1st Edition
Vigor Mortis The Vitality of the Dead in Medieval Societies
Preface
Scott G. Bruce
Introduction: The vitality of the dead in medieval cultures
Stephen Gordon
1. The worm and the corpse: Carolingian visions of Gehenna’s undead cemetery
Matthew Bryan Gillis
2. ‘Agite, agite et uenite!’ Corrupted breath, corrupted speech and encounters with the restless dead in Geoffrey of Burton’s Vita sancte Moduenne virginis
Stephen Gordon
3. The necromancer and the abbot: summoning the dead in Cistercian exempla
Martha G. Newman
4. The dead in dreams: medieval Icelandic conceptions of the unquiet dead
Kirsi Kanerva
5. Talking with ghosts: Rancière, Derrida and the archive
John H. Arnold
6. Landscapes of the dead in the late medieval imagination
Carl Watkins
7. Byland Revisited, or, Spectres of Inheritance
Tom Johnson
8. Bodies of Earth and Air: Corporeality and Spirituality in Pre-Modern British Narratives of the Undead
Martha McGill
9. Of Saxons and spectres
Matthew Vernon
Biography
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.
