Revenants, Resurrection, and Burnt Sacrifice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13044894 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nancy Mandeville Caciola (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 311-338 |
| Publication date | 2014-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Preternature Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2161-2188 • E-ISSN: 2161-2196 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/preternature.3.2.0311 |
| OpenAlex | W2021852838 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg incorporated several stories about the undead in his chronicle of the deeds of the Ottonian kings. His accounts feature embodied revenants (not insubstantial specters) at worship. The stories the bishop recounts likely circulated in oral form, as urban legends, for some time before he recorded them in writing. Perhaps because they featured revived bodies, Thietmar presented these stories as evidence for the Christian doctrine of Resurrection. However, the tales do not readily lend themselves to this project, not least because the revenants were presented as frightening, dangerous, and even murderous in nature. This article probes the dissonances of Thietmar's ghost stories, arguing that they represent the hybrid products of a syncretism between Slavic pagan and medieval Christian cultures
Art · Doctrine · Linguistics · Literature · Sacrifice · Syncretism (linguistics · Theology · Worship · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy
Authority
The reversible world
The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity
De partibus Saxoniae and the Regulation of Mortuary Custom
The Carolingian Missionary and the Pagan
The Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier 1250-1350
Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology
Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany
Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |