SUMMA DÆMONICA BIBLIOGRAFIA

GORDON 2013 1SDB2019

Stephen R. Gordon

The Walking Dead in Medieval England:

Literary and Archaeological Perspectives

(Teză de doctorat)

University of Manchester, 2013. 277 p. (pdf.)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the popular perception of the walking dead – ‘revenants’ – in medieval England, using both written and archaeological sources. The opening chapter defines the methodology for conducting an interdisciplinary investigation into literary and material ‘texts’. Chapter two investigates the strategies used by the Church to prescribe the rules for a ‘good’ death performance. This will include a brief overview of the evolution of the Western funerary rite from the Roman period to the fifteenth century. The third chapter examines the specific codicological placement of the revenant narratives in William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum (c.1198), and explores the theological, political and cultural contexts which prompted their transcription and circulation. This examination of the ‘social logic’ of the walking dead will include a critical analysis of the ‘Buckingham Ghost’ narrative. Motifs of pestilence and the spreading of social/physical disorder, so evident in the William’s Historia, are investigated in chapter four. The percipients’ negotiation of religious doctrine, humoural theory, and the traditions of ‘folk’ medicine will be used to explicate why some revenants were considered contagious. The relationship between the somatic experience of the revenant attack and the ‘nightmare’ is also given consideration in this chapter. The final section of this study involves an exploration of the material strategies used to allay the walking dead. I contend that it is indeed possible to draw intertextual analogies between the written sources and unusual/deviant burial practices. The way in which medico-magical knowledge (discussed in chapter four) was utilised to protect the living from the pestilential dead is given special consideration. The aim of chapter five, then, is to analyse the evidence for the fear of the errant corpse in mortuary and landscape contexts. In short, I argue that smaller (unwritten) traditions could be improvised within the prevailing habitus of the local community to form idiosyncratic patterns, or ‘rhetorics’, of apotropaic response.

Contents

List of Figures 4; Abbreviations 6; Abstract 11; Declaration 12; Copyright Statement 12; Acknowledgements 13; 1. Introduction 14; Ghost Belief: An Overview 15; Defining the Walking Dead 18; Chronological Boundaries 19; Chronological Boundaries: The Twelfth Century 24; Geographical Boundaries 27; Literature Review 29; Aims of Study 38; Methodology 39; Interdisciplinarity: the ‘Anti-Method’ 41; Designing a Method: ‘Texts’ and the Illusory Divide 47; Designing a Method: Orality, Aurality, and Book 48; Theory of Practice 54; Sources 61; Chapter Overview 63; Conclusion 66; 2. Pattern and Performance in Medieval Attitudes to Death 69; Aim of Chapter 70; Labyrinths and Knots in Christian Exegesis 72; Christian Funerary Rite: Origins 77; Christian Funerary Rite: Late Medieval 80; Preaching and the Maintenance of the ‘Pattern’ 89; Untangling the Knot: The Dance of Death 92; Conclusion 99; 3. The Walking Dead and the Historia Rerum Anglicarum 101; The Northern Church: A Historical Review 103; Cultural Networks and the Truthfulness of Ghosts 105; Revenants and Wonders 109; The Revenant Stories in Context 112; The ‘Buckingham Ghost’ in Context 120; Conclusion 130; 4. Disease, Nightmares and the Walking Dead 132; Contagion, Decay and the Body 133; Humours and Ill-Health 137; Sin and Ill-Health 141; Nightmares: An Introduction 144; Canonical Nightmares 147; Insular Tradition and the Nightmare 155; Nightmares and Revenants 162; Conclusion 165; 5. The Archaeology of the Walking Dead: The Grave 167; Charcoal and Ash Burial 169; Pillow-Graves 173; Grave Goods 176; Positive Burial Innovations: A Synthesis 181; Archaeology and the Dangerous Dead 183; Liminal Burials 185; Staking/Weighing the Body/Prone Burial 194; Cremation and Decapitation 200; Apotropaic Grave Goods 203; Stones 204; Metal 209; Conclusion 211; 6. Conclusion 213; Appendix 219; Bibliography 234; Figures 265.