Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450 by Stephen Gordon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450 by Stephen Gordon Claire Fanger Keywords medieval England, ghosts, undead, demonology, devil, witchcraft, sleep paralysis stephen gordon. Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pp. x + 242. What is the difference between a demon and a revenant or embodied ghost? This is not a trivial question if you are trying to figure out how to eradicate one. This book, which began as Stephen Gordon’s Ph.D. dissertation, comprises a set of case studies of stories involving medieval English narratives of human encounters with the dead (or undead). Many of the stories fall roughly in the genre of what we might call ghost stories with a touch of urban legend (often they are claimed to recount actual events in real places; in some cases they are claimed to derive from a local witness, a friend of a friend). They are described by Gordon as a type of shared “porous and malleable” socio-cultural text, attributable not strictly to the “belief” in ghosts and revenants, but rather to “the acknowledgement of the belief in” them (3). They could arouse a wide array of reactions in medieval listeners, from skepticism to fear to intellectual interest in the manner of existence and the cause of the behavior of the monstrous beings they described. There are already excellent surveys of the restless dead in medieval culture. Gordon’s book is informed by prior scholarship, but his work differs from the well-known, larger scale studies (for example those of Jean-Claude Schmitt and Nancy Caciola) in that most chapters offer close reading of a particular narrative account in its context. There are six chapters, the first three focused on narratives from twelfth-century Latin sources, Chapters 4 and 5 drawing on the fourteenth-century vernacular stories, and Chapter 6 more generally treating episodes referred to by the modern term “sleep paralysis.” Chapter 1 concerns the tale of the Witch of Berkeley from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum—a tale designed to exemplify the dangers of devoting one’s life to the Devil and engaging in illicit magic. Gordon reads the fate of the Witch in William’s account (dragged from her tomb to ride to hell on the back of a demonic horse, somewhat in the manner of later Faust narratives) as a social commentary on foreign elements of which the community needed to be purged. He also looks at the text’s reception history, for it was transmitted well into the period of witch-hunting; this last part of the chapter is interestingly illustrated by woodcuts from early modern sources. In Chapter 2, Gordon looks at a set of tales drawn from Book 5 of William of Newburgh’s Histora rerum Anglicarum—the tale of the “Buckingham Ghost,” the “Berwick Ghost,” the “Hounds’ Priest,” and the “Ghost of Anantis.” Gordon notes that the undead in these stories have some similarities to Scandinavian draugr and Slavic vampires. In a reading that builds on [End Page 310] Chapter 1, he discusses the tales in relation to rhetoric of contagion, tying the pestilential features of undead corpses to the dangers of social deviance and social unrest. Chaper 3 offers a close reading of the undead appearing in the De nugis curialium of Walter Map, with special attention given to the satirical features in these narratives. The chapter explores how the narrative conventions of the ghost encounter are undone by Map, who uses the figure of the undead corpse to satirize the conventions of tales of mirabilia. Chapters 4 and 5 jump from the twelfth-century Latin context to a late-fourteenth-century vernacular one. Chapter 4 looks at restless dead that appear in Middle English sermon literature, focusing in particular on the Liber festivalis by John Mirk. Chapter 5 concerns Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” which relates thematically to the sermon literature discussed in Chapter 4 and involves an extended dialogue between the Devil and the summoner that reflects on the demonic animation of corpses. These two chapters, written more than a century after the Fourth Lateran Council, both manifest...