[Liuhum] What if the Angel of History were a Walking Corpse? Seminar with COMPASS and LiU Historiska studier

[Polina Ignatova]

Save the date for the seminar organised by COMPASS Research Hub and Historisak studier:

8 October, 13.15. Campus Valla, Key Building, Floor 4, Room 'Tage' (can be found in the “historikerkorridor”).
Polina Ignatova, 'What if the Angel of History were a Walking Corpse: Reading Augustine's Second Death as an Ecological Disaster'.

In her article ‘What if the Angel of History Were a Dog?’ Deborah Rose commented on the Australian practice of dingo baiting with 1080 poison, citing Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, which refers to Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’. Rose explores man-made mass death and introduces the concept of ‘double death’: the perverted form of death, which amplifies itself and destabilises ecosystems.
This paper will employ Rose’s methodology to offer a new reading of medieval English walking-dead stories. So far, Geoffrey of Burton’s, William of Newburgh’s, and Walter Map’s narratives about the undead have been viewed as cautionary tales, commentaries on political upheavals, or expressions of anxiety over a post-mortem fate of one’s body. This paper will argue restless corpses could be understood as references to ecological disasters. It will demonstrate that medieval English undead represent what Augustine referred to as ‘second death’. According to Augustine, on Doomsday the souls of the sinners will be reunited with their corpses to undergo eternal torment. I will argue that in medieval sources, such as anathemas, punishments inflicted by saints, or walking-dead stories, ‘second death’ was used in a sense analogical to Rose’s ‘double death’: as a force destroying ecosystems.

Dr Polina Ignatova is a postdoctoral researcher at Linköping University, Executive Editor at Culture Unbound Journal, and an editor for the Trivent’s Environmental History series. Her research focusses on environmental and cultural history, particularly medieval understandings of death, and life after death, and medieval perceptions of water-borne animals.
[cid:512dc0e8-3e7f-466c-adeb-70177ba16bf6]
Dr Polina Ignatova
Postdoc | IKOS Tema Q / COMPASS
Executive Editor | Culture Unbound
Linköping University
Environmental History Series Editor | The Trivent

Website: medievalke.wordpress.com
Follow me on Twitter: @paulineignatova
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