Autopsies and Philosophies of a Merovingian Life: Death, Responsibility, Salvation

In the seventh century a cluster of problems about death, agency, and accountability arose in conjunction with new ideas about the afterlife. Merovingian intellectuals challenged and adapted late antique theories of moral responsibility and eschatology in view of the increasingly attractive possibility that the soul’s destination after death could be influenced by earthly actions. These changes were informed by an increasingly social understanding of human choice and behavior, and that whole knot of related philosophical propositions surfaced in hagiography, when authors began to explain more fully how and why their protagonists died.