"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."
"John Blair is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His new book is Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. The creator and host of The Medieval Podcast is Danièle Cybulskie. Click here to visit her website or follow her on BlueSky @5minmedievalist.bsky.social"
Corpses that refused to stay dead terrified medieval communities and inspired beliefs in reanimated dead that sought to eat the living. Communities developed a variety of funerary and anti-reanimation measures designed to keep the dead buried and inactive. Some instances of reported hauntings and revenant activity spread widely and were described as epidemic in nature. These phenomena and countermeasures appear across wide geographic and temporal ranges, with comparable patterns documented from ancient Near Eastern contexts through later transregional occurrences attributed to vampiric or revenant threats.
Read at Medievalists.net
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