ABSTRACT
In his introduction to this collection, Albrecht Classen notes that the self can understand itself only when it has achieved a clear demarcation from the ‘other.’ 1 The other may be conceptualized here as any one of the many selves and ethnicities that function in the community and known world external to a self, the supposed denizens of regions beyond or invisibly beside the community and the known world, or indeed the external known world considered as a whole. The demarcation of the self takes definite shape when an other enters the community in which the self resides, as a stranger who in the ensuing dialogue enables the self to situate more precisely its boundaries of personality and self-understanding. During the Middle Ages, a period haunted by astounding numbers of revenants, these spectral beings functioned as a special sort of other, furthering the self’s ongoing external and constructive dialogue both by appearing within the self’s community, and by bringing into their dialogue a third, invisible, party that was equally foreign to the unregenerate self.
