Chapter 1 traces the antebellum faith in the non-finality of death and its antithesis in the irreparable change wrought by amputation. In sentimental theology, the dead are never wholly gone – they live on to inspire and save, awaiting reunion with those they leave behind. The dead child embodies the reality of unpredictability and at the same time operates within a narrative that soothes. The author contrasts antebellum postmortem photography and images of amputees and amputated limbs. Postmortem photography of children reinforces the sense that the family has not really been ruptured, that death isn’t really the end. Photographs of amputee Civil War soldiers do quite the opposite. Rather than operating as postmortem photography does, as a mediator between the living child, its dead body, and the family left behind, the portrait of the amputee is insistently in the present, even as the lost limb is consigned to an unrecuperable past. While nineteenth-century pictures of dead children often encouraged the fiction that the photograph’s subject was an ongoing member of the family, amputation photography – both medical and vernacular – insists on the permanence of bodily change.

Chapter 12 explores Augustine’s Christocentric speculations on the beatific resurrection of the saints to eternal life. Particularly in Book 22 of De ciuitate dei, Augustine displays both moderation in his tentative articulations and generosity in his allowance of a wide range of eschatological prospects within the parameters set by Scripture and the resurrected Christ. Considering the spiritual body and the ecclesial body of the beatific resurrection, Augustine discusses the perfection of human freedom, the vigor and beauty of the saints’ resurrected flesh, the vindication of history in their resurrected bodies and memories, and the unity and diversity of the resurrected Church. Augustine develops his understanding of the beatific vision to articulate the prospect that it will come not only after, but also from within the beatific resurrection. Enjoying forever the insatiable satisfaction of God, the resurrected community of the saints will indefatigably celebrate and praise the God of the resurrection.

Part I covers the death arts that focus on the period leading up to and concluding with the advent of death. Both philosophical and biblical traditions enjoined the early modern individual to prepare physically, mentally, and spiritually for the day that he or she would die. In addition to ensuring that one’s worldly goods were in order and left to the most suitable survivors, preparation entailed attending to the health of one’s soul: one would repent of sin, cultivate a legacy of virtue, and contemplate the four last things – Death, Judgement Day, Heaven, and Hell. The primary means of instructing the religiously minded in how to die well were ars moriendi treatises, several of which are represented here. Modernized and annotated excerpts also represent many other genres, high and low, that directed readers to look deathward. Devotional and theological works, conduct manuals, emblem books, calendars, ballads, and last dying speeches illustrate not only exemplars of good and bad dying but also the various arts whereby readers could prepare themselves for the afterlife. Throughout the excerpts, the confessional and political implications of the death arts are highlighted.

This chapter covers a large literary category which I call ‘hagiographical’: it includes miracle stories that involve the Virgin Mary, full-length Lives of the Virgin (which began to be produced from the late eighth or early ninth century onward) and two Apocalypses. Many of the texts studied here are composed in a colloquial style that may have appealed to wider audiences in non-liturgical settings. This genre thus contrasts with the liturgical texts that are studied in the first four chapters: according to hagiography, Mary assumes power and agency that goes beyond her theological role in giving birth to Christ. Christians appeal to this female holy figure as one who is able to appeal to Christ and who is willing to help sinners or supplicants who despair of God’s direct favour. Christological teaching persists in these texts, but the emphasis has shifted to Mary’s intercessory role among Christians.

Chapter 5 is about the properties of virtue. These properties follow upon a virtue by the simple fact that it is a virtue. There are four such properties that seem rather loosely connected: the mean of virtue, the connection between the virtues, the order of the virtues, and the duration of virtue after this life. Despite this somewhat loose ordering, each of these properties must be studied if we are to understand Thomas’s account of virtue as a whole.

This chapter covers a large literary category which I call ‘hagiographical’: it includes miracle stories that involve the Virgin Mary, full-length Lives of the Virgin (which began to be produced from the late eighth or early ninth century onward) and two Apocalypses. Many of the texts studied here are composed in a colloquial style that may have appealed to wider audiences in non-liturgical settings. This genre thus contrasts with the liturgical texts that are studied in the first four chapters: according to hagiography, Mary assumes power and agency that goes beyond her theological role in giving birth to Christ. Christians appeal to this female holy figure as one who is able to appeal to Christ and who is willing to help sinners or supplicants who despair of God’s direct favour. Christological teaching persists in these texts, but the emphasis has shifted to Mary’s intercessory role among Christians.

The Vision of Tnugdal (1149) was written in Latin in Regensburg. It provides a case study for the genre of otherworld visions. The author, an Irish monk, shows the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, in his treatment of divine mercy and justice as expounded by a guide who accompanies the visionary and explains the nature of the otherworld. Hell is segmented into eight locations for different punishments. The less grievous sinners, still redeemable, are at the top, with those eternally damned already in the pit of hell. Outside a segmented heaven two intermediate locations are designated for those neither particularly good nor particularly bad. This lengthy and popular work demonstrates considerable learning and a unique creativity with its vivid descriptions of punishments and demons and its spatial, intellectual, and spiritual vision of heaven. The vision expounds a theology of fear while extoling the redemptive power of both internal and external pilgrimage.

Visions of the afterlife in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) circulated in collections of saints’ legends and sermons, in religious manuals, mystics’ writings, stand-alone pieces, and literary works. Along with the stories inherited from earlier centuries, there were many new accounts. Together they demonstrate how the medieval Church’s teachings on heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as on prayers and masses for the dead, on engaging in the sacrament of penance, on accruing merit, on fighting against the demonic realm, and on devotion to the saints, were conveyed to, assimilated, and adapted by the laity. This chapter draws on several categories of these otherworld narratives, including visitations by ghosts, demons, and saints, and explores three primary spiritual dynamics illustrated by the visions:purgatorial ‘transactions of satisfaction’ with the ghosts, spiritual warfare with the demons, and ‘reciprocated devotion’ with the saints. The glimpses of the otherworlds and their inhabitants shored up the religious beliefs and practices of the late medieval laity.

This chapter characterises visionary experiences of heaven, hell, and purgatory received by medieval religious women.The twelfth-century Benedictines Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau offer detailed representations of a celestial city but fewer specifics regarding the netherworld.Hildegard’s perception of the cosmos informs her view of heaven, whereas for Elisabeth it symbolises a longed-for end to life’s journey.Among the Cistercian women residing at Helfta in the thirteenth century, the graphic descriptions of otherworldly realms described by Mechthild of Magdeburg in The Flowing Light of the Godhead are most remarkable.For her contemporaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, the joyous union with Christ on earth is emphasised equally with the union in heaven.The striking scenes depicting the judgement of sinners in purgatory found in the revelations of the fourteenth-century saint Birgitta of Sweden serve as an admonition to her more secular audience.

This short introduction first places the medieval tradition of thought about the afterlife in a larger and longer context, then lays out the historiographical background for the collection.It also briefly introduces each of the fifteen chapters, noting how together they tend to shift the focus away from the twelfth century (hitherto considered a key turning point in the history of the afterlife) to the early Middle Ages and the later.It closes by noting that the contributions also keep to a current trend of seriously considering the reception and influence of texts and ideas, here suggesting that afterlife visions (for example) became an integral part of the medieval imagination.

Between AD c. 400 and c. 1100, Christian ideas about the afterlife changed in subtle but important ways. This chapter outlines broad trends in thought about the afterlife in this period in the Latin West, and examines the concomitant changes in thinking about the post-mortem fates of souls. Ongoing contemporary discourse around topics such as sin and penance or baptism contributed to developments in the way that contemporaries understood the afterlife, including heaven, hell, and an interim state between death and universal judgement. Significantly, as Christians came to be more certain about some aspects of the afterlife, the possibility of salvation for individual souls was perceived to be less certain. As a result, by the end of the period there is much greater evidence for concern about the post-mortem fate of the soul than there had been at the beginning, laying the foundations for high medieval theological discussions and developments.

This chapter not only explores the efflorescence of ‘new’ visions that occurred, especially, but not only, in the British Isles, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it also traces the reproduction of early medieval visions too, arguing that the slow evolution of ‘purgatory’ from early medieval origins facilitated their continued use. Change is nonetheless to be found in this period. There was renewed sensitivity to old anxieties about the authenticity of visions. There was a fresh flux of debate about conceptualisations of the afterlife that were so strongly material. And, most especially, new theological and pastoral priorities were imprinted on vision-texts, which were subtly reshaped by shifting thinking about penitence and prayer. The chapter examines some of the most ‘popular’ visions, measured in terms of manuscript circulation, but it also reconstructs something of the range of visionary experiences too, taking into account narratives that were little attended in their day.

This chapter examines how the authors of the Mahābhārata, India’s great epic, seek strategically to edify real human warriors and kings through a set of martial tropes and expectations. Specifically, nine chapters of the epic’s twelfth book, the Śānti Parvan (MBh.12.96–104), present in religious and ritual terminology a clear set of ideals, which kings can use to convince warriors that fighting and dying in battle is the right thing to do. For example, the paradigmatic model for the courageous behaviour of human warriors is the śūra (‘hero, champion’). In contrast to his heroic exploits, acting like a ‘coward’ (bhīru) is the single most abhorrent thing a warrior could do in social and cosmological terms. What is more, warfare is reconceived in ritual terms and thus dying in battle is elevated to an act of ritual sacrifice which will secure the fallen warrior everlasting heaven with its promise of sexually eager nymphs. Consequently, these chapters provide kings with a coherent masculine ideology to ensure the loyalty of troops, whose willing death in battle will secure martial victory and ultimately protect the kingdom.

The essay contributes to the scholarly conversation about apocalyptic literature by emending the definition of the genre to take into account the ancient rhetorical techniques the apocalyptic authors use, namely, vivid visual rhetoric. The essay considers the facets of genre, audience, and style, three of the literary elements of ancient apocalyptic literature essential for understanding the Biblical texts. The heart of the essay looks at the main texts of apocalyptic literature in the Bible, Daniel, Mark 13, and Revelation. In looking at them the focus is on storytelling, why the authors told the story in a certain way and what effects this mode of communication might have had on each audience’s political, economic, and social outlook. The discussion about the Biblical materials paves the way for thinking about the way they are used in art, contemporary literature, media, politics, and even religious pilgrimage sights.

In this chapter, the author offers grounds for belief that, in the eschatological end, God will resurrect, transform, and include all non-human creatures and things in the messianic kingdom of God. Besides philosophical-theological and moral grounds, he appeals to doctrines of the “image of God,” the atonement, and the resurrection in support of this eschatological proposition. Next, he discusses recently offered scenarios of animals in Heaven. He focuses on the identity-problem of predation: will predators transformed into non-predators still be themselves?Finally, he offers his own scenario of God defeating Darwinian evil for animals by elevating them to a stature analogous to the exalted place of martyrs according to Christian tradition.