The Supernatural

Revenants, Witches and Demons

Seminar and Essay Questions

What can stories of revenants tell us about medieval understandings of death, sin, and the afterlife?
How did medieval people distinguish between holy and demonic supernatural activity?
Why did fears of witchcraft intensify during the later Middle Ages?
What factors shaped medieval judgements about whether a supernatural experience reflected sanctity or heresy?

Primary Sources

William of Newburgh: Of the prodigy of the dead man, who wandered about after burial
Christina of Stommeln, Epistolae (1272) (pp.164-168) (from M. Goodich, ed. Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
The Bull of Innocent VIII

E-resources

Malleus Maleficarum
Revenants Revisited (Turbulent Priests; Dr Charles West)

Essential Reading

Stokes, Laura, 'Toward the Witch Craze' in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, J.M. Bennet and R.M.Karras (eds) (Oxford University Press, 2012),

Caciola, Nancy, ‘Night is conceded to the dead’: Revenant Congregations in the Middle Ages' in Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds) (Palgrave Macmillan 2017)

Simpson, Jacqueline, 'Repentant Soul or Walking Corpse? Debatable Apparitions in Medieval England' Folklore, Volume 114, Number 3 (2003), pp.389-402.

Further Reading

Bailey, Michael, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum, 76 (4) (2001): 960–90.

Bailey, Michael, “The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages,” Essays in Medieval Studies, 19 (2002): 120–34

Bailey, Michael, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies : The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2017)

Caciola, Nancy, 'Wraiths, revenants and ritual in medieval culture', Past and Present, 152 (1996), pp. 3–45

Caciola, Nancy, ‘Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, 2 (2000): 268-306.

Caciola, Nancy, Discerning Spirits : Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2006)

Cohn, Norman, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000)

Geary, Patrick, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1994)

Gordon, Stephen, 'Disease, Sin and the Walking Dead in Medieval England, c.1100-1350: A Note on the Documentary and Archaeological Evidence', in Medicine, Healing and Performance, ed. by Stephen Gordon et al (Oxford: Oxbow, 2014), pp. 55–70

Herzig, Tamar, 'Flies, Heretics, and the Gendering of Witchcraft,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 5:1 (2010), pp.51–80

Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Ghosts in the Middle Ages : the living and the dead in Medieval society (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan) (Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Stokes, Laura, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)