THE PAGAN GODS, LEWIS WROTE, only became beautiful to us, and useful as poetry, when we ceased to believe in them. In classical poetry they are worshipped, feared, hated and sometimes even laughed at, but rarely are they explored as objects of interest to man for purely aesthetic rather than religious reasons. It is that religio, Lewis wrote, that separated us from the gods. In order for us to begin to write about them as approachable characters, the stuff of secular stories and poetry, there must be, besides the religion, ‘a marvellous that knows itself as myth’. This, I suggest, is what became of medieval revenants. They became entertaining to us as subjects of fiction when we stopped believing in them.

Thus far we have examined the undead in the religious context that pervaded medieval life, and then traced what became of them after the Reformation, when churchmen and scientists sought other ways to explain accounts of revenancy. We will look now at these banished revenants, and efforts by people to resurrect them, divorced from the overt ecclesiastical perspective through which they had previously been mediated, in literature.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, skeletons began to replace cadavers in church-sanctioned painting. The Church, keen to teach respect for the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, could not countenance its being brutalised in art. Taking into account beliefs regarding lingering life in the corpse until it is fully decomposed, this effectively – in iconography, at least – banished the revenant from the Church. In any case, over time, having been made more graphic and horrifying as the motif developed, images of the Legend had lost their ability to shock.4 On top of this, as we have seen, scientists began proffering rational explanations for many of the natural phenomena people had blamed on revenants and other supernatural beings.

People sought ways to re-establish the bonds with the dead – previously maintained through the Roman Catholic system of suffrages, masses and encouragement of stories of apparitions for didactic purpose – which had been broken by reformers and scientists.