Introduction

Summary

‘The dead by their nature are not able to involve themselves in the affairs of the living …’ It was by such adamant statements that St Augustine, one of the most influential fathers of the early Christian Church, rejected a central belief of the classical world about the afterlife and the spirits of the dead. For Augustine, writing in the fifth century in a Roman province in North Africa, and for many early medieval churchmen influenced by his teaching throughout the cities and provinces of Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the classical tradition of appeasement of the dead by elaborate funerary rites represented precisely the kind of pagan superstition which Christianity required them to ignore.

This discrediting by the early Church of the Roman emphasis upon funerary ceremony carried with it an implicit rejection of the connected belief that unappeased spirits of the dead (those who had not been properly buried, or those like criminals or suicides who had died in exceptional or dishonourable circumstances) wandered restlessly at the margins of the living world. Stories of the uneasy dead, who made the living aware of themselves by sounds and apparitions, were commonplace in the classical world; at the same time, stories of ‘revenants’, corporeal ghosts who returned to mingle with the living, were likely to have been a mainstay of the non-Christian culture of the Germanic tribes which over-ran Northern Europe from the fifth century onwards. As we shall see in Part Three, many of the narrative traditions relating to such ghosts were later preserved in medieval Scandinavia. There were, however, remarkably few stories of apparitions of the dead recorded by Christian writers in the early middle ages, during the period, indeed, when these Germanic tribes were being converted to Christianity.

This is not surprising, given that the recording function was carried out by monastic scribes who, whether or not they were familiar with the precise teaching of St Augustine, were operating within an ecclesiastical culture which would have been influenced by his overall contention that visions of the dead were illusory, mere phantoms of the imagination, of no more substance or significance than the images which occurred in dreams.