Suffering Souls
Marina Warner: Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 18 June 1998
Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society
by Jean-Claude Schmitt, translated by Theresa LavenderFagan.
Chicago, 290 pp., £26.50, May 1998,0 226 73887 6 Show More
by Jean-Claude Schmitt, translated by Theresa LavenderFagan.
Chicago, 290 pp., £26.50, May 1998,
“... A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers ... ”