Michael Barbezat, 'The Desire To See and Speak With the Dead in Twelfth-Century England'

Michael Barbezat is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Western Australia. He holds an MA in Medieval History from the University of California at Davis (2006) and a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto (2013). Michael’s research focuses on connections between religious ideologies and conceptions of society, geography and identity, particularly in the fields of medieval historiography and literature. He is currently writing a monograph titled 'Burning Bodies: Community, Eschatology and Identity in the Middle Ages', which will be published by Cornell University Press in 2018. This paper, ‘Curiosity that Becomes Something Else: The Desire to See and to Speak with the Dead in English Twelfth-Century Sources’, was delivered at a conference on ‘The Natural and the Supernatural in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds’ at The University of Western Australia in October 2017.