Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages

According to the introduction of Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, Patrick J. Geary sets out to examine the similarities between how the people of the Middle Ages dealt with the dying and death and how our modern-day society manages the same. Geary somehow mostly misses this assessment, and instead through a collection of essays provides an in-depth appraisal of the reverence of the lives of saints, their burials, and the subsequent respect of the relics of saints. Geary’s essays are divided into the following sections: Reading, Representing, Negotiating, and Living. These chapters highlight the challenges that have been faced by early medieval specialists in terms of the sources available to them. Reading the sources is perhaps the most challenging as seen by Geary. Geary advocates for a triple process of evaluation: a traditional interpretation of written sources, examination of how …show more content…
The analysis of hagiographic texts should extend beyond the internal life of religious communities and examine the relationships among communities and lay society. “By concentrating on a specific locale, by examining the codicological tradition, by going beyond classic hagiographic texts to look at liturgy, miracle collections, devotional literature, and even the evidence of archives, they avoid artificial constructs of author and ideal.” Geary asserts that we need dozens of micro studies of the lives of individual saints, that we need to be informed of the relationships between ordinary laity and their local saints, that we need model of comportment and ideals of human existence that saints seemed to offer.
In short, researchers should further cultivate the study of texts, objects, and gestures to examine the underlying structures uniting them, to bring us an understanding of their place in early Medieval