This winter, Dr Eleanor Janega leads us into the darker corners of the medieval imagination - a world where the boundary between the living and the dead was dangerously thin.
Drawing on medieval chronicles, religious monuments, and Icelandic sagas, we learn why people believed the dead could return, and what those fears reveal about sin, salvation, and community.
From a monk buried in chains for refusing to stay dead, to a choir girl sent back from purgatory with a chilling warning; these stories illuminate how people in the Middle Ages understood the supernatural, and why those fears still linger today.
…be prepared for a fright!
_
You can watch Eleanor’s first film on the medieval afterlife here: https://access.historyhit.com/videos/medieval-afterlife
Up Next in Top Documentaries
-
The Ashmolean Up Close: Memento Mori
The fourth film in our series exploring the remarkable collections of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
In this episode, Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb meets curator Matthew Winterbottom to explore the morbid side of life in Early Modern Europe... through Memento Mori.
This was a period awash with obje...
-
Paestum: A Tale of Three Cities
The story of ancient Italy is so much more than just Rome. Tristan Hughes visits the extraordinary site of Paestum in southern Italy, home to some of the greatest ancient Greek temples from anywhere in the world.
From majestic temples to pristine wall paintings more that 2,500 years old, he exp...
-
Big Stories from a Small Town: The Re...
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents”. So begins ‘Little Women’ by Louisa May Alcott.
In this special seasonal film, History Hit explores the extraordinary literary heritage of Concord, Massachusetts - a town that nurtured so many great American writers and thinkers, particularly ...
22 Comments