Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

'The vagaries of this foul carcass': social disease and revenant belief in Medieval England  
Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester)

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the rhetoric of social disease in medieval England, and its manifestation in the form of the walking dead. I will examine the disparity between official, textual interpretations of revenant encounters and the practical, local methods for keeping pestilent bodies in the grave

Paper long abstract:

The concept of pestilence in the Middle Ages extended beyond the confines of the material, observable world. Outbreaks of disease and destruction were often seen as physical indexes of social unrest. Indeed, contravention of the prevailing habitus of the community (heresy; ill-timed death) was a degenerate social performance, the manifestation of which sometimes took the form of a walking, disease-spreading corpse. Utilising the revenant narratives in William of Newburgh's Historia Rerum Anlgicarum (c.1198), I will explore the interrelations between the greater, textual traditions of disease theory and the local, practical methods for assuaging the dangerous dead. That is, to what extent did a chronicler's educational background, their conception of the sinful body and knowledge of humeral theory influence the ways in which they understood and transcribed their informants' 'wonderful' tales? Moreover, how useful are the anthropological approaches when trying to analyse the local, practical methods of dealing with outbreaks of social unrest? The rationale behind decapitation and the staking of a body is absent from liturgical texts and, as the anthropological literature suggests, the contagious nature of the liminal body was an issue which was not confined to European sources alone. Thus, using a combination of literary and archaeological evidence, and with reference to the theories of practice advocated by Michel de Certeau, I will illustrate how smaller (practical) traditions could be improvised within the larger (textual) traditions of society to form idiosyncratic patterns ('rhetorics') of apotropaic response.

Panel S11
Medicine, healing, performance: beyond the bounds of 'science'?
  Session 1