The living and the dead

'One would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around to terrorize the living, were there not so many cases supported by ample testimony.'

This BBC documentary from the series Inside the Medieval Mind spends some time on the relationship between the living and the dead in medieval Britain. Narrator Robert Bartlett of St Andrew's University recounts some of the 'ghost stories' told by William of Newburgh and others. Many of these stories are compiled by Andrew Joynes in Medieval Ghost Stories (The Boydell Press, 2001).

Bartlett is author of several books including The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

From the fifth book of William of Newburgh's Chronica rerum anglicarum as paraphrased by Robert Bartlett in the quote above.

Medieval ghostly encounters

The documentary on 'vampire skeletons' in the previous post refers to William of Malmesbury's tale of the witch from Berkeley and other medieval stories of ghosts and revenants. The best starting point for reading some of these stories is probably Andrew Joynes' Medieval Ghost Stories, originally published in 2001 and reprinted as a paperback a couple of times: 'a collection of ghostly encounters from medieval romances, monastic chronicles, sagas and heroic poetry.'

One slightly frustrating thing about this book, though, is that it opens with the interesting quote:

'... The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life...'

because when you look up the book that it is taken from, Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1977), to learn more, the book really has little to say about the kind of ghosts and revenants one would expect, as it is really about 'haunting' in a more metaphorical sense, cf. Amazon's description: Gordon 'uses the metaphor of haunting to reflect on how contemporary society hides from its past.'