A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living.[1] The word "revenant" is derived from the Latin word, revenans, "returning", from the verb "revenire"; in French, "revenant" means "coming back", from the verb "revenir", meaning "to come back".
Belief in revenants lies beneath the universal rituals for regaining the favor of the dead, to keep them in their place. Vivid stories of revenants arose in Western Europe (especially Great Britain, and were later carried by Anglo-Norman invaders to Ireland) during the High Middle Ages. Though later legend and folklore depicts revenants as returning for a specific purpose (e.g., revenge against the deceased's killer), in most Medieval accounts they return to harass their surviving families and neighbours. Revenants share a number of characteristics with folkloric vampires.
Many stories were documented by English historians in the Middle Ages. William of Newburgh wrote in the 1190s, "one would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around, animated by some evil spirit, to terrorize or harm the living, unless there were many cases in our times, supported by ample testimony".[2] Stories of revenants were very personal, always about a specific individual who had recently died (unlike the anonymous zombie depicted in modern popular culture), and had a number of common features.
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Medieval stories of revenants have common features. Those who return from the dead are wrongdoers in their lifetime, often described as wicked, vain or unbelievers. Often the revenants are associated with the spreading of disease among the living. The appropriate response is usually exhumation, followed by some form of decapitation, and burning or removal of the heart.
Several stories imply that sucking of blood has occurred.[3] Because of this, revenants have sometimes been described as "vampires" by a number of authors of popular books about vampire legends, starting with Montague Summers.[4] Medievalists are, however, largely skeptical towards this interpretation,[5] possibly because vampire legends are believed to have originated in Eastern European folklore and became known to the Western public only later through reports coming from the East in the 18th century. Vampires do not appear in Western fiction (with modifications) until the late 18th century and early 19th century, starting with authors such as Robert Southey, Lord Byron and John William Polidori. However, anthropologists and folklorists tend to blur distinctions between the various forms of "walking dead", for which counterparts exist in the myths and legends of nearly every civilization dating back to earliest history.
William of Newburgh (1136?-1198?) wrote of a number of cases "...as a warning to posterity." He says these stories were very common and that "were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome".[2]
One story involves a man of "evil conduct", on the run from the law, who hides out in the province of York and makes the ill-fated choice to get married. Becoming jealous of his wife, he hides in the rafters of his bedroom and catches her in an act of infidelity with a local young man, but then accidentally falls to the floor mortally wounding himself, and dies a few days later. As Newburgh describes:
A number of the townspeople were killed by the monster and so:
In another story Newburgh tells of a woman whose husband recently died. The husband returns from the dead and comes to visit her at night in her bedchamber and he "...not only terrified her on awaking, but nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body." This goes on for three nights, and the revenant goes on to repeat these nocturnal visits with other nearby family and neighbours and "...thus become a like serious nuisance", eventually extending his walks in the broad daylight around the village. Eventually the problem was solved by the bishop of Lincoln who wrote a letter of absolution, upon which the man's tomb was opened wherein it was seen his body was still there, the letter was placed on his chest, and the tomb re-interred and sealed.[6]
The English Abbot of Burton tells the story of two runaway peasants from around 1090 who died suddenly of unknown causes and were buried, but:
The villagers became sick and started dying, but eventually the bodies of the revenants were exhumed, the heads cut off and their hearts removed, which put an end to the spread of the sickness.[7]
The chronicler Walter Map, an Englishman writing in the 12th century, tells of a "wicked man" in Hereford who rose from the dead and wandered the streets of his village at night calling out the names of those who would die of sickness within three days. The response by bishop Gilbert Foliot was "Dig up the body and cut off the head with a spade, sprinkle it with holy water and re-inter it".[8]