Living with the dead in the Middle Ages (review)

Reviews 255 The most telling chapter investigates when new building techniques and new developments in masts, sails, and rigging were introduced and where they came from. The arrival of carvel and skeleton building is seen as an introduction of Mediterranean practices only slowly replacing the earlier shelltechniques,perhaps coming with the taking of Genoese carracks in the 1410s. The conclusion looks forward to late-sixteenth-century shipping and what the Admiralty records can tell us about their types and age. This is a book which can be recommended to both specialists and the general reader for it has much to offer both. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Geary, Patrick J., Living with the dead in the Middle Ages, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1994; cloth and paper; pp. viii, 273; R.R.P. US$46.75 (cloth), $17.55 (paper). There are twelve studies in this collection. Each is a revised version of one of Geary's essays which originally appeared in the period 1977 to 1988. They are clustered in five sections entitled: Reading, Representing, Negotiating, Reproducing, and Living. The whole is generously annotated and meticulously indexed by Celeste Newbrough, who has also supplied a particularly useful 'Index of published sources'. Whereas m o d e m societies tend to banish the dead from the world of the living, and western 'developed' society as a whole is publicly guilty of this, medieval men and women accorded them a vital role in the community. The particular focus of this book is on the regions of Europe which, in medieval times, were under the direct influence of the Frankish political and cultural traditions. In them death marked not so much aterminationof existence as 'a transition, a change of status' (p. 2). For the living still owed them various obligations, in particular memoria (or 'remembrance'). This meant, in practicalterms,not merely liturgical remembrance in prayers and chantry masses for the dead, but preservation of the deeds of the departed, perhaps the true origins of more m o d e m oral history and folk legend. More specifically, prayers were addressed to those venerated for their deeds. Here, as at many other points in this now integrated set of essays, Geary follows with much approval Peter Brown's interest in the 'very special dead' as presented in his studies, The cult of the saints: its rise and 256 Reviews function in Latin Christianity (1981) and Society and the holy in late antiquity (1982). These available and powerful intercessors with God on behalf of the living are shown in their lives to be both fascinating in themselves and of remarkable value in affording us insights into the various societies' ideal types. Thus Geary sees hagiography as a splendid source of information as to the hagiographers' attitudes towards simple folk and towards their rulers. In 'Representing', Geary explores how the dead perform a bonding of all into a single community with regard to such areas as property, family, and individual and group goals. H e focusses particularly upon exchange and interaction between the living and the dead in early medieval society, considering prayers, bequeathing of lands, and a pattern of gifts and countergifts. This original Germanic pagan notion provided much social stability in a society in flux. Therefore, perhaps consequentially, the Church took an ever larger part in these exchanges. To illuminate the basic/folk core of such transactions Geary concentrates on various related passages such as those in Hervarar saga or the Visio Caroli Magni. These afford satisfying explanations for the Church's later interposing role as arbiter as to the gifts appropriate for deceased relatives. Clearly these sections have considerable implication for the folk's understanding of the more human aspects of legal inheritance. 'Negotiating' contains three essays: 'Humiliation of saints', 'Coercion of saints in mediaeval religious practice', and 'Living with conflicts in stateless France ... 1050-1200'. These present the involvement of the dead, and particularly of saints, in the political spheres of conflict, decision, and negotiation in the real world of dispute solution. Ritual humiliation, denial of burial or excommunication, or difficulty in obtaining church blessing in knightly society were all areas where it was usual to...