Well, it’s been a long time since I last posted here. A lot has happened since March 2019, after which life kind of got in the way. The biggest news was the publication of my first monograph, Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050-1450, via the good people at Routledge (coincidentally available to buy, here).
The book acts as a synthesis of my work to date, showcasing how medieval authors utilised tales of the walking dead for their own critical and literary circumstances. Chapters to one to three explore how revenants were approached in twelfth-century Anglo-Latin texts; sources which have long been acknowledged as providing the most explicit references to the undead in medieval England. As I discuss with reference to William of Malmsesbury (ch.1), William of Newburgh (ch.2) and Walter Map (ch.3), revenants provided a versatile canvass onto which authors could insert all manner of socio-critical meanings. Want to criticise tensions (and distentions) in the contemporary political makeup? Use an equally monstrous body. Want to highlight the dangers of overstepping one’s social boundaries? The pestilential corpse was an appropriate metaphor to explore the theme of disorder run rampant. Want – as Walter Map certainly did – to ironise the conventional use of such wonders? Why yes, use a creature that by its very nature is resistant to uniform categorisation.
Chapters four and five move forward in time slightly and focus on how later medieval authors utilised the topos of the restless corpse, with a focus on sermons of John Mirk (ch. 4) and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (ch. 5). I argue that the parochial nature of Mirk’s sermons justifies the idea that the fear of the undead was just as prevalent in the fourteenth century as the twelfth, much as The Friar’s Tale’s reference to devils ‘aryse[ing] with dede bodyes’ suggests a belief commonplace to Chaucer’s own audience. The final chapter (ch. 6) consolidates all these reading and explores how a specific aspect of the revenant encounter – the nightmare, or feeling of pressure on the chest – was conceptualised in different literary arenas.
It took about seven years to mould the base themes of my PhD into something suitable enough to put into the academic kiln, as it were. Bits have been lobbed off and bits have been added, but the shape more or less remains the same. This isn’t the last time I’ll be exploring the undead in my research – I have some really interesting projects and papers in the pipeline – but it’s nice to finally release something that, academic pricing systems notwithstanding, everybody can enjoy.
Supernatural Histories 