Review of 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)

Abstract

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 modem 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 a tennination of existence as 'a transition, a change of status' (p. 2). For the living still owed them various obligations, in particular menwria (or 'remembrance'). This meant, in practical tenns, 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 modem oral history and folk legend.