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  • Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages by Nancy Mandeville Caciola
  • Josh Timmermann
Nancy Mandeville Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2016), 363 pp.

Over the past few decades, the study of the complex relationship between the living and the dead in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has proven to be an exceptionally fertile area of inquiry, with vital contributions by Peter Brown, Patrick Geary, Éric Rebillard, Robert Bartlett, and Thomas Laqueur, among numerous other scholars. Much of that work has been centered around the cults of the martyrs and saints, with Bartlett's magisterial study, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, of particular note among recent publications. Inevitably, saints pass through the macabre mise-en-scène of Nancy Mandeville Caciola's Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, but they are made to blend in among the mosaic of zombies, revenants, shades, and spirits—conceptions of the returned dead that may trace back to Europe's ancient pagan cultures.

At the outset of her study, Caciola asserts that she is not proposing that medieval Europe was "cryptopagan." She adopts a more nuanced stance, contending that medieval traditions, customs, and ideas concerning death have too often been regarded as "unproblematically Christian" (14). To be sure, scholars have long attempted to reconstruct pre-Christian cultures and traditions through alleged "survivals," preserved especially among the rural, "rustic" communities that represented a majority of the medieval population. This approach is exemplified by Carlo Ginzburg's classic studies of early modern witchcraft, an apparent source of inspiration for Caciola's project. Yet, in more recent scholarship, the pendulum has swung mainly, if not decisively, in the other direction, toward a conception of medieval Europe as having been almost thoroughly "Christianized" (if in different ways, following patterns of missionary activity and imperial "reform" efforts), perhaps as early as the [End Page 196] Carolingian era. Caciola pushes back against this tendency to assume near-totalizing Christianity by "tak[ing] seriously the contributions of earlier pagan societies to the distinctively medieval culture that superseded them" (14). Attitudes toward death and the afterlife, Caciola asserts, provide an especially revealing window onto this type of sustained—though by no means static—syncretism.

As all medievalists are acutely aware, the great majority of extant texts from the early to central Middle Ages were written by ecclesiastical figures, whether to convert non-Christian peoples or to "correct" the beliefs and practices of fellow Christians. Consequently, Caciola endeavors to read such texts against the grain; ostensibly isolating the author's specific (Christian) perspective and prerogatives, she takes the elements that remain thereafter as incidental, yet reliable, evidence of contemporary beliefs and practices with winding, twisting roots in the primordial (pre-Christian) past. One chapter, for example, attempts a critical reading of the eleventh-century bishop Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon, from which Caciola argues that the "ghost stories" therein "interweave pagan and Christian elements promiscuously, though perhaps only partially consciously" (142). The chapter then proceeds to "triangulate" Thietmar's text alongside various others, especially Arthurian narratives, from (Caciola concedes) "widely spaced times and places" (144), in order to identify seemingly congruous data attested across a broad range. Another chapter examines "spiritist cults" in southern France, extracting purported attestations from the typically dismissive accounts of local clerics. Some of Caciola's demonstrations of these interpretative strategies are more successful than others, but even where her evidence is thin and her theses less than fully convincing, her book remains an engrossing read.

Before moving on to the period ca. 1000–1500, the book's primary focus, Caciola establishes the basic parameters for Christian positions on the relationship between the living and the dead. Unsurprisingly, she locates these positions in the formative age of Late Antiquity and the thought of the Latin Church Fathers. After quickly surveying the scriptural precedents from which the Fathers drew, Caciola erects a binary opposition between "Augustinian" and "Gregorian" views of contact between the living and the dead. Essentially, the "Augustinian model" held that "the dead, once departed, are...

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