Since the work of Philippe Ariès in the 1970s, medieval death has drawn its fair share of interest from a wide array of scholars. While drawing from this vast scholarship, Nancy Mandeville Caciola provides a substantial and original contribution to the subject with her book entitled Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. Divided into three parts, the book is more than a simple study of the medieval undead. Like many of the authors she quotes (Patrick Geary, Michel Lauwers, Jean-Claude Schmitt, to name but a few in a long list of references from different languages and fields of research), Caciola offers an anthropological inquiry into the imagining of death and the afterlife in the longue durée of the Middle Ages. Arguing that the "materia mortalia" of the period is "abundant and often contradictory" because it merges various cultures (8), the author sets to explore the different manners in which pagan traditions connected over time with the Christian understanding of the postmortem condition. Hence, the title "Afterlives" refers not only to the multiple conceptions of death and the afterlife in the Middle Ages but also to the process of cultural survival and transmission (14-15), a broader historiographical issue for which, surprisingly, the author ignores the influential work of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and Didi-Huberman.
The first part of the book gives an overview of the normative and universalizing discourse on Christian death forged by the intellectual elite of Western society between the second and the fourteenth centuries. Chapter 1 deals with the theological angle provided by the Church Fathers. While admitting the absence of a unified and monolithic view on death in the patristic writings of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Caciola singles out two conflicting systems of thought, that of Saint Augustine and that of Pope Gregory the Great. [1] The Augustinian system considers death as an event that definitely separates the dead from the living, while the Gregorian system understands death as a process that makes the boundaries between this world and the next less impenetrable. According to Caciola, the medieval conception of death and the afterlife nourished itself from the dynamic tension between these two dominant models, until the former "thanatology" triumphed over the latter at the end of the Middle Ages. The author goes on to explain this triumph in the next chapter where, focusing on medical thought, she argues that the importance given to diagnosing death between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries "harden[ed the] conceptual boundaries that earlier had been seen as more porous" (71).
Against this intellectual backdrop, the remainder of the book delineates the discordant discourses of different cultural traditions in which the undead are an integral part of reality. Part 2 deals with the traditions of northern Europe where Caciola examines the traces of "corporeal revenants," i.e. the dead who continue living in a material state to interact with the world. Chapter 3 explores the Christian assimilation of the pagan undead in the German marches of central Europe. Through a careful reading of the evidence, mostly collected from the Chronicon written by the Saxon bishop Thietmar of Merserburg between 1013 and 1018, Caciola argues that the Gregorian model of death and the afterlife made it possible to reframe local revenant stories within a Christian discourse. Indeed, despite the fact that their behaviour as a collective society, their space within a mountain and their embodied appearance were somewhat dissonant with Christian tradition, the pagan undead are rarely condemned as demonic, but rather assimilated into church dogma (resurrection, purgatory).
Chapter 4 follows the same line of investigation by focusing on the motif of the undead army in the Anglo-Norman regions. After discussing its folkloric elements, Caciola explains how certain authors used the narrative of the wandering band of dead warriors to support the Christian notion of a tripartite afterlife by portraying it as a form of post-mortem penitence. However, this viewpoint, which is in accordance with the Gregorian thanatology, gives way to a definite Augustinian reading in the thirteenth century after William of Auvergne dismisses the apparitions as the deceptive work of demons. Rather than a straightforward evolution, Caciola regards the history of the army of the dead more as an "ongoing dialogue" between the different levels of culture which allowed the pagan motif to survive.
The next chapter turns to accounts of individual revenants that go against the dominant Augustinian thanatology of the Late Middle Ages by perpetuating within the lay society of Northern Europe a popular and materialistic vision of the afterlife. Considering that the efforts made by church writers to discredit the notion of corporeal revenants are an indication of the enduring belief (and fear) in the vitality of dead flesh, Caciola explores its many patterns in different stories, images and practices. Contrary to the previous two chapters, the material gathered here is far too great for the author to offer an in-depth analysis. As a result, some of the observations are not always as satisfying or convincing. For instance, the notion that funeral practices that limit contact with the corpse is evidence of a "general mental outlook of dismay at the freshly dead" is interesting, but it relies solely on sketchy observations made by Philippe Ariès some forty years ago. Just as stimulating is the idea that the boiling and dismemberment of bodies meant to hasten the passage of the dead to the status of ancestors and limit the possibilities of their return, but the reasons behind the opposite practice of embalming are left unexplained (240-242). [2] To be sure, the efforts made to tease out the "inner logic" of revenants across a wide array of beliefs, rituals and iconography are commendable and should inspire scholars, but the links drawn between some of the material appear at times tenuous and forced, especially when images are involved.
The third part of the book moves the investigation to the south of Europe where the undead take on the appearance of disembodied shades. In chapter 6, Caciola looks at ghost stories from southern France. Although it might have to do with the arbitrary survival of sources, many cases considered by the author suggest that the capacity to speak with and for the dead was deeply rooted in the popular beliefs of the region. By providing the living with a glimpse of the afterlife and by helping put the dead to rest, mediums were important figures within local communities, and they remained so even when the clergy appropriated their abilities as a way to "add experiential scaffolding to the promulgation of new doctrines about the afterlife" (296).
The final chapter follows the disembodied undead in Italy and Portugal where they appear in cases of spectral possession, a subject previously explored by the author. [3] Although similar to spirit mediumship, ghost possession implies total control of the living receptacle, a temporary mechanism that allowed the dead to reintegrate their former community in order for it to achieve social closure. Indeed, while church writers condemned them simply as demonic possessions according to their own construct of the supernatural world, most of the events presented by Caciola were regarded "as opportunities to ritually reconstruct community boundaries and definitions" (341).
As this brief summary has tried to make obvious, the structure of the book is coherent and well organized. There are of course a few editorial issues like the frustrating lack of a bibliography, the numerous typos in the French references and the incomplete reference of figure 1.3 (which should read: Paris, Mazarine, ms. 2029 fol. 79v). Nevertheless, and despite the considerable amount of material collected, the author's intention and train of thought remain clear throughout. Caciola's goal is to reveal a medieval culture of death that is far richer and more complex than the one depicted in traditional historiography. Using a variety of documents that are read "against the grain" or approached through "triangulation", she demonstrates how folkloric conceptions of death and the afterlife, over time, were reframed both positively and negatively by the church, as well as assimilated by regional cultures. Absorbed by society, pagan notions, such as those of "bad death" and the residual vitally of dead flesh, thus came to enrich the medieval understanding of the postmortem condition beyond the universal scope of the intellectual elite.
Contents
Introduction
Part One: Imagining Mortality
1. Mors, A Critical Biography
2. Diagnosing Death
Part Two: Corporeal Revenants
3. Revenants, Resurrection and Burnt Sacrifice
4. The Ancient Army of the Undead
5. Flesh and Bone: The Semiotics of Mortality
Part Three: The Disembodied Dead
6. Psychopomps, Oracles and Spirit Mediums
7. Spectral Possession
Conclusion
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Notes:
1. An issue dealt with the previous year by Peter Brown, Ransom of the Soul, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2015.
2. On the subject of embalming, the reader should consult Romedio Schmitz-Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter. Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers, Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, Mittelalter-Forschungen, Band 48, 2016.
3. Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003.