The Symbolic Significance of Clothing for the Dead -- Lay and Clerical Regulation of Grave Goods and Cemeteries -- Grave Markers as Memoria -- Membership in the Kingdom of the Elect -- Christian Liturgy and the Journey to the Next World -- Exchanges Between the Living and the Dead
Summary
"The relationship between the living and the dead was especially significant in defining community identity and spiritual belief in the early medieval world. Peter Brown has called it the "joining of Heaven and Earth." For clerics and laypersons alike, funerals and burial sites were important means for establishing or extending power over rival families and monasteries and commemorating ancestors. In Caring for Body and Soul, Bonnie Effros reveals the social significance of burial rites in early medieval Europe during the time of the Merovingian, or so-called "Long-Haired" Kings from 500 to 800 C.E."--Jacket
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references ([213]-246) and index
