Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c. 1050'1450 by Stephen Gordon (review)

Supernatural Encounters addresses the use of spirits as literary devices and textual symbols in a variety of medieval English sources. Comprised of six chapters that function as distinct essays, Stephen Gordon's work gives close narratological readings of texts by a number of well-known medieval English authors, composed both in Latin and in Middle English across the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The focus is chiefly upon the uses of spirits as rhetorical tropes.

The first two chapters form a pair and make similar arguments about their material. The "Witch of Berkeley" story in William of Malmesbury's Gesta regnum Anglorum is the subject of chapter 1. The witch, before her death, instructs her heirs to bury her corpse in a local monastery, confined in a leaden coffin bound securely with three iron chains. Though these instructions are faithfully fulfilled, a demon succeeds in breaking open the last chain on the third night after her burial; he drags forth her body and absconds with it upon a terrifying black stallion, outfitted with iron barbs. At the most obvious level, the Witch of Berkeley provides a moral exemplum against the use of magic, illustrating how the body of such a practitioner is forcibly ejected from sacred precincts. Gordon argues that its themes also are intimately related to Malmesbury's overall narrative purposes. Additionally, he interprets the tale as a symbolic commentary on politics: Malmesbury deplored the influence of Norman aristocracy in the 1050s, wishing them gone from English soil and the body politic. Just as the body of a spiritual transgressor who trafficked with dark arts must be removed from the monastic premises, so William wished for the political purging of English society of foreign, intrusive bodies.

The next chapter takes up a series of revenant stories recounted in William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum. The revenants of this chronicle pose substantial threats to the community as unnatural forces and as vectors of disease. While conceding that William does not draw any explicit moralizing connection between these supernatural events and the contemporary politics of his day, Gordon proposes that William's revenants serve as a symbolic commentary on the social monstrousness of a rather diffuse list of contemporary political figures. These include William FitzOsbert, leader of a London rebellion in 1196, William Longchamp, the unpopular chancellor of England, and multiple English and French monarchs who maintained a state of war with one another, destabilizing society in the process. Thus, the monstrous threat posed by the revenant, whose putrid body emanates destruction, is read as a metaphor for a broad sense of political parasitism and depredation.

The third chapter concerns Walter Map's De nugis curialium. Here, Gordon turns away from the political underpinnings of supernatural mirabilia in order to take up questions of satire and textuality. Map is well known as a writer with an ironic bent, whose presentation of "Courtier's Trifles" emphasized the emptiness and falseness of courtiers' existences. Gordon argues that the revenant is a "perfect tool for satire" because of its betwixt-and-between, ambiguous status as neither fully dead nor fully living. In the same way, the falseness and flattery that pervades court life is a marker of things that are not what they seem, of words that mean something other than what they say, and of codes of conduct that are hypocritically transgressed. The roving corpses of Map's work are for Gordon symbols of the unmooring of fixed values in court life.

Fourth is a chapter on John Mirk's sermons, with additional consideration of the series of twelve revenant stories transcribed by an anonymous monk of Byland Abbey in the fifteenth century. This chapter adopts a more historical view in order to argue that revenant corpses continued to be of wide interest to English people well into the later medieval period. Gordon contends that...