‘Night is conceded to the dead’: Revenant Congregations in the Middle Ages

Abstract

How did medieval natural philosophers, theologians and folktales categorize the dead who were reported to act in lifelike ways – ghosts, revenants, saints or revivified human beings? Death was widely understood to be a lingering process, rather than a swift transition. Yet explanations for how and why a person, though dead, might nonetheless display agency or power varied widely amongst different social groups and their associated epistemologies. The essay explores medical definitions of vitality and mortality, and the struggle to define death; theologians’ desire to separate the theology of the resurrection from contemporary tales of revivification and their consequent recourse to demonic intervention as a heuristic device; the widespread notion that ‘bad’ deaths would lead to an evil return of the deceased; and folktales about peaceful groups of the dead living in community. Beliefs about the dead occupied an interstitial position in the society of the Middle Ages: few mortuary beliefs or practices were defined as heretical or actively suppressed. Hence beliefs about the dead were left as an open field of interpretation and debate.