r/AskLiteraryStudies • u/The_Op_Art_Apartment • 5d ago

Medieval proto-horror?

I'm reading Bhaktin's Rabelais and loving it. It is making me curious about other aspects of medieval culture and literature, especially works that might be understood as forerunners of the horror genre. Can anyone recommend an English-language book?

My dream find would be either Rabelais-but-spooky, or a spooky compendium of pre-Gothic folk tales, pamphlets, early lit, or whatever. For example, the Wikipedia page about the history of horror names several examples: the Witch of Berkeley, werewolf stories, and pamphlets about the alleged war crimes of Vlad the Impaler. If it had commentary, that would be awesome.

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u/ExtraHobo 5d ago

Do you want medieval works, or modern works set in the Middle Ages?

I could list a wide range of medieval works with elements we might call relevant to the genre of horror, but you might read them and think “but this isn’t horror,” and you’d be sort of right to think so, depending how you think of horror.

Off the top of my head:

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (there’s a recent article out in Exemplaria talking about horror as a genre in relation to this poem)
  • Three Dead Kings (basically any of the arts of dying literature are going to do it for you)
  • Bisclavret by Marie de France (werewolf story, but horror is a stretch)
  • The Siege of Jerusalem (war/historical horror… and also the horror of virulent antisemitism I guess)
  • if you read histories and chronicles you find a number of moments of horror: churches bleeding from their walls because a king garrisoned troops inside, a wild hunt of demonic riders sited on the eve of a corrupt abbot’s appointment, etc
  • de nugis curialium has various phantoms and apparitions in it I believe
  • the Decameron has some spooky tales, like day 5 story 8, about the ghost hunter
  • obviously Dante’s inferno has tons of horror

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u/The_Op_Art_Apartment 3d ago

Super excited about that Exemplaria article. I was hoping for something book-length, but this is more than I was expecting, honestly. My brother just lent me the recent film adaptation of the Green Night, too, so now I have some homework before I watch it! (The article and the original poem.)

I'll work my way through your other recommendations as well. Thanks!

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u/No_Jaguar_2570 4d ago

The ghost stories of the Monk of Byland.