Afterlives

"""Afterlives is a well-researched and well-written book about medieval experiences with the return of the dead and their interaction with the living. Nancy Mandeville Caciola takes a broad regional approach to such encounters, arguing for the existence of distinct northern European and Mediterranean traditions. In the Slavic and Scandinavian cultural tradition the afterlife takes place in an embodied state that can interact with the world of the living in both dangerous and productive manners. The Mediterranean model made reference to disembodied spirits seeking to maintain contact with the living. Caciola also looks at changing medical lore on death, which suggests the eventual triumph of an understanding of death as swift and definitive, thus setting the way for modern understandings of death that made revenants and ghosts 'an old-fashioned relic.'""-Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study, author of Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary ""Afterlives ambitiously reconstructs the thought-worlds of medieval Europeans asthey pertained to human death and what followed. Reading a wide variety of narrative sources with the careful eye of a cultural anthropologist, Nancy Mandeville Caciola unearths beliefs about death, spirits, ghosts, and revenants that were decidedly pre-Christian in their origin. Having found these materials and brought them together, the author deftly explores the manner in which pre-Christian ideas about death might live in harmony with Christian ideas, differ from them, or be co-opted into Christian theology. Caciola correctly recognizes that ideas about death change slowly and with difficulty, and that a careful read of extant medieval texts will reveal survivals, adaptations, and reinterpretations of pre-Christian ideals. She thus expands the current literature with a rich addition on the interplay between learned theology and folklore. Beyond the questions of death and afterlife, Caciola's findings also have cultural implications for those who study possession, the medieval cult of the saints, and early modern witchcraft.""-Leigh Ann Craig, Virginia Commonwealth University, author of Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages"