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This volume explores the enduring presence and participation of the dead in the lives of premodern people from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. The chapters in this book were originally published in the
Journal of Medieval History.
List of contents
Preface. Introduction: The vitality of the dead in medieval cultures
1. The worm and the corpse: Carolingian visions of Gehenna's undead cemetery
2. 'Agite, agite et uenite!' Corrupted breath, corrupted speech and encounters with the restless dead in Geoffrey of Burton's Vita sancte Moduenne virginis
3. The necromancer and the abbot: summoning the dead in Cistercian exempla
4. The dead in dreams: medieval Icelandic conceptions of the unquiet dead
5. Talking with ghosts: Rancière, Derrida and the archive
6. Landscapes of the dead in the late medieval imagination
7. Byland Revisited, or, Spectres of Inheritance
8. Bodies of Earth and Air: Corporeality and Spirituality in Pre-Modern British Narratives of the Undead
9. Of Saxons and spectres
About the author
Scott G. Bruce is Professor of Medieval History at Fordham University. His research interests include monasticism, hagiography, and the reception of classical and patristic traditions in medieval Europe. He is the editor of
The Penguin Book of the Undead (2016),
The Penguin Book of Hell (2018), and
The Penguin Book of Demons (2024).
Stephen Gordon is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Cardiff University. He has taught previously at the University of Manchester and Royal Holloway. Stephen is an interdisciplinary scholar of the premodern supernatural with an especial interest in the literature and archaeology of the medieval walking dead.
Summary
This volume explores the enduring presence and participation of the dead in the lives of premodern people from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Medieval History.
