–5 Gregory the Great  33, 39–41, 48 Historiae Memorabiles  8, 33, 52–4 De nugis curialium 46–8 tales of the monk of Byland Abbey  33, 55–6 William of Newburgh  1–2, 8, 48–50 dreams 13–15 etymology 8 motif 3–4 otherness 15 and pestilence/plague  46, 47, 49, 50, 61 post-Reformation 92–100 violent  33, 53, 54, 59, 61, 65, 74, 88–91 Rulfo, Juan  157–58 saints  5, 12, 17, 43, 56, 58, 107 cult of  2, 7, 16, 31–3 Salt Is Not for Slaves 132–34 Satan’s Invisible World Discovered 92–3 Scott, Walter Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft 126 ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’  57 See also Golden Legend, The Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus  14, 147–50 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  148, 150 Sinclair, George  92–3 Sinistrari of Ameno Demoniality 104

‘Sir Orfeo’  66 Soul and Body poetry  68–9 South English Legendary 58–9 ‘St Erkenwald’  80–1, 151 Stevenson, Robert Louis  114 Thrawn Janet  9, 114–17 Story of Baelbrow 136 Teig O’Kane and the Corpse 123–24 Tertullian of Carthage  28–9 Thietmar of Merseburg  33, 41–3 See also revenants, in chronicles Thomas Aquinas, St  29–30, 36 Thrawn Janet  9, 114–17 See also Stevenson, Robert Louis ‘Three Dead Kings’  84–5 ‘Three Living and the Three Dead’  2, 18, 66, 67, 73, 74, 93 Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Emperor Maximilian  90 Li Troi Mort et Li Troi Vif  2, 69–72 Psalter of Robert de Lisle  73, 89 Thurnley Abbey 135 Timor mortis conturbat me 21 Tomb of Sarah 146–47 Twain, Mark  162 Curious Dream, A 135 Tyndale, William  94 Vado Mori 86 Vampire of Croglin Grange 144–45 Vampires  61, 105–8, 156 in fiction  136–47 Visio Pauli 5 Walking Dead, The  15, 165–66 William of Malmesbury  57 See also Gesta Regum Anglorum under revenants, in chronicles William of Newburgh  2, 8, 38–9 See also revenants, in chronicles witches  101–5, 106, 107, 113, 115, 116 zombies  163, 164–66