Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 6: Medieval Vampires
Darren Oldridge - The Roaming Dead
University of Worcester, United Kingdom

Numerous accounts of the reanimation of corpses were recorded in mediaeval and Renaissance Europe. Many educated men accepted that these events really took place. Today it is tempting to dismiss this belief as “superstitious”, but this paper will argue that it was entirely rational in the intellectual context of the pre-modern world. The revival of the dead was a familiar motif in late mediaeval and early modern Christianity; specific examples were described in The Bible and other authoritative texts. There was also a broad consensus on the existence of divine interventions and demonic manipulations of nature, both of which could cause corpses to rise. Most mediaeval and Renaissance Christians believed that the community of the dead could intervene in the affairs of the living, though this idea was challenged to some extent by the Protestant Reformation. In the context of these widely accepted ideas, it was possible for both learned and uneducated people to accept that bodies occasionally wandered from their graves.

Christa Tuczay - Ancient and Medieval Myths Surrounding the Dead and Undead
Austrian University and Academy of Science, Vienna, Austria

The revenant is a concept of an entity who returns after death. Amongst the names used throughout history for these returning dead are: revenant, nachzeher, gespenst
Very early in literature visions of the dead are not only a current motif but the literature dealing with visions becomes a specific branch in medieval literature. But not only in the visionary literature the motif of the returning dead is to be found but in almost every genre of courtly literature the appearance of revenants, ghosts and grateful dead are constituting elements of the narratives.
The so called folk belief as it can be traced in courtly literature, penitentials, treatises and homiletic literature describes manifold nocturnal creatures. Among them the most famous the wild hunt, a phenomenon which can only be comprehended and explained thoroughly after disputing the medieval concept of the soul, spirit and demonology.
The gespenst, a ghostly or ghastly type of undead, roaming the earth in search of peace, usually because they had died by violence, or were left unburied somewhere surely occupied the fantasy of mankind from antiquity to our times.
There were many ways of handling these revenants once they were located. Apotropaics, or methods of causing evil to turn away, were diverse. Among the methods employed were mutilation of a corpse, physical restraints, funeral rites, and like the medieval fabliaux shows trickery to fool the revenant to depart.
The paper will present a survey of the medieval conceptual variants of the dead and revenants not only as literary motif but as well as part of folk belief. Similarities and distinctions to related phenomena as demons, witches and the proto vampires will show the complexity and numerous facets of the medieval thinking.

Kate Greenspan - Dead on Their Feet: the Folklore and Theology of the Living Dead in Handlyng Synne
Department of English, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA

Medieval exempla (short tales to be incorporated into sermons) offer rich insights into what lay people of the period believed and practiced and not only as Christians. Robert Mannyng of Brunneís
collection of exempla, Handlyng Synne (c. 1303), is shaped for lay and religious instruction, combining religious doctrine, traditional belief, and ordinary observation to promote honest and holy living, encourage responsible parenthood, and eliminate social sins. Indeed, he is far more concerned with day-to-day behaviour than with abstract or mystical matters of the soul. In this practical vein, several of his exempla deal with dead bodies that exhibit signs of life.
These tales enunciate popular beliefs about the disposition of those who die suddenly or by violence. Mannyng does not criticize these beliefs, though they hardly accord with Christian teachings; instead, he uses them to make a didactic point. In his tale of the Curséd Carolers of Colbek, for example, he uses theological and folk ideas about the death of sinners and saints to teach laymen and clerics separate lessons about the power of the priest at mass.
The priest in the exemplum appeals to God and St. Magnus to wreak vengeance on a groups of carolers who sing and dance in the churchyard as he is performing the Christmas mass. He asks that they might continue as they have begun for a twelvemonth. And so the carolers suddenly find themselves locked in sin, holding hands and dancing about, singing over and over again the ironic refrain, "Why stonde we? why go we noght?" [Why do we stay? Why donít we go?] When the priestís son, attempts to pull his sister from the circle, her arm comes off in his hands, but her body dances on. This horrifying pass reveals the fundamental effect of the curse upon the carolers: the girl's arm is as "dry as a branch torn from a tree"; when the heart has ceased to beat, the blood no longer flows. The limb has been torn from a corpse.
Other frightening changes come over the carolers. The natural processes of life are suspended: unaffected by weather, hunger, thirst, fear, even by such normal processes as excretion or the growth of hair and nails, they continue to dance and sing. Like the little clergeon in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, their activity is only temporarily interrupted by death. The little clergeon continues to sing with his throat cut; the carolers dance on in bodies that no longer exhibit the ordinary signs of life.
In my presentation, I will address the complicated question of what dead bodies can tell a medieval audience about sin and saintliness, and how popular beliefs about death modify, even distort, Christian teachings about the afterlife. I will also explore the connection of the priestís abuse of power to the genesis and fate of the undead. Finally, I will show how Mannyng speaks to two audiences with one exemplum, using his carolers to exemplify the devastating consequences of defying the priest, while reminding priests not to take lightly the profound mysteries they represent, mysteries of which their flock can have little comprehension.

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