English Visiting Speaker Seminar 'Wykud spyritus þat wonon in þat wylde place': Folk Horror in Middle English Sermon Exempla' Dr Eleanor Baker, University of Oxford

The generic term ‘folk horror' is most readily associated with three films which are together referred to as the Unholy Trinity: The Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). These films are united by their foregrounding of natural environments and the rural communities which inhabit them, their allusion to the supernatural, and their inclusion of threatened — and often graphically realised — violence. This paper will explore the various resonances of the term folk horror for medieval literature, and will argue that the generic concerns of folk horror offer a useful means of considering texts whose scholarly attention is often fractured between discussions of ecopoetics, the supernatural, lay and ‘popular' culture, and religious practice. It will focus on Middle English sermon exempla (the pithy, didactic narratives designed to illustrate the content of a sermon) that feature folk-happenings in rural English settings.