This chapter focuses on hymns designed to accompany the burial of wives and mothers, identified variously as “In funere mulierum” (“On women’s burial,” madrāshâ 32) and “In funere matrisfamilias” (“On the burial of a female householder,” madrāshâ 31). Their collection is part of the necrosima’s “family section,” a segment of the collection addressing the burial of married men, women, children, and youths. As such, they provide insight into the construction of feminine identity in Syriac Christian communities at the intersection of social strictures and biblical models. The chapter also reflects an initial foray into the question of the hymns’ function in their original setting as part of funerary processions, including their performance by women’s choirs who voiced both the part of the deceased and that of her community. In these contexts, the hymns could serve as pedagogical performances, remapping the Syrian city with an eye towards both protological and eschatological realities.

On an upper floor of the Tridentine Diocesan Museum in a series of darkened rooms the walls are lined with glass cases. Inside them are vestments. It is yet one more measure of our great distance from William Durand. Chasubles, copes, surplices, and dalmatics are displayed as fragile matter: behind glass in cases controlled for temperature, moisture, and light. Chasubles are arranged in chronological order along one wall; copes, surplices, and dalmatics, fewer in number, are in other cases. It is not merely that all are separated from the persons who, Durand’s word, used them – as they would have been when those persons were not celebrating a Mass. Nor is it that they are fixed in place and separated from one another. We come closer when we recognize that all have been removed from their place, the place of worship, but that, too, still is only part of their transformation. All are kept permanently physically and spatially isolated both from those persons and also from the place with which they had so complexly participated in the meaning of the Mass. They have become objects, their intricate embroidery now the focus of our gaze.

Sometime around 1593, William Claxton (d. 1597) gathered memories of Durham cathedral in a scroll. Although he titled it Discription or Breef Declaracion of all the Auncyent Monuments, Rytes and Customs Belonging or Beinge within the Monasticall Church of Durham before the Suppression, it has come to be known as The Rites of Durham, reflecting its primary interest for scholars. It is one of the earliest testimonies to the conceptual shift Evangelicals effected. Individuals remembered specific altars, windows, chapels – discrete things. The “church” had become a box containing objects and dead bodies, within which the faithful gathered. It was no longer a place of worship. It was no longer a made world. In Part II, we turn to the acts that sundered. Here let me simply underline, Evangelicals did not simply recast altarpieces and eternal lamps as mere matter, “objects.” They tore apart the fabric of what Durand and medieval European Christians understood ecclesia to be. Far more than altar or vestment, the word – ecclesia, iglesia, église, Kirche, kerk, kirk, church – altered irrevocably in its content in the sixteenth century.

This chapter turns from Christian laypersons to the spiritual elites both serving and governing the communities in question. The necrosima opens with an extensive section on clergy, most prominently hymns designed to accompany the burial of a city’s bishop. The latter’s deaths posed particular challenges for communities, inasmuch as episcopal transitions provided openings for intra-Christian conflict, schism, or simply extended leadership vacuums. Strikingly, these hymns also showcase an aspect of the necrosima’s approach to biblical exegesis. While a smattering of texts thus figure prominently in many of the madrāshê, the lives of departed bishops are read through the lens of biblical types, becoming identified in immediate and personal ways with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. This chapter explores the necrosima’s engagement with Scripture to narrate both death and the deceased themselves through a range of exegetical lenses.

Courage is the virtue of acting when we would rather not. This chapter looks at some of the classic situations where courage is needed, such as war and emergency response. It suggests that we need to show the sort of courage that comes from treating climate change as an emergency. Drawing on specifically Christian examples, we also consider the courage of the martyrs.

Prudence is the virtue of seeing things clearly. It has been notably central to Christian accounts of what it means to be a virtuous person, and to live a virtuous life. At the foundation of that lies the idea that to act well we have not only to understand the sorts of traditions that help us know what is good, but also to work on having an accurate account of the concrete situations we face. Much of what is offered as convenient solutions to climate change fail in the second way: these easy fixes simply aren’t realistic or accurate, as they cannot be implemented at the speed or scale we need. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Iris Murdoch, we call this sort of techno-optimism ‘fantasy’, and contrast it with the sort of imaginative response to the world as it really is that Murdoch championed, and which any successful response to climate change demands.

The virtue of temperance, or moderation, is central to a discussion of responding to climate change by showing restraint. In this chapter, we discuss the idea that temperance is not about despising goods or pleasures, but about ordering them, being willing to forgo lesser goods for the sake of greater goods. Attention to the need for temperance helps us to be realistic that the climate challenge we face does require some sacrifice, some letting go. Approaching that in terms of the ordering of goods helps us to find motivation: we do it for the sake of the things we love most, among which we might list God, the earth, human societies and other people, not least those who will come after us.