THE PRECEDING PAGES have sought to demonstrate that the development of revenant literature was heavily influenced by the Church, first through the doctrine of resurrection and the cults of the body and of the saints, then through ecclesiastical efforts to use revenant stories to deliver didactic messages for the cure of souls. I have tried to show also that the message the Church intended and the message the laity received were not always – or at least not completely – the same. Where churchmen offered a message of memento mori to spur parishioners to amend their lives, the laity often responded more to the macabre language and images with which the message was presented, for it spoke to their own inner fear of death. Indeed, ecclesiastics were themselves sometimes so taken with the sheer pleasure of the fantastic that they seemed to relate tales with no discernible moralite simply for the joy of the story itself. When the Church began discouraging the laity from telling such stories and allied themselves with scientific views debunking claims of revenants through rational explanations or ascribing them to the work of demons or tricksters, people persevered in telling the tales without institutional support, through ballads and imaginative literature, for a variety of purposes social, political and artistic. As we have seen, that instinct drove a proliferation of stories of the risen dead, some following the lead of the classic medieval revenant and others branching off in new and sometimes surprising directions. Stories and novels were joined by films and television programmes, and paramount among modern receptions of the medieval revenant is the modern zombie story.

We return now to the larger question. Why did people insist on maintaining belief in revenants despite efforts by Church and secular authorities to dissuade them? Why is revenant art and literature so fecund a subject matter? Why has it captivated ecclesiastics and laity, writers and poets, painters and even composers, from the Middle Ages to the present?

As we have seen, revenant tales in different historical circumstances have coincided with specific ills. In many accounts in England, for instance, revenants were blamed for outbreaks of plague.