October 30, 2025 • 49 mins
As the nights get longer and spookier, there's one thing that's guaranteed to make our hair stand on end: corpses that just won’t stay dead. Especially the ones interested in eating us. This week, Danièle speaks with John Blair about who refused to rest in peace in the Middle Ages, how medieval people attempted to keep the dead buried, and why some hauntings reached epidemic proportions.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and thirteen
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sebolski. As
we head towards All Hallows Eve and the nights get
(00:22):
longer and spookier, it seems inevitable that our thoughts would
turn towards the supernatural. Whether it's thriller, Twilight or the
Last of Us. One thing that is guaranteed to make
our hair stand on end is the thought of the
dead who just won't stay dead, especially the ones interested
in eating us. This week I spoke with doctor John
(00:45):
Blair about the restless dead of the medieval world. John
is Emeritus Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford and the author
of many books, including The Church in Anglo Saxon Society
and Building Anglo Saxon, England. But lately he's been brave
facing the undead in the name of his new book
Killing the Dead. Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World.
(01:08):
Our conversation on who refused to rest in peace, how
medieval people attempted to keep the dead buried, and why
some hauntings reached epidemic proportions is coming up right after
this well welcome John to talk about vampires. This is
so exciting and we're doing it right in spooky season,
(01:29):
so it's perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So you call this book vampire epidemics. When we're talking
about the Middle Ages? Are we talking about vampires? The
well dressed bloodsuckers that we see on TV?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Is that who we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
No, we're not. The First thing to just be said
about vampires is that everything about Count Dracula is wrong
in terms of what people actually believed. Bramstoker took a
rather abnormal example and then he heightened it for traumatic effect.
But everything's really wrong about Count Dracula. He's several hundred
years old, whereas most vampires are people who died in
(02:05):
the last small number of years or months. And he's
an aristocrat, which they're mainly not. He's such blood, which
they normally don't do. He's also very wily and strategic
and clever, which most vampires are not. They're actually mostly
rather stupid. So no, medieval vampires are not like Count Dracula,
though they do come in quite a range of different
(02:25):
shapes and forms.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And when we were talking about these undead, these revenants.
What are people calling them at this time? Do they
have a name for them?
Speaker 3 (02:34):
No, And this is rather interesting that there actually isn't
any name in least in northern and western Europe. There
seems to be no consistent term, so people just talk
about so and so who is dead is now walking around.
There's one very unusual story which comes from northern England
(02:55):
in the late twelfth century, where the corpse is dug
up after its predations have been causing trouble and it's
found to be bloated with blood and so the text says,
and therefore people knew that it was a bloodsucker, a
sangui's uga. Now this is unique in Western Europe, but
it does relate to beliefs that it seemed to be
(03:16):
coming westwards into the Balkans from areas like the Caucasus
and the Black Sea where there are bloodsucking demons, and
it seems to be that essentially Caucasian then southern Balkan
element which brings the bloodsucking motif in. And if it
weren't for this one story from twelfth century England, we
would think that was entirely happening from the seventeenth century onwards,
(03:38):
but it seems that there must have been earlier contact.
One of the frustrating things about this is that you
can pick up some similarities, some contacts, but like everything folkloric,
most of the fine texture of how ideas moved around
is lost to us.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yes, unfortunately. And one of the things you do in
the book is you go way back in time. Why
did you choose to go all the way back as
far as you could go when you were looking at vampires?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
I thought that it wouldn't make sense to make this
a book just about European vampires, even though that's what
I was mainly interested in, because they wouldn't have any
context without citing it more widely, and so I decided
it should be worldwide. And some very interesting broad brush
patterns came out of that. I mean, one is that
there are broad patterns across the world where in recent
(04:23):
times the beliefs in the dangerous corpses have existed, and
on the whole those are in conformity with the earlier
written than antological evidence we have, But of course evidence
is of very different dates in very different areas. I mean,
to take one extreme Mesopotamia. There's evidence from the seventh
(04:44):
century BC onwards. That's because, of course we have cuneiform
inscriptions on clay tablets, Whereas to take another extreme Siberia,
where there purely are very ancient traditions of rather different kind,
but we don't know about them until we start to
get ethnographers' reports from in the eighteenth century onwards. So
there are huge differences in the evidence space. Western Europe
(05:04):
is somewhere in between those two, in that we have
quite a lot of archeological evidence from the early Middle Ages,
and then we start from the really the eleventh century
onwards to get increasing amounts of written evidence.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Well, you seem to have discovered I mean, this is
based on other people's work too. We shouldn't discount the
other people's work too. But one of the things you
discovered in the research for this book is that people
were or seem to have been nervous about corpses even
back into prehistory.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Do you found that there is a difference in some
people's burials even in prehistory.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yes, it's hard to know what to make of it
because usually we don't have enough prehistoric burials from anywhere
that make it possible to chart precise changes over time,
and since one of the main arguments of the book
is that a lot of vampire killing episodes have an
epidemic quality, the evidence from prehistory is generally just not
(05:57):
good enough to show that. What we can say, for example,
in late Iron Age Britain, there are some persuasive cases.
There are some persuasive cases in Roman Britain going through
into the immediately post Roman period, then in parts of
northwestern Europe in the Low Countries, and then in the
maryor of Indian Carrol Engine periods going through into the
(06:18):
Rhineland and a bit further eastern, a bit further south
as we go from the seventh fath centuries onwards, So
we can see broad patterns there, but it's not really
until quite a bit later we start to get the
written evidence.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yes, well, one of the things I found most interesting
before we get into the Middle Ages here is that
one of the places you didn't find walking.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Dead was in Egypt.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So you always see mummies in the monies, but there's
no working mummies.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I mean, one I think is that there are worldwide
patterns on the whole. What I've rather tongue in cheek
called the vampire corridor goes from northwestern Europe across northern
Europe into Russia, Iberia, Asia, Southeast Asia. Egypt's a bit
outside that geographically. But I think that's another thing, which
(07:07):
is I mean, you might think that mummies are the
quintessential potential walking corpses, but the thing is they've already
been processed. You know that they've been mummified, they've had
the brain removed, they've had the intestines removed, they've been
processed in such a way, they've been made inert. And
in some ways you might say that that mummification and cremation,
which sound like absolute opposites, well they're having common is
(07:30):
that they both transform the body into something different. So
of course, for that reason, it's unusual, though it's not
completely unknown for cremating societies to believe in the danger stead.
I mean, even sometimes there seems to be some fear
of ashes, but that's uncommon. What does, on the other hand,
produce that fear is cases where people move from cremation
to inhumation, because then the familiar way of turning the
(07:53):
body into something different is no longer there. Because you
might have thought you might get stories of that kind
from people who were not mummified, but so far as
I know, there aren't any. So I think that illustrates
that the absences are as interesting as the presences.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Right, And I mean, you're getting to the point which
I need to ask, how do you get to be
a restless corpse in the first place? Because you've seen
some patterns over time and across the world, how do
you get to be one of the restless dead?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
There are various different ways. I suppose you can divide
them into, first of all, your gender and life cycle.
So in many cultures it's young women particularly who are
in the high risk category. It's women who die between
the age of about let's say twelve thirteen and about
twenty three twenty four. And well, there are a number
(08:42):
of strands in this. One is that there is a
very deep, I think worldwide tradition of female flying demons.
Almost all cultures seem to have that. Another is that
some societies have had religious and magical specialists to a
female and I think that actually it seems to be
true of a lot of Northwestern Europe in the early
(09:02):
Middle Ages. This is controversial, but I mean, the evidence
of this comes up in so many places. You certainly
get it in archaeological evidence from England and also from
parts of Frankier, the Ryland in particular, and you certainly
get it a bit later in Scandinavia. The vulgar the
female crs you get in some Scandinavian sources. So if
(09:25):
women are the religious specialists, then of course they are
powerful potentially also dangerous, so they may need to be controlled.
But the third element I think in it is women
who die before their time, so it's the adolescent. And
it's interesting that this relates, for example, to things like
poltergeist phenomena, which are so often associated with adolescent girls.
(09:47):
And it's I think there's the idea that these rather
uncanny forces are pent up and then if the person
grows up, which is middle age, they dissipate. But if
the woman dies with these uncanny forces still pent up
in her body, and also with the resentment of dying
without her life being fulfilled, without having married, without having children,
(10:09):
these resentments and powers can be very powerful package there
as it were. So that's one way, it's the life cycle.
Second way, I think is being a bad person, and
this varies. It's very strong. In the later Russian evidence,
it's quite strong in the Northern European evidence in the
well eleventh to thirteenth centuries Icelandic Sagas and then the
(10:30):
English stories. The Icelandic Sagas I mean, I called that
section of the book Neighbors from Hell because it's neighbors.
It's it's grumpy, anti social, quarrelsome neighbors often who when
they die, you know, they go on being quarrelsome and
anti social aft to death. In England it tends to
be in the stories that we are told in the
twelfth century, it tends to be people who are bad, dishonest, faithless,
(10:54):
dishonest judges, bad priests, bad stewards, you know, people who've
not kept their oaths and that kind of thing. So,
of course badness varies between different societies, and we can
see that here. And then thirdly, there are people who've
done nothing wrong in life at all, but whose bodies
are taken over by some kind of malevolent or uncanny force,
(11:18):
and it could be demonic possession. And of course this
is something particularly the Ecclesiastics went for, because walking corpses
are not compatible with Christian theology. Frittly speaking, plenty of
priests at various points have actually gone along with it.
But basically it is not capatibley he's not compatible with
what Augustine as for example. So one way that clergy
can rationalize it is by saying it's not actually the
(11:39):
dead person, it's a demon occupying the body, or it
can be something that's different. Again, it's some weird force.
I mean. A good example of that is the Lutheran
cases in mid sixteenth century Saxony, where there's the weird
belief that you can hear the corpse chomping on its shroud,
the lip smacking dead, they're eating their shrouds, and as
they do this, they spread plague, and so you've got
(12:01):
to dig them up and behead them. And Martin Luther
himself talked about this, and he said, oh, this is
just the devil's nonsense. He plays tricks. Just tell him
go away, devil, you're a fraud. You can't deceive us.
But the interesting thing about these cases is that they're
not in any way connected with the evil life of
the people. But then you go into Eastern Europe in
these sixteen seventeenth centuries, and some of those again are
bad people. So there's quite a lot of variety in
(12:23):
this and I might mention that the other example the
extraordinary episode of this kind of thing in New England
in the late eighteenthrough nineteenth centuries, where again the people
were not at all wicked. It's just that when they die,
their internal organs, their heart and their liver and their
lungs spread tuberculosis to their relatives.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yes, I mean that's very inconvenient. But before we go
into epidemics and maybe back into the early Middle Ages,
what you're bringing up now is the holy aspect of this,
like people's souls and all of that stuff. So it
brings me to the question are these undead able to
be seen in the end? What were people's takes on this?
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, this is an extremely interesting question and quite a
complex one. It's surprisingly rare for it to be mentioned.
The English stories seem to veer between the assumption the
person is damned and that because they're damned, they're working
in their bodies. You've just got to burn it, you've
got to destroy it. And then some of the English stories,
(13:22):
involving particularly Midilate to our century bishops of a reforming temperament,
there seems to be an idea that they're in purgreshy,
because by that time the idea of purgat is developing
more and so you can perhaps help them. To contrast,
two examples, one from the Welsh Marches that's told by
Walter map Set in the Battle even sixty. Robert Folliott,
(13:44):
Bishop of Hereford, says, oh, I know what to do
about the case like this. You just dig them up
and cut their head off with the spade. That'll sort
it out. But on the other hand, twenty years later,
since Hugh Bishop of Lincoln, because a great theologian come
from outside England, when he's confronted with a case like
that in his diocese in Buck, I'm sure and that
people say you've got to burn it. He says, no, no,
we're not going to do that. You open the grave
and I will write an absolution with my seal on it,
(14:06):
and you put that with the corpse and that'll sort
it out. And then it does, according to the story.
So there's a range of opinions on this, but the
most interesting perspective on this comes from the best piece
of modern anthropology on vampires, which is an article by
Julip Duboulay on rural Greece where she says essentially that
people's minds are split, and I think people can It's
(14:30):
the interesting thing about belief of all kinds. People can
actually hold contradictory beliefs in their mind at the same time.
So on the one hand, everybody knows that at death,
the angel of Death comes with his sword, releases the soul,
takes the soul off, so the soul's gone. But on
the other hand, corpses to walk around and you've got
to you've got to suppress them. And she concluded from
(14:50):
talking many years she spent in the communities talking to
them that actually people weren't really thinking that if you know,
uncle is walking around, you have to dig him up
and burn the body or cut the heart on, that's
annihilating you. They weren't really thinking that. They were thinking
it was suppressing a nuisance in this world, but it
wasn't actually harming his chances of the next world. But
it's really very difficult. I mean, that's that's a very sensitive,
(15:12):
close grained anthropological analysis, which of course we can't do
for the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yes, well, let's start with the Middle Ages. Then let's
start in the sixth and seventh centuries, where you start
to see an epidemic, who are the victims?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
What are people doing about this?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
So the earliest European cases that we know are from England,
a few from the Rhineland. The English ones are best
studied and they form into two groups which are partly
reflections of patterns in grave good deposition, which is because
cause of difficult is because people may have been doing
things but the times they weren't using grave goods. It's
(15:49):
harder to date the burials, but the first is between
about five sixty five eighty on grave good evidence, and
these are in north East England. They're in your and
County Durham. They're all female and now mostly women, accompanied
by things like symbolic keys, ambulance magical equipment. And the
extraordinary thing about these is the weird positions they're placed in.
(16:13):
They're faced down, some of them seem to be over
something like a wooden chest that's collapsed. Sometimes their legs
are tied back, and the most extraordinary thing is that
in almost every case, one limb it's either a leg
or an arm, is raised up so it's almost touching
the surface of the grave. When they can't do that accidentally,
I mean you're burying your body. You can't have a
hand coming up and almost touching the surface without meaning
to do that. So that's obviously meaning something, and I
(16:35):
think these must from their equipment be wise women. What's
notable in these cases is that they are not disturbed afterwards.
They're buried first time round like this, so when they
die people say, okay that you know she's important, she's
done good, but now we've got to keep her under control.
That's right how I would interpret it. So those are
the sixth century ones. One hundred years later you get
(16:58):
another clutch of thee and of course these are from
a very different context because by that time England is
Christian and in particular relevant to this, lots of nunneries
are being founded, and I think there is an interesting
question of what do the old wise women do it.
Maybe if they're well connected in high status, so they
reinvent themselves as nuns and abesses, but probably some of
(17:19):
them are still identifying as traditional wise women. In a
Christian society are getting more and more marginalized, so these
women are treated very differently. They're buried normally initially, but
then a period between say a few weeks and a
few months, the graves opened and the body is treated
in almost exactly the same way each time it's pulled about.
(17:41):
It's a stage where it's when it's sort of half decaying,
so it's actually chopped, but it's starting to come apart,
so you turn it over, which often involves dislocating the
leg bones, You take the head off, You pull the
head off, you pull apart the skull and the lower jaw,
and you put them back in different parts of the grave.
It's also possible in some cases that the heart has
(18:01):
been pierced or taken out, but it's hard to say
that because a pierced hard with a state doesn't necessarily
show up very well archaeologically. So I think what's clear
in these cases is that these are women who have
been buried normally, but then in the few weeks after
they're burial, it's been thought that they're walking around whatever
causing trouble or they're causing harm from the grave, and
(18:22):
therefore they have to be dealt with. So that's the
evidence of the early ones, and we have almost no
written evidence for that, as only one tiny fragment of
written evidence which comes from the it's one of the
texts from the English missions to the continent in the
eighth century the Life of Cleoba, and it says how
this holy future abbess was brought up in the nunnery
(18:44):
at Wimborne in Dorset. And the nunnery had an abbess
who was good, but there was a priorress who was sadistic,
and she tormented the young nuns, and then she died
unreconciled suddenly, and then when she was buried, the young
nuns danced on her grave and the abbess, no, you
mustn't do this, you must be forgiving. Though the abbess
I mean clear, she thought that she'd not been a
(19:04):
good person. But then the horrific thing was the grave
earth sank. The abbess saw that the earth and the
grave sank, and the text just as obscurely she knew
from this what penalty God had inflicted. Doesn't say what
that was. But if we go to later Eastern European folklore,
for example from Serbia, if grave earth sinks, it means,
(19:25):
of course, the corpse has come out from underneath it.
That's why it sunk. And so she prays, The abbess prays,
they all pray, and then the earth rises again, which
is us signed that the status has been established? This,
I think is our one piece of written evidence for
this pre Viking phase.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Well, this is the difficult thing because all you have
is the grave evidence and you don't have written evidence.
And of course the question I'm begging to find the
answer to is who is doing this? Because this is systematic.
You have to wait until the corpse is in the
right amount of decomposition that you can actually do these things.
Somebody has to go in there, decapitate these women, remove
(20:00):
their jaws.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
This is a lot of work, and it's like it
doesn't seem right.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, well, the first thing to be said is it's
definitely coming from below upwards. There are one or two
counter Reformation period exceptions to this, but basically this is
not some authority saying you've got to do it. It's
families or communities, you know, attacking a threat that's coming
(20:26):
to them from these members of their own communities. It's
not usually outsiders. It's members of their own communities, or
at least it could be people who've moved from outside,
people who've lived and died in the community. So it's
being done by the community. Yes, of course, doesn't bear
thinking of the one well recorded recent case, which is
the amazing case from Romania in two thousand and four,
(20:48):
where it's all recorded on video, that we have an
account by the man who actually did it, speaking in
front of a video camera. He drank a leader of
plum brandy before he did it, and that may well,
of course be what happened in some of these cases.
But what's helpful here is recent anthropology on extreme rituals.
There's a very good book on, for example, firewalking, you know,
walking with bare feet on hot coals. Why do people
(21:08):
do such painful things? And extreme rituals are kind of
fortifying in a sort of way. It's a triumph when
you've done it. But also they're self perpetuating because the
more you do them, the harder it becomes to accept
that there was no point in doing them. So there's
a self reinforcing aspect in this that the more corpses
(21:30):
you dig up and mutilate, the harder it comes to
think that actually digging up corpses and mutilating them is
doing no good to anybody. And so once an epidemic starts,
it takes quite some time to wind down.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Right, and you are looking at this in temporal terms
as well. So it's an epidemic. It's happening in the
sixth and seventh centuries. And you were connecting this possibly
to disasters happening more broadly, right, So this seems to
have been connected to greater issues like plague.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Is that what you found?
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Well, it's possible, And mean, it's interesting that the Yorkshire
group of burials they are the time of the Justinianic
Cogonic plague. Though why just in Yorkshire? I mean, that's
but you know, can't explain that. But then when you
get to the six fifty sixty seventies, of course, there
are all kinds of things. I mean, of course, obviously
one major thing is religious change, the replacement of one
religious system by another, many communities in England moving creation
(22:21):
from cremation to burial, massive economic change at the same time,
development of kingship, changes in coinage, and then the great
plague that came to England and the six sixties. So
all of these things together are I think ample explanation
for why they might be crises of this kind in
this period.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
It's always interesting to see how people react to such disasters,
and of course this is one of the probably most
striking examples I've ever seen, where you know, you're going
into graves and adjusting the corpses. It is a spectacular
moment in history, I think. And one of the good
things I just mentioned to people who haven't seen your
book yet that you have illustrations so you can really
(23:01):
actually see how these corpses are situated and really tell
the difference between a normal burial and what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Yeah, that's what I tried to do. I redrew a
lot of grave plans to get them to the same conventions.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Right, And when we fast forward a little bit, it
seems like the next real epidemic that you've mentioned in
the book, if I have this right, is in the
twelfth century, and the people are completely different, right.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
And male. Yeah, so the wise women have gone, of course,
the female religious specialists increasingly being marginalized. You know, they're
being seen more and mortis as witches and so they're
on the edges. They're all male. So the main evidence
for this comes from and there are a few bits
of narrative from parts of northern Germany, but the main
two sources are the Icelandic sagas, which are thirteenth century,
(23:47):
but are looking back to the eleventh century really, and
then England, where the twelfth century produces a remarkable crop
of stories. There about ten or elevenu of them, all told,
and they relate two episodes, some of them in the
early eleventh century, most of them really between about ten
fifty and eleven eighty eleven ninety. Several people write these stories,
(24:10):
including some notable scholars like William of Malmsbury and Walter Mapp.
But then the most spectacular collection is the one from
the Yorkshire his William of Newborough writing around eleven ninety,
and he's got several stories of this cutsort and then
he says, well, I can tell you more, but to
be honest, nowadays he says, walking corpses are so commonplace
(24:30):
it's boring to talk about them. There are so many,
and that's the extraordinary thing. And it does illustrate the
epidemic effect that by about thirty years later it seems
to have almost disappeared. That's the occasional story crops up.
But this real epidemic happening in England, particularly in the
twelfth century.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Well, since this is a completely different demographic of walking dead,
how are they being kept from walking. What are some
of the things that people are doing to keep them
from walking?
Speaker 3 (24:58):
So I begin by saying this very little arto logical evidence.
I was one of two burials. But compensating for that
is the written evidence, which tells you what they did.
And so one case from Burton on Trends in about
ten ninety, they cut off the heads and put them
between the feet of the corpses. They cut out the hearts,
They took them up to a hilltop and burnt them.
(25:20):
They burnt the hearts, and as the hearts were burning,
a black crow flew up from the flames, and the
people who were still sick recovered. And it's worth saying
that the story from Romania in two thousand and four,
apart from the black crow, is almost exactly the same.
The Romanian farmer tells us in his own words in
front of a video camera, how he broke open a
neighbor's tomb, cut out the heart, burnt it at across roads,
(25:43):
mixed the ashes with tea, gave them through the victim
to drink, and she recovered. So there's extraordinary continuum there.
So that's one way of doing Sometimes they bury them
in bogs. They throw them in pools or bogs, and
there's very striking later casey the own later manual case
from fourteenth century, again Yorkshire Island. Abby the rector of
(26:05):
a local church who've been buried near the chapter house.
But he's taken to getting up at night and he
goes back to visit his former mistress and he gouges
her eyes out. So they take his coffin and dump
it in a bog. But there are several stories like that,
or the other thing is that they burn them. Now,
of course that would mean the dumping in the bog.
In the burning, we would not get conventional otological evidence.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yes, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah, I think that bog burials are really interesting because
they're not always I don't think they're always about revenance.
What do you think it is about bogs that make
it so that nobody comes back?
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, that's interesting. I think the thing about a bog
is and it certainly seems to apply to these cases,
and it might apply also to some of the prehistoric
ones who don't know is the liminality of a bog.
It's neither one place nor another, so that the corpse
that's put in a bog doesn't decay. The bog preserves it,
so the corps can't go through the normal processes of decay.
It's almost like it's turning into a revenant in a way,
(27:01):
but except it can't get out. It's a prison in
the bog, so it's like a kind of purgatory on earth.
It's a painful prison where the corpse is put. So
it's sort of like I sort of safe keeping. It
can't do any harm, but also it can't move on.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yes, well, it's interesting because there are bodies of water
all over the world, but it doesn't seem to be
water that does it so much as actual bog.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
It seems to be a thing.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
That's right, that's right. And of course there are medieval
bog burials in Denmark and there are quite a few
from England, but we don't know why they were put there,
and some of them may have been for this reason.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Some of the other things that you've noticed that people
do to keep people from walking is putting stones on
them or nailing them.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Now, yes, that's right. Well, the stones are ambiguous because
I mean that can be for shaming reasons or for
let's say, suicides, or something. But if you've got that
combined with other things like like heart piercing or leg
binding or as you say, nailing, nailing seems to be
a particularly late Row Roman practice, and it's the one
(28:02):
group of killed corpses that seem to focus on the Mediterranean.
And there's one late Roman text from Rome itself that
refers to this practice. And they've been found in Italy,
on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, in southern Gaul
and in Spain, with a few more more northerly in Europe,
(28:25):
and one in a probable post Roman burial in England.
And this this bocks the normal geographical trend. But if
you don't normally get these practices in the Mediterranean, and
I think the explanation for that probably is that the
exceptional circumstances of the Roman Empire army units moving around
and they were probably spread by these spread by the
Roman army.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Well, that's an interesting take on it, because I'm wondering,
you know, how much of this has to do with
Roman ideas about the afterlife and how intact the body
has to be. Because Christian ideas in the Middle Ages
seem to be that your body should be intact for
the last judgment kind of needed, except for there are
some exceptions, again as always exceptions about burying your heart
in a different place, but in a holy place, so
(29:07):
presumably your spirit can find it again. So it's interesting
thinking about the Roman take on this, because I mean,
I'm not a Roman scholar. I'm wondering about how much
the body needs to be intact in order to reach
the afterlive.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Okay, in Christian theology it doesn't, and Augustin says it's
clearly that God can reassemble a body for a physical
resurrection out of any remains. However, there are categories or
special corpses that are incorrupt, and of course those include saints,
so particularly holy saints. This raises a very interesting definition
(29:40):
problem in societies like Greece or some parts of the
post Roman world, where an incorrupt corpse is a sign
either that it's very holy or that it's very unholy. Indeed,
and there's an interesting explicit case of this from Russia
in the sixteenth century where a parish priest is walking
through a forest. He finds an incorrupt course of a
(30:01):
young man. Is great, We've got a saint. Take it
back to the church. But the parishioners say, han, in
a minute, you keep that corpse out on the landing
on the balcony, just until we work out is it
a saint or a a vampire. Now Again, Deboulet's work
on Greece is very helpful here because Greek Orthodox belief
very strongly emphasizes the incorruptibility of saints, but also the
(30:22):
incorruptibility of the unholy, and in fact, Orthodox theology actually
embodied an idea that excommunicates. One of the sign of
being excommunicatet was that the corpse could not decay, and
in fact, the Greek idea down to modern times is
that decay is good because it shows the person's moved on.
What you want when after ten years or so, you
exhume the body and put the bones in an osterary,
(30:44):
you want clean white bones. That's great because the clean
white bones means the whole process has happened. The bones
don't matter. The person's moved on. It is flesh left though.
That's that's sinister, because it means that the person's sins
have kept them in this life. And she actually asked
people about this difference, and they won't bothered by it
at all. They said, no, no, we know perfectly well
that some people are so holy they don't need to decay.
(31:07):
You know that the processes of the creation of pollution
and the removal of pollution and my complete dissolution of
the body aren't necessary because the person is so pure.
So so a saint's body is uncorrupt. A vampire's body
is incorrupt because it's so polluted it can't move on.
And so it's the two opposites. But the people in
practice know exactly which they're dealing with. So I think
(31:28):
that Christian theology accommodated itself in sometimes our curious ways,
to these beliefs, because it's quite clear that you know,
if you go straight down the line theology, this is
just not possible. Corpses don't have their souls still hanging
around in them. But the Orthodox theology possibly is an
alternative to purgatory, which the Orthodox Church doesn't have, created
this strange idea of the tympanaos the inert corpse, that
(31:52):
it's perfectly harmless. So in fact, there's one story from
the seventeenth century. Some boys find when a users a trampoline,
it's foiling up like a drum, and timpanaous means drum,
So it just has to stay like that until some
priest releases it by performing an absolution, at which point
it will decay or the rikolakas, which is the walking corpse,
which is much more dangerous well and has to be
(32:13):
dealt with.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
One of the things that you mentioned in the book
is talking about saints, as you're saying right now, and
it's made me think that one of the things you
see sort of consistently in saints stories is they open
up the grave and there's this beautiful smell. And I
always thought that this was just about, you know, the
holiness of the person. But do you think this is
a way to tell whether you're looking at a saint
or just an uncorrupted revenant.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Well, actually, the stories of revenant exhumations don't normally mention
the smell. I mean, that's presumably because I think any
corpse at that stage would be smelling. So it's going
that second. For granted, I suppose they're certainly never said
to be sweet smelling, and indeed sweet smelling is yeah,
that does seem to be a sign of a sanctity.
The signs that they look for are well signs. I
(32:56):
mean sometimes they be moving around, signs of blow, cheapness,
blood around the mouth, that kind of thing. Now, there
are some rather unpleasant physiological aspects to this, and there's
a whole book about this put by Paul Barber called Vampires,
Death and Burial, which deals with these aspects. And of
course the natural processes of decay involve some bloating, swelling
(33:17):
and so forth. But you can't just say, well, it's
just that, because of course many societies have not had
these beliefs, so you have to have the fear there
to start with, to interpret a corpse that's going through
those processes as being an unquiet one.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yes, and this is something that you get it throughout
the book, where the conditions have to be there, but
then there usually sparked by something. And you compare this
to which hysteria later, What are the connections that you
see there?
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yes, it's interesting the connection with witches. I and think
what some corpses have in common with the witches but
not with spirits, ghosts, life forces and so forth, is
that they're physical. And the fact that their physical means
that they can be fought. You can track them you
can put them on trial, you can imprison them, you
can torture them, you can execute them. I think one
(34:06):
of the reasons why corpses perhaps have a particular fascination
in dangerous corpses compared with say, ghosts, is that ghosts
are nothing you do about them.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
Really.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
You can exercise them, you can't think about them physically.
But any evil entity that chooses to come back in
a human corpse, the corpse can be attacked, and so
it's a variant on the kind of release of fear, pain, anger,
or anxiety that lies behind so many episodes of which hysteria.
(34:35):
It's interesting that on the whole, geographical zones of witch
killing and geographical zones of corpse killing are mutually exclusive.
So where you get intensive witch persecutions, you don't get
intensive corpse persecution epidemics. There are a few exceptions for that,
but by and large that's the case. It's only in
(34:58):
certain Kinnter Reformation contexts where there was a very strong,
educated idea about demons, and so of course the whole
bit is about witchcraft is you're making packed with the devil,
demonic forces familiars. But suppose those demons also choose to
occupy corpses. So there is an intellectual sort of continuum there,
which meant that in for example, in Moravia, in the
(35:18):
Eastern Czech Republic in the le sement early eighteenth centuries,
that the same authorities were supervising witch hunting and corpse hunting.
But that's unusual, so it's really a response to the
same sorts of fear. And I think an important thing
to say at this point is that these are both
of them examples of paranoic persecution mania, which happens when
(35:40):
people are frightened or angry or think that they need
to hit back at somebody. And of course we know
tragically that that can take the form of persecution of
all kinds of minority groups. But isn't it so much
better if the people being persecuted are dead already. That's
one of the messages of the book.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yes, do you get a sense of it, And again
looking as fragmentary sources, but maybe maybe the later sources
will give us a better look at this, that there
is a pushback against this, and that these are the
corpses of people who have been loved by the community
and now they have to be dealt with in a
way that is kind of ugly. Do you get a
sense of pushback against this or people just being like, well,
(36:20):
this needs to happen.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Well, it varies in the societies where the dead people
are bad people, which is true in the Icelandic sources.
It seems to be true in the English material. Then
of course people don't think that it certainly is the case.
A good example here is Lutheran Saxony, where there's this
weird idea develops that the corpses are munching on their shrouds,
(36:41):
these lips smacking dead, and you can hear them chomping
away at their shrouds, and as they eat their shrouds
they spread plague. But these are perfectly order and respectable
people who have been buried in a normal way, and
the remedy is to open the grave and chop off
the head with a spade, again like twelfth century Herefordshire.
But of course, as you say, many people didn't like this,
and there are a couple of sermon collections from Saxony
(37:03):
in the late sixteenth century where priests preach against this
and say it's the devil that's tempting you to do
this to behave in this undignified and Unchristian fashion towards
our dead, and we got to learn, and of course
this is taking a cue from what Luther had already
said about it. We've got to learn that we just
tell the devil to get lost, we don't taken notice
(37:23):
of his nonsense, and then eventually he will stop. So
there is a pushback there against.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
It, well, because it occurs to me that it would
be something that you'd want to resist your relative or friend,
or something being zoomed and then being pulled apart.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
But the funny thing about that is that people do
seem to compartmentalize their minds about it, and that particularly
ClearCase is the American one is New England and Pennsylvania,
where people are doing it to their own relatives, and
particularly since there was a strong belief that tuberculosis went
in families, which of course it often did for medical reasons,
but the idea developed that let's say one or two
(37:59):
children in a large family die, they're going to bring
the others after them, and so you've got to dig
up the first ones. You really get parents sticking up
their own dead children and cutting their hearts out. This
is happening in New England and in the mid to
late nineteenth century in order to save the remaining children.
So I think the terror of plague, whether it's plague
(38:19):
in late medieval early modern Europe or tuberculosis in nineteenth
century USA, it's terrifying. How do you fight back against it?
Here is a way you can fight back against it,
people think, and at least it's therapeutic.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Well, and that's where the brandy comes in, right, because
this is unpleasant. Okay, Coming back around to vampires. One
of the things that seems to be consistent and looking
at these revenants, that there is a real fixation on
the mouth. And some people have said that this is
because when corpses are off gasing, they eat the shroud
because that's part of the decomposition process, or if this
(38:52):
is something I've heard before, and maybe you can correct
me on this, But do you find it's always the
mouth that seems to be where people are focused or
is it the skin? What are people worried about?
Speaker 3 (39:03):
No, it's not. And in fact, most of them, the
medieval European undead, the harm they do is actually rather unclear.
I mean, they kill people, but they seem to do
it by just their presence, you know, they wander around
the Icelandic ones, one of who of the Englishmen sit
on the roofs of houses. They're make a nuisance to
themselves and then people die, so it's like their presence
(39:24):
is spreading some sort of lethal contagion. And occasionally they
throw things. There's one hilarious episode from one of the
Icelandic sagas where two lots of dead men come into
the same house and one lot of being drowned, and
then some others who already died because they're depredations, and
then they start throwing things at each other, and the
(39:44):
normal inhabitants of the household beat a rapid retreat. So
it's not mainly the mouth. As I said. There is
this one English exam from the twelfth century referring to
a bloodsucker, but generally speaking it's not. The emphasis on
the biting and sucking doesn't until very late, until we
get to after about seventy hundred, when you start to
get in the Balkans. This fusion between the central European
(40:08):
beliefs and the ones that seem to be coming from
ideas of Turkic sucking spirits so the whole mouth and
business is actually is quite later. This is the unfortunate
thing that brand Stoker took these stories from Serbia in
the seventy twenties and thirties, and that's what the modern
stereotype is based on. But it's not at all representative.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Well, I mean, I think this episode is going to
be disappointing to some people who have really invested in
the vampire idea of being you know, something that's ancient.
They've always looked good, they've always been youthful, they've always
had long fangs. But I mean, I think this is
a really interesting way of looking at anthropologically the way
that people are dealing with their problems and their interactions
(40:53):
with the dead. So can we blame all of our
ideas about vampires on Bram Stoker?
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Is this the place where the buckstop?
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Not entirely, The literary development of the vampire idea starts
earlier than that. And there are some much other examples
of completely fictional vampires. And there's one I think I
identified in late sixteenth century Moravia, but really it's from
the seventeen thirties. That's the crucial point when the episodes
(41:23):
in Serbia were starting to get into the Western European newspapers.
It was a particular episode in seventy thirty two where
there was a report made for the habsbook Imperial Authorities,
and that got into the hands of various people who
wrote pamphlets and popular journalistic work, which then got translated
from that into German and then into French into English,
(41:46):
and so in March seventeen thirty two it was in
the English papers. And from that point on it wasn't
the seriously at all. It was just some weird things
that happened, you know, on the other side of Europe,
in weird places. But it became came a very attractive
metaphor for exploitative beings, exploitative rulers, and even gets into
(42:08):
the French revolutionary discourse and the words of the Revolutionary
anthem about the bloodthirsty tyrants sucking their mother's blood. This
metaphor is coming out of the Serbian stories, so already
by the late eighteenth century it's starting to get into
various fictional works who start to get short stories, which
then really takes off in the nineteenth century with Lord Byron,
(42:31):
with Polydori, who was Barron's physician, then the Irish novelist
Sheridan Leferu in the eighteen seventies of his story Carmilla,
and then culminating in the eighteen nineties with Bram Stoker's
Drag which of course throughout the board. It was such
a compelling work, it captivated people. It really almost obliterated
all the rest, and Stoker took the Serbian episodes. He
(42:55):
read Augustin Kalmey's book on the subject, published in the
seventeen six is. He looked at a lot of recent
Romanian folklore, but actually a lot of stories and that
were in fact practices which developed quite recently, and he
put all that together to make this completely fictional character
of the Transylvanian nobleman.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Well, as we get to the end of this, there's
so much more for people to read, and it is
an absolutely beautiful, sweeping look at the way that corpses
have come to haunt us. So I need to ask
you who is your favorite vampire or revenant?
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Do you have one?
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Yes, if it's one, If I'm need to choose one.
Johan Kunza, who is the subject of that first vampire
novel that I mentioned, which was a bit of a
discovery again because the story has often been quoted, but
just as an example of one of the most detailed
vampire stories. And it comes from a Moravian village in
the fifteen nineties. And this man is buried and then
(43:50):
all kinds of weird things happen. It's like an encyclopedia
of paranormal phenomena. There, there are things thrown around, he
sells his soul to the devil. He rides around with
his horse, strikes sparks like the Wild Hunt. There's a
very strong sexual element in it. He rapes women, he
attacks people's genitals, He generally gets up to high drinks,
(44:13):
and then eventually they dig him up and they burn him.
But an interesting thing there is that the story of
how his body is dragged to the pyre is actually
most identical. This is very strange to one of the
thirteenth century Icelandic sagas the same episode. The author of
it must have got it from something like that. And
I think what's clear is that although there may have
(44:34):
been a real yo Handkunzer, what we have here is
a vampire novel. Now unfortunately we don't have it surviving
in the original German text. It's preserved in a Latin
summary by a very serious minded demonologist who quotis as
an example of how terrible demons are. But actually, if
you deconstruct it, you can see perfectly well that it's
(44:55):
a work of fiction, and it must have been a
popular pamphlet. I should buy lurid woodcuts that were circulating
this story. So it's the first vampire novel. But then
in turn people read it, and so of course those
ideas would have circled back into what people actually believed.
So I think I would say he's my favorite vampire.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Well, there are lots to choose from, but that is
a great pick because I mean, like you say, everything
is in it. Well, thank you so much to John
for coming on and telling us about vampires. It's just
been fascinating in such a fun time to chat with
you about it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
That's a great pleasure.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
To find out more about John's work, you can visit
his faculty page at Queen's College, Oxford. His new book
is Killing the Dead Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the
New World. Before we go, here's Peter from Medievalist dot net.
And Peter, you have some big news, speaking of spooky
season and vampires and all that.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
What is your big news.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
Oh well, one of our interns a kitten, but we
call it an entro miragold one best cat costume at
a little event here in Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
Well tell the people what the costume was, because it
wasn't just Maricle that was dressed up.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Yeah, yeah, I was the knight. She was my queen.
Brought her in front of the crowds at watched on
here in Oakville, and she won by default since every
other pet lover only brought the dog.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
So she really was truly the queen of the pets there.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
I think that's how every cat thinks of themselves, right.
I'm not a.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Cat person, but that's my impression of cats. And they
know that they are royalty, right.
Speaker 4 (46:36):
Indeed, although I put her back to work hard at
work here at medievals dot net.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Well, I hope you will post those pictures because I
from one am looking forward to seeing them. Congratulations to
you and miracle for me your big win in Oakville.
Speaker 4 (46:50):
Thanks so much so.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
What is going on on the website this week?
Speaker 4 (46:55):
We took a look at twenty five words that are
most associated with the Middle Ages, things like castle night
even medieval itself. You know, they explain where they came from.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
So if people want to know where the word castle
comes from, they can go straight to Medievalist dot net
and you've got it covered.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Yeah, that at twenty four other words, including like cathedral,
which comes from the Latin word cathedral, which meant chair.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
There you go, chair indeed, and gets.
Speaker 4 (47:22):
To associated with the bishop's chair. So that's how it
all develops like that. So it's just interesting some words
developed during the Middle Ages and some way after the
Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah, I love etymology. This is the type of post
that I would definitely seek out on the Internet.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
So we have that. Plus we have news about medieval
frogs and their use in medicine, and we have a
piece by Luke Gouci kind of takes a look at
the archaeological evidence to see what happened in world life
in Spain after the Reconquista.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Well, as usual, there's a whole range of things for
people to check out on Medievalist on net. So thanks
Peter for stopping by and tell us all about it.
Speaker 4 (48:01):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
No matter how spooky things get, I know I can
always count on you listeners, So thank you so much
for being here and helping out by sharing your favorite
episodes like this one, letting the ads roll through, or
by becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Without you, the
world would definitely be a much scarier place. If you'd
(48:24):
like to find out how to become a patron, please
visit patreon dot com. Slash Medievalists for everything from vampires
two church spires, follow Medievalist dot Net on Instagram at
medievalist net or blue sky at Medievalists. You can find
me Danielle Sabowski across social media at five min Medievalist
or five minute Medievalist, and you can find my books
(48:46):
at all your favorite bookstores. Our music is by Christian Overton.
Thanks for listening and have yourself a spectacular day. You
w
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and thirteen
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sebolski. As
we head towards All Hallows Eve and the nights get
(00:22):
longer and spookier, it seems inevitable that our thoughts would
turn towards the supernatural. Whether it's thriller, Twilight or the
Last of Us. One thing that is guaranteed to make
our hair stand on end is the thought of the
dead who just won't stay dead, especially the ones interested
in eating us. This week I spoke with doctor John
(00:45):
Blair about the restless dead of the medieval world. John
is Emeritus Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford and the author
of many books, including The Church in Anglo Saxon Society
and Building Anglo Saxon, England. But lately he's been brave
facing the undead in the name of his new book
Killing the Dead. Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World.
(01:08):
Our conversation on who refused to rest in peace, how
medieval people attempted to keep the dead buried, and why
some hauntings reached epidemic proportions is coming up right after
this well welcome John to talk about vampires. This is
so exciting and we're doing it right in spooky season,
(01:29):
so it's perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So you call this book vampire epidemics. When we're talking
about the Middle Ages? Are we talking about vampires? The
well dressed bloodsuckers that we see on TV?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Is that who we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
No, we're not. The First thing to just be said
about vampires is that everything about Count Dracula is wrong
in terms of what people actually believed. Bramstoker took a
rather abnormal example and then he heightened it for traumatic effect.
But everything's really wrong about Count Dracula. He's several hundred
years old, whereas most vampires are people who died in
(02:05):
the last small number of years or months. And he's
an aristocrat, which they're mainly not. He's such blood, which
they normally don't do. He's also very wily and strategic
and clever, which most vampires are not. They're actually mostly
rather stupid. So no, medieval vampires are not like Count Dracula,
though they do come in quite a range of different
(02:25):
shapes and forms.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And when we were talking about these undead, these revenants.
What are people calling them at this time? Do they
have a name for them?
Speaker 3 (02:34):
No, And this is rather interesting that there actually isn't
any name in least in northern and western Europe. There
seems to be no consistent term, so people just talk
about so and so who is dead is now walking around.
There's one very unusual story which comes from northern England
(02:55):
in the late twelfth century, where the corpse is dug
up after its predations have been causing trouble and it's
found to be bloated with blood and so the text says,
and therefore people knew that it was a bloodsucker, a
sangui's uga. Now this is unique in Western Europe, but
it does relate to beliefs that it seemed to be
(03:16):
coming westwards into the Balkans from areas like the Caucasus
and the Black Sea where there are bloodsucking demons, and
it seems to be that essentially Caucasian then southern Balkan
element which brings the bloodsucking motif in. And if it
weren't for this one story from twelfth century England, we
would think that was entirely happening from the seventeenth century onwards,
(03:38):
but it seems that there must have been earlier contact.
One of the frustrating things about this is that you
can pick up some similarities, some contacts, but like everything folkloric,
most of the fine texture of how ideas moved around
is lost to us.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yes, unfortunately. And one of the things you do in
the book is you go way back in time. Why
did you choose to go all the way back as
far as you could go when you were looking at vampires?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
I thought that it wouldn't make sense to make this
a book just about European vampires, even though that's what
I was mainly interested in, because they wouldn't have any
context without citing it more widely, and so I decided
it should be worldwide. And some very interesting broad brush
patterns came out of that. I mean, one is that
there are broad patterns across the world where in recent
(04:23):
times the beliefs in the dangerous corpses have existed, and
on the whole those are in conformity with the earlier
written than antological evidence we have, But of course evidence
is of very different dates in very different areas. I mean,
to take one extreme Mesopotamia. There's evidence from the seventh
(04:44):
century BC onwards. That's because, of course we have cuneiform
inscriptions on clay tablets, Whereas to take another extreme Siberia,
where there purely are very ancient traditions of rather different kind,
but we don't know about them until we start to
get ethnographers' reports from in the eighteenth century onwards. So
there are huge differences in the evidence space. Western Europe
(05:04):
is somewhere in between those two, in that we have
quite a lot of archeological evidence from the early Middle Ages,
and then we start from the really the eleventh century
onwards to get increasing amounts of written evidence.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Well, you seem to have discovered I mean, this is
based on other people's work too. We shouldn't discount the
other people's work too. But one of the things you
discovered in the research for this book is that people
were or seem to have been nervous about corpses even
back into prehistory.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Do you found that there is a difference in some
people's burials even in prehistory.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yes, it's hard to know what to make of it
because usually we don't have enough prehistoric burials from anywhere
that make it possible to chart precise changes over time,
and since one of the main arguments of the book
is that a lot of vampire killing episodes have an
epidemic quality, the evidence from prehistory is generally just not
(05:57):
good enough to show that. What we can say, for example,
in late Iron Age Britain, there are some persuasive cases.
There are some persuasive cases in Roman Britain going through
into the immediately post Roman period, then in parts of
northwestern Europe in the Low Countries, and then in the
maryor of Indian Carrol Engine periods going through into the
(06:18):
Rhineland and a bit further eastern, a bit further south
as we go from the seventh fath centuries onwards, So
we can see broad patterns there, but it's not really
until quite a bit later we start to get the
written evidence.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yes, well, one of the things I found most interesting
before we get into the Middle Ages here is that
one of the places you didn't find walking.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Dead was in Egypt.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So you always see mummies in the monies, but there's
no working mummies.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I mean, one I think is that there are worldwide
patterns on the whole. What I've rather tongue in cheek
called the vampire corridor goes from northwestern Europe across northern
Europe into Russia, Iberia, Asia, Southeast Asia. Egypt's a bit
outside that geographically. But I think that's another thing, which
(07:07):
is I mean, you might think that mummies are the
quintessential potential walking corpses, but the thing is they've already
been processed. You know that they've been mummified, they've had
the brain removed, they've had the intestines removed, they've been
processed in such a way, they've been made inert. And
in some ways you might say that that mummification and cremation,
which sound like absolute opposites, well they're having common is
(07:30):
that they both transform the body into something different. So
of course, for that reason, it's unusual, though it's not
completely unknown for cremating societies to believe in the danger stead.
I mean, even sometimes there seems to be some fear
of ashes, but that's uncommon. What does, on the other hand,
produce that fear is cases where people move from cremation
to inhumation, because then the familiar way of turning the
(07:53):
body into something different is no longer there. Because you
might have thought you might get stories of that kind
from people who were not mummified, but so far as
I know, there aren't any. So I think that illustrates
that the absences are as interesting as the presences.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Right, And I mean, you're getting to the point which
I need to ask, how do you get to be
a restless corpse in the first place? Because you've seen
some patterns over time and across the world, how do
you get to be one of the restless dead?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
There are various different ways. I suppose you can divide
them into, first of all, your gender and life cycle.
So in many cultures it's young women particularly who are
in the high risk category. It's women who die between
the age of about let's say twelve thirteen and about
twenty three twenty four. And well, there are a number
(08:42):
of strands in this. One is that there is a
very deep, I think worldwide tradition of female flying demons.
Almost all cultures seem to have that. Another is that
some societies have had religious and magical specialists to a
female and I think that actually it seems to be
true of a lot of Northwestern Europe in the early
(09:02):
Middle Ages. This is controversial, but I mean, the evidence
of this comes up in so many places. You certainly
get it in archaeological evidence from England and also from
parts of Frankier, the Ryland in particular, and you certainly
get it a bit later in Scandinavia. The vulgar the
female crs you get in some Scandinavian sources. So if
(09:25):
women are the religious specialists, then of course they are
powerful potentially also dangerous, so they may need to be controlled.
But the third element I think in it is women
who die before their time, so it's the adolescent. And
it's interesting that this relates, for example, to things like
poltergeist phenomena, which are so often associated with adolescent girls.
(09:47):
And it's I think there's the idea that these rather
uncanny forces are pent up and then if the person
grows up, which is middle age, they dissipate. But if
the woman dies with these uncanny forces still pent up
in her body, and also with the resentment of dying
without her life being fulfilled, without having married, without having children,
(10:09):
these resentments and powers can be very powerful package there
as it were. So that's one way, it's the life cycle.
Second way, I think is being a bad person, and
this varies. It's very strong. In the later Russian evidence,
it's quite strong in the Northern European evidence in the
well eleventh to thirteenth centuries Icelandic Sagas and then the
(10:30):
English stories. The Icelandic Sagas I mean, I called that
section of the book Neighbors from Hell because it's neighbors.
It's it's grumpy, anti social, quarrelsome neighbors often who when
they die, you know, they go on being quarrelsome and
anti social aft to death. In England it tends to
be in the stories that we are told in the
twelfth century, it tends to be people who are bad, dishonest, faithless,
(10:54):
dishonest judges, bad priests, bad stewards, you know, people who've
not kept their oaths and that kind of thing. So,
of course badness varies between different societies, and we can
see that here. And then thirdly, there are people who've
done nothing wrong in life at all, but whose bodies
are taken over by some kind of malevolent or uncanny force,
(11:18):
and it could be demonic possession. And of course this
is something particularly the Ecclesiastics went for, because walking corpses
are not compatible with Christian theology. Frittly speaking, plenty of
priests at various points have actually gone along with it.
But basically it is not capatibley he's not compatible with
what Augustine as for example. So one way that clergy
can rationalize it is by saying it's not actually the
(11:39):
dead person, it's a demon occupying the body, or it
can be something that's different. Again, it's some weird force.
I mean. A good example of that is the Lutheran
cases in mid sixteenth century Saxony, where there's the weird
belief that you can hear the corpse chomping on its shroud,
the lip smacking dead, they're eating their shrouds, and as
they do this, they spread plague, and so you've got
(12:01):
to dig them up and behead them. And Martin Luther
himself talked about this, and he said, oh, this is
just the devil's nonsense. He plays tricks. Just tell him
go away, devil, you're a fraud. You can't deceive us.
But the interesting thing about these cases is that they're
not in any way connected with the evil life of
the people. But then you go into Eastern Europe in
these sixteen seventeenth centuries, and some of those again are
bad people. So there's quite a lot of variety in
(12:23):
this and I might mention that the other example the
extraordinary episode of this kind of thing in New England
in the late eighteenthrough nineteenth centuries, where again the people
were not at all wicked. It's just that when they die,
their internal organs, their heart and their liver and their
lungs spread tuberculosis to their relatives.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yes, I mean that's very inconvenient. But before we go
into epidemics and maybe back into the early Middle Ages,
what you're bringing up now is the holy aspect of this,
like people's souls and all of that stuff. So it
brings me to the question are these undead able to
be seen in the end? What were people's takes on this?
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, this is an extremely interesting question and quite a
complex one. It's surprisingly rare for it to be mentioned.
The English stories seem to veer between the assumption the
person is damned and that because they're damned, they're working
in their bodies. You've just got to burn it, you've
got to destroy it. And then some of the English stories,
(13:22):
involving particularly Midilate to our century bishops of a reforming temperament,
there seems to be an idea that they're in purgreshy,
because by that time the idea of purgat is developing
more and so you can perhaps help them. To contrast,
two examples, one from the Welsh Marches that's told by
Walter map Set in the Battle even sixty. Robert Folliott,
(13:44):
Bishop of Hereford, says, oh, I know what to do
about the case like this. You just dig them up
and cut their head off with the spade. That'll sort
it out. But on the other hand, twenty years later,
since Hugh Bishop of Lincoln, because a great theologian come
from outside England, when he's confronted with a case like
that in his diocese in Buck, I'm sure and that
people say you've got to burn it. He says, no, no,
we're not going to do that. You open the grave
and I will write an absolution with my seal on it,
(14:06):
and you put that with the corpse and that'll sort
it out. And then it does, according to the story.
So there's a range of opinions on this, but the
most interesting perspective on this comes from the best piece
of modern anthropology on vampires, which is an article by
Julip Duboulay on rural Greece where she says essentially that
people's minds are split, and I think people can It's
(14:30):
the interesting thing about belief of all kinds. People can
actually hold contradictory beliefs in their mind at the same time.
So on the one hand, everybody knows that at death,
the angel of Death comes with his sword, releases the soul,
takes the soul off, so the soul's gone. But on
the other hand, corpses to walk around and you've got
to you've got to suppress them. And she concluded from
(14:50):
talking many years she spent in the communities talking to
them that actually people weren't really thinking that if you know,
uncle is walking around, you have to dig him up
and burn the body or cut the heart on, that's
annihilating you. They weren't really thinking that. They were thinking
it was suppressing a nuisance in this world, but it
wasn't actually harming his chances of the next world. But
it's really very difficult. I mean, that's that's a very sensitive,
(15:12):
close grained anthropological analysis, which of course we can't do
for the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yes, well, let's start with the Middle Ages. Then let's
start in the sixth and seventh centuries, where you start
to see an epidemic, who are the victims?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
What are people doing about this?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
So the earliest European cases that we know are from England,
a few from the Rhineland. The English ones are best
studied and they form into two groups which are partly
reflections of patterns in grave good deposition, which is because
cause of difficult is because people may have been doing
things but the times they weren't using grave goods. It's
(15:49):
harder to date the burials, but the first is between
about five sixty five eighty on grave good evidence, and
these are in north East England. They're in your and
County Durham. They're all female and now mostly women, accompanied
by things like symbolic keys, ambulance magical equipment. And the
extraordinary thing about these is the weird positions they're placed in.
(16:13):
They're faced down, some of them seem to be over
something like a wooden chest that's collapsed. Sometimes their legs
are tied back, and the most extraordinary thing is that
in almost every case, one limb it's either a leg
or an arm, is raised up so it's almost touching
the surface of the grave. When they can't do that accidentally,
I mean you're burying your body. You can't have a
hand coming up and almost touching the surface without meaning
to do that. So that's obviously meaning something, and I
(16:35):
think these must from their equipment be wise women. What's
notable in these cases is that they are not disturbed afterwards.
They're buried first time round like this, so when they
die people say, okay that you know she's important, she's
done good, but now we've got to keep her under control.
That's right how I would interpret it. So those are
the sixth century ones. One hundred years later you get
(16:58):
another clutch of thee and of course these are from
a very different context because by that time England is
Christian and in particular relevant to this, lots of nunneries
are being founded, and I think there is an interesting
question of what do the old wise women do it.
Maybe if they're well connected in high status, so they
reinvent themselves as nuns and abesses, but probably some of
(17:19):
them are still identifying as traditional wise women. In a
Christian society are getting more and more marginalized, so these
women are treated very differently. They're buried normally initially, but
then a period between say a few weeks and a
few months, the graves opened and the body is treated
in almost exactly the same way each time it's pulled about.
(17:41):
It's a stage where it's when it's sort of half decaying,
so it's actually chopped, but it's starting to come apart,
so you turn it over, which often involves dislocating the
leg bones, You take the head off, You pull the
head off, you pull apart the skull and the lower jaw,
and you put them back in different parts of the grave.
It's also possible in some cases that the heart has
(18:01):
been pierced or taken out, but it's hard to say
that because a pierced hard with a state doesn't necessarily
show up very well archaeologically. So I think what's clear
in these cases is that these are women who have
been buried normally, but then in the few weeks after
they're burial, it's been thought that they're walking around whatever
causing trouble or they're causing harm from the grave, and
(18:22):
therefore they have to be dealt with. So that's the
evidence of the early ones, and we have almost no
written evidence for that, as only one tiny fragment of
written evidence which comes from the it's one of the
texts from the English missions to the continent in the
eighth century the Life of Cleoba, and it says how
this holy future abbess was brought up in the nunnery
(18:44):
at Wimborne in Dorset. And the nunnery had an abbess
who was good, but there was a priorress who was sadistic,
and she tormented the young nuns, and then she died
unreconciled suddenly, and then when she was buried, the young
nuns danced on her grave and the abbess, no, you
mustn't do this, you must be forgiving. Though the abbess
I mean clear, she thought that she'd not been a
(19:04):
good person. But then the horrific thing was the grave
earth sank. The abbess saw that the earth and the
grave sank, and the text just as obscurely she knew
from this what penalty God had inflicted. Doesn't say what
that was. But if we go to later Eastern European folklore,
for example from Serbia, if grave earth sinks, it means,
(19:25):
of course, the corpse has come out from underneath it.
That's why it sunk. And so she prays, The abbess prays,
they all pray, and then the earth rises again, which
is us signed that the status has been established? This,
I think is our one piece of written evidence for
this pre Viking phase.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Well, this is the difficult thing because all you have
is the grave evidence and you don't have written evidence.
And of course the question I'm begging to find the
answer to is who is doing this? Because this is systematic.
You have to wait until the corpse is in the
right amount of decomposition that you can actually do these things.
Somebody has to go in there, decapitate these women, remove
(20:00):
their jaws.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
This is a lot of work, and it's like it
doesn't seem right.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, well, the first thing to be said is it's
definitely coming from below upwards. There are one or two
counter Reformation period exceptions to this, but basically this is
not some authority saying you've got to do it. It's
families or communities, you know, attacking a threat that's coming
(20:26):
to them from these members of their own communities. It's
not usually outsiders. It's members of their own communities, or
at least it could be people who've moved from outside,
people who've lived and died in the community. So it's
being done by the community. Yes, of course, doesn't bear
thinking of the one well recorded recent case, which is
the amazing case from Romania in two thousand and four,
(20:48):
where it's all recorded on video, that we have an
account by the man who actually did it, speaking in
front of a video camera. He drank a leader of
plum brandy before he did it, and that may well,
of course be what happened in some of these cases.
But what's helpful here is recent anthropology on extreme rituals.
There's a very good book on, for example, firewalking, you know,
walking with bare feet on hot coals. Why do people
(21:08):
do such painful things? And extreme rituals are kind of
fortifying in a sort of way. It's a triumph when
you've done it. But also they're self perpetuating because the
more you do them, the harder it becomes to accept
that there was no point in doing them. So there's
a self reinforcing aspect in this that the more corpses
(21:30):
you dig up and mutilate, the harder it comes to
think that actually digging up corpses and mutilating them is
doing no good to anybody. And so once an epidemic starts,
it takes quite some time to wind down.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Right, and you are looking at this in temporal terms
as well. So it's an epidemic. It's happening in the
sixth and seventh centuries. And you were connecting this possibly
to disasters happening more broadly, right, So this seems to
have been connected to greater issues like plague.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Is that what you found?
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Well, it's possible, And mean, it's interesting that the Yorkshire
group of burials they are the time of the Justinianic
Cogonic plague. Though why just in Yorkshire? I mean, that's
but you know, can't explain that. But then when you
get to the six fifty sixty seventies, of course, there
are all kinds of things. I mean, of course, obviously
one major thing is religious change, the replacement of one
religious system by another, many communities in England moving creation
(22:21):
from cremation to burial, massive economic change at the same time,
development of kingship, changes in coinage, and then the great
plague that came to England and the six sixties. So
all of these things together are I think ample explanation
for why they might be crises of this kind in
this period.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
It's always interesting to see how people react to such disasters,
and of course this is one of the probably most
striking examples I've ever seen, where you know, you're going
into graves and adjusting the corpses. It is a spectacular
moment in history, I think. And one of the good
things I just mentioned to people who haven't seen your
book yet that you have illustrations so you can really
(23:01):
actually see how these corpses are situated and really tell
the difference between a normal burial and what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Yeah, that's what I tried to do. I redrew a
lot of grave plans to get them to the same conventions.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Right, And when we fast forward a little bit, it
seems like the next real epidemic that you've mentioned in
the book, if I have this right, is in the
twelfth century, and the people are completely different, right.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
And male. Yeah, so the wise women have gone, of course,
the female religious specialists increasingly being marginalized. You know, they're
being seen more and mortis as witches and so they're
on the edges. They're all male. So the main evidence
for this comes from and there are a few bits
of narrative from parts of northern Germany, but the main
two sources are the Icelandic sagas, which are thirteenth century,
(23:47):
but are looking back to the eleventh century really, and
then England, where the twelfth century produces a remarkable crop
of stories. There about ten or elevenu of them, all told,
and they relate two episodes, some of them in the
early eleventh century, most of them really between about ten
fifty and eleven eighty eleven ninety. Several people write these stories,
(24:10):
including some notable scholars like William of Malmsbury and Walter Mapp.
But then the most spectacular collection is the one from
the Yorkshire his William of Newborough writing around eleven ninety,
and he's got several stories of this cutsort and then
he says, well, I can tell you more, but to
be honest, nowadays he says, walking corpses are so commonplace
(24:30):
it's boring to talk about them. There are so many,
and that's the extraordinary thing. And it does illustrate the
epidemic effect that by about thirty years later it seems
to have almost disappeared. That's the occasional story crops up.
But this real epidemic happening in England, particularly in the
twelfth century.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Well, since this is a completely different demographic of walking dead,
how are they being kept from walking. What are some
of the things that people are doing to keep them
from walking?
Speaker 3 (24:58):
So I begin by saying this very little arto logical evidence.
I was one of two burials. But compensating for that
is the written evidence, which tells you what they did.
And so one case from Burton on Trends in about
ten ninety, they cut off the heads and put them
between the feet of the corpses. They cut out the hearts,
They took them up to a hilltop and burnt them.
(25:20):
They burnt the hearts, and as the hearts were burning,
a black crow flew up from the flames, and the
people who were still sick recovered. And it's worth saying
that the story from Romania in two thousand and four,
apart from the black crow, is almost exactly the same.
The Romanian farmer tells us in his own words in
front of a video camera, how he broke open a
neighbor's tomb, cut out the heart, burnt it at across roads,
(25:43):
mixed the ashes with tea, gave them through the victim
to drink, and she recovered. So there's extraordinary continuum there.
So that's one way of doing Sometimes they bury them
in bogs. They throw them in pools or bogs, and
there's very striking later casey the own later manual case
from fourteenth century, again Yorkshire Island. Abby the rector of
(26:05):
a local church who've been buried near the chapter house.
But he's taken to getting up at night and he
goes back to visit his former mistress and he gouges
her eyes out. So they take his coffin and dump
it in a bog. But there are several stories like that,
or the other thing is that they burn them. Now,
of course that would mean the dumping in the bog.
In the burning, we would not get conventional otological evidence.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yes, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah, I think that bog burials are really interesting because
they're not always I don't think they're always about revenance.
What do you think it is about bogs that make
it so that nobody comes back?
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, that's interesting. I think the thing about a bog
is and it certainly seems to apply to these cases,
and it might apply also to some of the prehistoric
ones who don't know is the liminality of a bog.
It's neither one place nor another, so that the corpse
that's put in a bog doesn't decay. The bog preserves it,
so the corps can't go through the normal processes of decay.
It's almost like it's turning into a revenant in a way,
(27:01):
but except it can't get out. It's a prison in
the bog, so it's like a kind of purgatory on earth.
It's a painful prison where the corpse is put. So
it's sort of like I sort of safe keeping. It
can't do any harm, but also it can't move on.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yes, well, it's interesting because there are bodies of water
all over the world, but it doesn't seem to be
water that does it so much as actual bog.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
It seems to be a thing.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
That's right, that's right. And of course there are medieval
bog burials in Denmark and there are quite a few
from England, but we don't know why they were put there,
and some of them may have been for this reason.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Some of the other things that you've noticed that people
do to keep people from walking is putting stones on
them or nailing them.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Now, yes, that's right. Well, the stones are ambiguous because
I mean that can be for shaming reasons or for
let's say, suicides, or something. But if you've got that
combined with other things like like heart piercing or leg
binding or as you say, nailing, nailing seems to be
a particularly late Row Roman practice, and it's the one
(28:02):
group of killed corpses that seem to focus on the Mediterranean.
And there's one late Roman text from Rome itself that
refers to this practice. And they've been found in Italy,
on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, in southern Gaul
and in Spain, with a few more more northerly in Europe,
(28:25):
and one in a probable post Roman burial in England.
And this this bocks the normal geographical trend. But if
you don't normally get these practices in the Mediterranean, and
I think the explanation for that probably is that the
exceptional circumstances of the Roman Empire army units moving around
and they were probably spread by these spread by the
Roman army.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Well, that's an interesting take on it, because I'm wondering,
you know, how much of this has to do with
Roman ideas about the afterlife and how intact the body
has to be. Because Christian ideas in the Middle Ages
seem to be that your body should be intact for
the last judgment kind of needed, except for there are
some exceptions, again as always exceptions about burying your heart
in a different place, but in a holy place, so
(29:07):
presumably your spirit can find it again. So it's interesting
thinking about the Roman take on this, because I mean,
I'm not a Roman scholar. I'm wondering about how much
the body needs to be intact in order to reach
the afterlive.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Okay, in Christian theology it doesn't, and Augustin says it's
clearly that God can reassemble a body for a physical
resurrection out of any remains. However, there are categories or
special corpses that are incorrupt, and of course those include saints,
so particularly holy saints. This raises a very interesting definition
(29:40):
problem in societies like Greece or some parts of the
post Roman world, where an incorrupt corpse is a sign
either that it's very holy or that it's very unholy. Indeed,
and there's an interesting explicit case of this from Russia
in the sixteenth century where a parish priest is walking
through a forest. He finds an incorrupt course of a
(30:01):
young man. Is great, We've got a saint. Take it
back to the church. But the parishioners say, han, in
a minute, you keep that corpse out on the landing
on the balcony, just until we work out is it
a saint or a a vampire. Now Again, Deboulet's work
on Greece is very helpful here because Greek Orthodox belief
very strongly emphasizes the incorruptibility of saints, but also the
(30:22):
incorruptibility of the unholy, and in fact, Orthodox theology actually
embodied an idea that excommunicates. One of the sign of
being excommunicatet was that the corpse could not decay, and
in fact, the Greek idea down to modern times is
that decay is good because it shows the person's moved on.
What you want when after ten years or so, you
exhume the body and put the bones in an osterary,
(30:44):
you want clean white bones. That's great because the clean
white bones means the whole process has happened. The bones
don't matter. The person's moved on. It is flesh left though.
That's that's sinister, because it means that the person's sins
have kept them in this life. And she actually asked
people about this difference, and they won't bothered by it
at all. They said, no, no, we know perfectly well
that some people are so holy they don't need to decay.
(31:07):
You know that the processes of the creation of pollution
and the removal of pollution and my complete dissolution of
the body aren't necessary because the person is so pure.
So so a saint's body is uncorrupt. A vampire's body
is incorrupt because it's so polluted it can't move on.
And so it's the two opposites. But the people in
practice know exactly which they're dealing with. So I think
(31:28):
that Christian theology accommodated itself in sometimes our curious ways,
to these beliefs, because it's quite clear that you know,
if you go straight down the line theology, this is
just not possible. Corpses don't have their souls still hanging
around in them. But the Orthodox theology possibly is an
alternative to purgatory, which the Orthodox Church doesn't have, created
this strange idea of the tympanaos the inert corpse, that
(31:52):
it's perfectly harmless. So in fact, there's one story from
the seventeenth century. Some boys find when a users a trampoline,
it's foiling up like a drum, and timpanaous means drum,
So it just has to stay like that until some
priest releases it by performing an absolution, at which point
it will decay or the rikolakas, which is the walking corpse,
which is much more dangerous well and has to be
(32:13):
dealt with.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
One of the things that you mentioned in the book
is talking about saints, as you're saying right now, and
it's made me think that one of the things you
see sort of consistently in saints stories is they open
up the grave and there's this beautiful smell. And I
always thought that this was just about, you know, the
holiness of the person. But do you think this is
a way to tell whether you're looking at a saint
or just an uncorrupted revenant.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Well, actually, the stories of revenant exhumations don't normally mention
the smell. I mean, that's presumably because I think any
corpse at that stage would be smelling. So it's going
that second. For granted, I suppose they're certainly never said
to be sweet smelling, and indeed sweet smelling is yeah,
that does seem to be a sign of a sanctity.
The signs that they look for are well signs. I
(32:56):
mean sometimes they be moving around, signs of blow, cheapness,
blood around the mouth, that kind of thing. Now, there
are some rather unpleasant physiological aspects to this, and there's
a whole book about this put by Paul Barber called Vampires,
Death and Burial, which deals with these aspects. And of
course the natural processes of decay involve some bloating, swelling
(33:17):
and so forth. But you can't just say, well, it's
just that, because of course many societies have not had
these beliefs, so you have to have the fear there
to start with, to interpret a corpse that's going through
those processes as being an unquiet one.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yes, and this is something that you get it throughout
the book, where the conditions have to be there, but
then there usually sparked by something. And you compare this
to which hysteria later, What are the connections that you
see there?
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yes, it's interesting the connection with witches. I and think
what some corpses have in common with the witches but
not with spirits, ghosts, life forces and so forth, is
that they're physical. And the fact that their physical means
that they can be fought. You can track them you
can put them on trial, you can imprison them, you
can torture them, you can execute them. I think one
(34:06):
of the reasons why corpses perhaps have a particular fascination
in dangerous corpses compared with say, ghosts, is that ghosts
are nothing you do about them.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
Really.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
You can exercise them, you can't think about them physically.
But any evil entity that chooses to come back in
a human corpse, the corpse can be attacked, and so
it's a variant on the kind of release of fear, pain, anger,
or anxiety that lies behind so many episodes of which hysteria.
(34:35):
It's interesting that on the whole, geographical zones of witch
killing and geographical zones of corpse killing are mutually exclusive.
So where you get intensive witch persecutions, you don't get
intensive corpse persecution epidemics. There are a few exceptions for that,
but by and large that's the case. It's only in
(34:58):
certain Kinnter Reformation contexts where there was a very strong,
educated idea about demons, and so of course the whole
bit is about witchcraft is you're making packed with the devil,
demonic forces familiars. But suppose those demons also choose to
occupy corpses. So there is an intellectual sort of continuum there,
which meant that in for example, in Moravia, in the
(35:18):
Eastern Czech Republic in the le sement early eighteenth centuries,
that the same authorities were supervising witch hunting and corpse hunting.
But that's unusual, so it's really a response to the
same sorts of fear. And I think an important thing
to say at this point is that these are both
of them examples of paranoic persecution mania, which happens when
(35:40):
people are frightened or angry or think that they need
to hit back at somebody. And of course we know
tragically that that can take the form of persecution of
all kinds of minority groups. But isn't it so much
better if the people being persecuted are dead already. That's
one of the messages of the book.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yes, do you get a sense of it, And again
looking as fragmentary sources, but maybe maybe the later sources
will give us a better look at this, that there
is a pushback against this, and that these are the
corpses of people who have been loved by the community
and now they have to be dealt with in a
way that is kind of ugly. Do you get a
sense of pushback against this or people just being like, well,
(36:20):
this needs to happen.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Well, it varies in the societies where the dead people
are bad people, which is true in the Icelandic sources.
It seems to be true in the English material. Then
of course people don't think that it certainly is the case.
A good example here is Lutheran Saxony, where there's this
weird idea develops that the corpses are munching on their shrouds,
(36:41):
these lips smacking dead, and you can hear them chomping
away at their shrouds, and as they eat their shrouds
they spread plague. But these are perfectly order and respectable
people who have been buried in a normal way, and
the remedy is to open the grave and chop off
the head with a spade, again like twelfth century Herefordshire.
But of course, as you say, many people didn't like this,
and there are a couple of sermon collections from Saxony
(37:03):
in the late sixteenth century where priests preach against this
and say it's the devil that's tempting you to do
this to behave in this undignified and Unchristian fashion towards
our dead, and we got to learn, and of course
this is taking a cue from what Luther had already
said about it. We've got to learn that we just
tell the devil to get lost, we don't taken notice
(37:23):
of his nonsense, and then eventually he will stop. So
there is a pushback there against.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
It, well, because it occurs to me that it would
be something that you'd want to resist your relative or friend,
or something being zoomed and then being pulled apart.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
But the funny thing about that is that people do
seem to compartmentalize their minds about it, and that particularly
ClearCase is the American one is New England and Pennsylvania,
where people are doing it to their own relatives, and
particularly since there was a strong belief that tuberculosis went
in families, which of course it often did for medical reasons,
but the idea developed that let's say one or two
(37:59):
children in a large family die, they're going to bring
the others after them, and so you've got to dig
up the first ones. You really get parents sticking up
their own dead children and cutting their hearts out. This
is happening in New England and in the mid to
late nineteenth century in order to save the remaining children.
So I think the terror of plague, whether it's plague
(38:19):
in late medieval early modern Europe or tuberculosis in nineteenth
century USA, it's terrifying. How do you fight back against it?
Here is a way you can fight back against it,
people think, and at least it's therapeutic.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Well, and that's where the brandy comes in, right, because
this is unpleasant. Okay, Coming back around to vampires. One
of the things that seems to be consistent and looking
at these revenants, that there is a real fixation on
the mouth. And some people have said that this is
because when corpses are off gasing, they eat the shroud
because that's part of the decomposition process, or if this
(38:52):
is something I've heard before, and maybe you can correct
me on this, But do you find it's always the
mouth that seems to be where people are focused or
is it the skin? What are people worried about?
Speaker 3 (39:03):
No, it's not. And in fact, most of them, the
medieval European undead, the harm they do is actually rather unclear.
I mean, they kill people, but they seem to do
it by just their presence, you know, they wander around
the Icelandic ones, one of who of the Englishmen sit
on the roofs of houses. They're make a nuisance to
themselves and then people die, so it's like their presence
(39:24):
is spreading some sort of lethal contagion. And occasionally they
throw things. There's one hilarious episode from one of the
Icelandic sagas where two lots of dead men come into
the same house and one lot of being drowned, and
then some others who already died because they're depredations, and
then they start throwing things at each other, and the
(39:44):
normal inhabitants of the household beat a rapid retreat. So
it's not mainly the mouth. As I said. There is
this one English exam from the twelfth century referring to
a bloodsucker, but generally speaking it's not. The emphasis on
the biting and sucking doesn't until very late, until we
get to after about seventy hundred, when you start to
get in the Balkans. This fusion between the central European
(40:08):
beliefs and the ones that seem to be coming from
ideas of Turkic sucking spirits so the whole mouth and
business is actually is quite later. This is the unfortunate
thing that brand Stoker took these stories from Serbia in
the seventy twenties and thirties, and that's what the modern
stereotype is based on. But it's not at all representative.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Well, I mean, I think this episode is going to
be disappointing to some people who have really invested in
the vampire idea of being you know, something that's ancient.
They've always looked good, they've always been youthful, they've always
had long fangs. But I mean, I think this is
a really interesting way of looking at anthropologically the way
that people are dealing with their problems and their interactions
(40:53):
with the dead. So can we blame all of our
ideas about vampires on Bram Stoker?
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Is this the place where the buckstop?
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Not entirely, The literary development of the vampire idea starts
earlier than that. And there are some much other examples
of completely fictional vampires. And there's one I think I
identified in late sixteenth century Moravia, but really it's from
the seventeen thirties. That's the crucial point when the episodes
(41:23):
in Serbia were starting to get into the Western European newspapers.
It was a particular episode in seventy thirty two where
there was a report made for the habsbook Imperial Authorities,
and that got into the hands of various people who
wrote pamphlets and popular journalistic work, which then got translated
from that into German and then into French into English,
(41:46):
and so in March seventeen thirty two it was in
the English papers. And from that point on it wasn't
the seriously at all. It was just some weird things
that happened, you know, on the other side of Europe,
in weird places. But it became came a very attractive
metaphor for exploitative beings, exploitative rulers, and even gets into
(42:08):
the French revolutionary discourse and the words of the Revolutionary
anthem about the bloodthirsty tyrants sucking their mother's blood. This
metaphor is coming out of the Serbian stories, so already
by the late eighteenth century it's starting to get into
various fictional works who start to get short stories, which
then really takes off in the nineteenth century with Lord Byron,
(42:31):
with Polydori, who was Barron's physician, then the Irish novelist
Sheridan Leferu in the eighteen seventies of his story Carmilla,
and then culminating in the eighteen nineties with Bram Stoker's
Drag which of course throughout the board. It was such
a compelling work, it captivated people. It really almost obliterated
all the rest, and Stoker took the Serbian episodes. He
(42:55):
read Augustin Kalmey's book on the subject, published in the
seventeen six is. He looked at a lot of recent
Romanian folklore, but actually a lot of stories and that
were in fact practices which developed quite recently, and he
put all that together to make this completely fictional character
of the Transylvanian nobleman.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Well, as we get to the end of this, there's
so much more for people to read, and it is
an absolutely beautiful, sweeping look at the way that corpses
have come to haunt us. So I need to ask
you who is your favorite vampire or revenant?
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Do you have one?
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Yes, if it's one, If I'm need to choose one.
Johan Kunza, who is the subject of that first vampire
novel that I mentioned, which was a bit of a
discovery again because the story has often been quoted, but
just as an example of one of the most detailed
vampire stories. And it comes from a Moravian village in
the fifteen nineties. And this man is buried and then
(43:50):
all kinds of weird things happen. It's like an encyclopedia
of paranormal phenomena. There, there are things thrown around, he
sells his soul to the devil. He rides around with
his horse, strikes sparks like the Wild Hunt. There's a
very strong sexual element in it. He rapes women, he
attacks people's genitals, He generally gets up to high drinks,
(44:13):
and then eventually they dig him up and they burn him.
But an interesting thing there is that the story of
how his body is dragged to the pyre is actually
most identical. This is very strange to one of the
thirteenth century Icelandic sagas the same episode. The author of
it must have got it from something like that. And
I think what's clear is that although there may have
(44:34):
been a real yo Handkunzer, what we have here is
a vampire novel. Now unfortunately we don't have it surviving
in the original German text. It's preserved in a Latin
summary by a very serious minded demonologist who quotis as
an example of how terrible demons are. But actually, if
you deconstruct it, you can see perfectly well that it's
(44:55):
a work of fiction, and it must have been a
popular pamphlet. I should buy lurid woodcuts that were circulating
this story. So it's the first vampire novel. But then
in turn people read it, and so of course those
ideas would have circled back into what people actually believed.
So I think I would say he's my favorite vampire.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Well, there are lots to choose from, but that is
a great pick because I mean, like you say, everything
is in it. Well, thank you so much to John
for coming on and telling us about vampires. It's just
been fascinating in such a fun time to chat with
you about it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
That's a great pleasure.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
To find out more about John's work, you can visit
his faculty page at Queen's College, Oxford. His new book
is Killing the Dead Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the
New World. Before we go, here's Peter from Medievalist dot net.
And Peter, you have some big news, speaking of spooky
season and vampires and all that.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
What is your big news.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
Oh well, one of our interns a kitten, but we
call it an entro miragold one best cat costume at
a little event here in Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
Well tell the people what the costume was, because it
wasn't just Maricle that was dressed up.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Yeah, yeah, I was the knight. She was my queen.
Brought her in front of the crowds at watched on
here in Oakville, and she won by default since every
other pet lover only brought the dog.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
So she really was truly the queen of the pets there.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
I think that's how every cat thinks of themselves, right.
I'm not a.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Cat person, but that's my impression of cats. And they
know that they are royalty, right.
Speaker 4 (46:36):
Indeed, although I put her back to work hard at
work here at medievals dot net.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Well, I hope you will post those pictures because I
from one am looking forward to seeing them. Congratulations to
you and miracle for me your big win in Oakville.
Speaker 4 (46:50):
Thanks so much so.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
What is going on on the website this week?
Speaker 4 (46:55):
We took a look at twenty five words that are
most associated with the Middle Ages, things like castle night
even medieval itself. You know, they explain where they came from.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
So if people want to know where the word castle
comes from, they can go straight to Medievalist dot net
and you've got it covered.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Yeah, that at twenty four other words, including like cathedral,
which comes from the Latin word cathedral, which meant chair.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
There you go, chair indeed, and gets.
Speaker 4 (47:22):
To associated with the bishop's chair. So that's how it
all develops like that. So it's just interesting some words
developed during the Middle Ages and some way after the
Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah, I love etymology. This is the type of post
that I would definitely seek out on the Internet.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
So we have that. Plus we have news about medieval
frogs and their use in medicine, and we have a
piece by Luke Gouci kind of takes a look at
the archaeological evidence to see what happened in world life
in Spain after the Reconquista.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Well, as usual, there's a whole range of things for
people to check out on Medievalist on net. So thanks
Peter for stopping by and tell us all about it.
Speaker 4 (48:01):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
No matter how spooky things get, I know I can
always count on you listeners, So thank you so much
for being here and helping out by sharing your favorite
episodes like this one, letting the ads roll through, or
by becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Without you, the
world would definitely be a much scarier place. If you'd
(48:24):
like to find out how to become a patron, please
visit patreon dot com. Slash Medievalists for everything from vampires
two church spires, follow Medievalist dot Net on Instagram at
medievalist net or blue sky at Medievalists. You can find
me Danielle Sabowski across social media at five min Medievalist
or five minute Medievalist, and you can find my books
(48:46):
at all your favorite bookstores. Our music is by Christian Overton.
Thanks for listening and have yourself a spectacular day. You
w
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