The Quick and the Dead: The Medieval Church and the Exhumation of Christians

FAIN: FEL-272438-21

Dyan Elliott
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on how medieval Christians treated the dead to signify posthumous reward or punishment.

This project analyzes the church’s manipulation of cadavers to signify posthumous reward or punishment. Initially, the only credible motive for church authorities to disturb a Christian body was if s/he was a saint destined for a better resting place. A punitive exhumation was anathema because it implied posthumous judgment: Peter was given the power to bind and loose the living, not the dead. This ancient rationale was reversed ca. 1100 when Pope Paschal II exhumed his rival, the antipope Clement III. Soon exhumations were visited upon heretics and excommunicates posthumously condemned, usurers, and even debtors. Such disinterments represent the church’s growing hegemony over the dead; an inversion of the translation of saints; a ritual of forgetting; and an impetus for lay resistance.