Zombies in Thietmar of Merseburg

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Why did commoners and kings in eleventh-century Germany keep seeing dead people? Why did a bunch of animated corpses decide to burn a priest alive? And why did a busy bishop write all this down?

​Podcaster: Lucy

Further Reading

Bagge, Sverre.  “Thietmar of Merseburg: Chronicon.”  In Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German Historiography c. 950-1150.  Studies in the History of Christian Thought. Leiden: Brill, 2002. pp.95-188

Brown, Peter.  “The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.”  In Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages.  Ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. pp. 41-59.

Geary, Patrick J.  Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

McLaughlin, Megan.  Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Schmitt, Jean Claude.  Ghosts in the Middle Ages: the Living and the Dead in Medieval Society.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

​Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com)