Dead man walking

Gengangere i europæisk middelalder

Resumé

The one thing we can be certain about in life is that we someday shall leave it in death. But what if that was a truth with modifications? Imagine risking becoming a revenant only to return from the grave and once again roam amongst the living. That’s pure fiction, right? Well, not if you were able to ask people in the European Middle Ages – lay, cleric and courtly alike. Beliefs about the return of the dead had many forms of cultural expressions in the Middle Ages and amongst the more interesting is the case of the walking dead – the revenants. But why did some people return from their graves to wonder amongst the living? And what was possibly at stake for them as well as for the community in which they once again roamed? By tracking the ‘zombie’ and it’s tales from the 12th to the 13th century this article aims to present a glimpse of an evolution in the medieval attitude towards death and afterlife as it presented itself in clerical writings.