Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages ed. by Carolyn Walker Bynum, Paul Freedman (review)

REVIEWS Sidrac in relation to the Secreta secretorum and The Seven Sages of Rome, and points to similarities between Mandeville’s Travels and the French Sidrac as well, though whatever influences there might be in this instance are only of the French upon the English. The care that Burton has put into constructing relationships between these kinds of didactic materials is of enormous benefit to anyone interested in exploring taste and education in the medieval period. As medievalists , we all owe a debt of gratitude to him for making accessible a document that has been virtually unavailable for ordinary scholarly reference. For his ‘‘dede’’ Burton can rest assured that ‘‘in other worlde [he] shall have his mede’’ (Laud 559, line 7930), and a great reward it should be. For the rest of us, working in this world now, his work provides great solace, both for making available its lore, which in itself offers unexpected delights, and for the light it sheds on other wisdom texts and the cultures they nurtured. Russell A. Peck University of Rochester Carolyn Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, eds. Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Pp. 363. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Based on an American Historical Association panel organized by Paul Freedman and a graduate seminar on eschatology taught by Carolyn Walker Bynum, this highly informative volume demonstrates the fraught history of medieval attitudes toward death, as well as the thoroughgoing impact that such thinking had on medieval lives. Made clear in the unusually helpful introduction is the immense variety—and indeed incompatibility—of medieval perspectives toward such issues as resurrection, immortality and apocalypse. For Bynum and Freedman, such variance suggests how eschatology ‘‘utilizes and deepens rather than denies or impoverishes’’ the ‘‘multiple and contradictory traditions ’’ of the medieval European west (9). Through their innovative take on the inconsistencies of medieval eschatological thought, the editors provide a fine model through which the reader can make sense of the less-than-unified body of information that follows. 385 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:03 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Part 1, on notions of the afterlife and the body, begins with Carole Straw’s analysis of the martyrs’ passions and ecclesiastical writings of the pre-Constantian church. As Straw’s title (‘‘Settling Scores’’) indicates, an abiding sense of reciprocity and polarity characterized notions of Christian sacrifice and resurrection during the period. Hence the polarizations entailed by martyrdom figured the stark divisions that would typify the final resurrection, when persecutors and the persecuted would each receive their just deserts. While the former enter a hell ‘‘worse than any torture,’’ the latter receive fleshly glorification for their bodily torments (30). Peter Brown takes us to a more nuanced Christian world in his ‘‘The Decline of the Empire of God.’’ Focusing upon late antiquity and the early middle ages, Brown details the ‘‘afterlife’’ of the two strands of thought that together constitute an emergent theory of purgatory: an Augustinian emphasis on the soul’s ultimate cleansing by the sinner’s personal transformation, and a late-imperial emphasis on God’s sovereign power of amnesty. As Brown amply demonstrates, sociopolitical structures deeply influenced eschatological thought, whereby the supplanting of an imperial order with a monarchic one in the middle ages explains the strangeness of late antique Christian accounts of sovereign amnesty. The notion of self-purification would persist and become bound to ‘‘a penitential system in which satisfaction must be made for every sin’’ (55). With Jacqueline E. Jung’s ‘‘From Jericho to Jerusalem’’ and Manuel Gragnolati’s ‘‘From Decay to Splendor,’’ the volume shifts from the broad early theological histories offered by Straw and Brown to focused analyses of two high medieval texts: Caesarius of Heisterbach’s vita of Engelbert of Cologne (1226) and Bonvesin da la Riva’s late thirteenthcentury Book of the Three Scriptures. Jung describes the ingenious rationale Heisterbach offers for Engelbert’s achievement of sainthood. If Engelbert was a ‘‘sinner in life’’ (66), he nevertheless was made holy through the horrid particulars of his death (68), which purged him of sin and rendered his corpse capable of effecting miracles the...