The temporal excesses of dead flesh

Abstract

The corpse does not signify absence in much medieval literature; instead, dead flesh, both intact and putrefying, offers a superabundance of disruptive and uncomfortable presence. This ‘untimely’ presence is a particularly historiographic problem, for a cadaver’s refusal to decay quietly in the grave destabilizes the supercessionary relationship of present to past, as this essay demonstrates by coupling Bill Brown’s thing theory and Michel de Certeau’s historiographic explications with Bede’s Vita Cuthberti, St Erkenwald, the alliterative ‘Three Dead Kings,’ and the anonymous Wilton Chronicle. This life of Edith of Wilton, written c. 1420, effectively rewrites Anglo-Saxon royal history through an imagined encounter between Edith’s preternaturally active corpse and an impious, but quickly converted, Cnut. Dead flesh’s temporally explosive potential is thereby imagined to enable an affective encounter between past and present that can engender ethical renovation and even change the future.