Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages.

Never in the history of Europe were the living and the dead closer than in the Middle Ages. As Pat Geary points out in the introduction to this collection of essays, the living did not just bury and commemorate the dead. The dead "were drawn into every aspect of life [and] played vital roles in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres." (p. 2) The essays ground these assertions in evidence and case studies from the sixth through the thirteenth centuries. They advocate and model a type of social-historical research that has become a standard for many historians of medieval religion. While all but one of the twelve have previously appeared in print, only four did so in English and in readily accessible books and journals. The author has translated four others from French, one from German, and one from Italian. He has also revised them all to avoid repetitions and added numerous cross references in the text. Source and subject indexes help further to underline connections among the separate chapters. The result is a more than usually coherent collection that represents the range and development of the author's work between the first and revised editions of his Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton 1978, 1990).

The two opening chapters are methodological. The first considers the relations between medieval saints and the societies that sanctified them. Geary offers a succinct history of the field, a critical appraisal of the state of the question, and telling examples of how he feels research on the topic ought to proceed. He argues that the social construction of sanctity cannot properly be understood outside a complex contextual web. That web must include the saints themselves, their literary lives and the hagiographers who produced them, the particulars of locale and personnel involved in the origins and development of their cults, and the concerns of the scholars who study them. If anything, Geary feels, recent scholarship has set its focus too wide. Too much has been written about society and too little about the saints themselves (and the microclimates in which they and their supporters lived and worked). The second essay presents a similar analysis of archaeological attempts to study society and culture through cemeteries and burial remains. Such things reveal their multiple meanings only when interpreted within the total cultural system of the people who produced them. Only then can we see "how various elements - actions, objects, practices, articulations - form a unity or, conversely, coexist in a state of dissonance." (p. 33) Geary's emphasis on dissonance underscores his wish to avoid effacing the unique features of early medieval Europe by ignoring the messiness that results from cultural interaction and change over time. Anthropological and social theory inform his work without dominating it.

The other essays illustrate some of the many roles the dead played in the construction of families, the legitimation of power, and in the establishment, defense, and realignment of communities. After a piece on a ninth-century vision that further illustrates the thorough contextualization of texts and events that Geary prizes, comes a survey of interactions between the living and the dead prior to the eleventh century. Here Geary makes two important points returned to elsewhere: early medieval people, both lay and clerical, actively and creatively participated in the construction of a community transcending death (distinctions between "elite" and "popular" culture are of little use here); and notions of exchange and social interaction are a useful tool for understanding how and why they did so. The essay that has the least to do with the dead (chapter 7) addresses the topic of dispute settlement in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when public forms of judicial authority were rare and violence common. Geary argues that the parties involved rarely sought to resolve conflicts conclusively. Rather, they "managed" them for a variety of purposes, such as establishing and maintaining personal ties (both within and among kin-groups) or renegotiating their positions within society.

The rest of the essays focus on relics. In this form, the dead were so important that no ecclesiastical community could flourish without them. Both subjects and objects, they could be abducted and rescued as well as bought and sold. Two chapters reveal how thirteenth-century churchmen took advantage of the importation of relics from Constantinople to create cults where none existed before. Two others explore the ritual humiliation and attempted coercion of saints who failed to defend their lands and dependents. Three others focus on shrines and the lively trade in relics in Carolingian Francia. A chapter on "sacred commodities" develops the arguments in Furta sacra within the context of exchange patterns to show, among other things, how stealing relics could be more desirable than receiving them as gifts or buying them outright. In the early medieval economy, a gift could put the recipient in a subordinate position to the giver - a potential problem for Franks who had to look to the popes in Rome for the bones of martyred saints. On the other hand, in a society primarily organized into friends (amici) and enemies (inimici), buying relics created a less personal relationship than theft (which the perpetrators tended in any case to represent as an abduction in which the saint willingly participated).

Overall, Geary's thoughtful attention to context and process reveals a complex logic behind behavior that might otherwise seem incomprehensible, superstitious, or simply primitive. His studies show in various ways how early medieval people integrated themselves, their families, and their devotion to the saints into a world not yet dominated by centralized, bureaucratic forms of power and authority or capitalist forms of exchange. Clearly and engagingly written, and based on wide reading in both Anglo-American and continental scholarship (as well as the author's own research), this book is an excellent guide to the social meanings of some central aspects of early medieval religion and culture.

Fred Paxton Connecticut College