A Paper on life after death in the early church should probably begin with the underworld: Sheol in the Hebrew Bible, Hades, in Greek mythology, with parallels in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. It should reflect on the universally connected theme of judgment and its importance for theodicy, and address the wide variety of beliefs discernible in the New Testament and its background, especially in the apocalyptic literature. It should consider the so-called intermediate state, and the supposed distinction between the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul and the Hebrew idea of resurrection: which takes us full circle, since the latter notion assumes the picture of shades in the underworld brought back to full-bodied living – as indeed the traditional Anastasis icon of the Eastern Orthodox tradition makes dramatically clear, Christ springing up from the grave and hauling Adam up with one hand and, often though not invariably, Eve with the other.

The Last Judgement was one of the most important themes in Christian art from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. It can be found in glittering mosaics on the west wall of the cathedral on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, on the sculptured centre portal of the west façade of Notre Dame in Paris, in Luca Signorelli’s haunting frescos in the Chapel of the Madonna of San Brizio in Orvieto, and in Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel. Numerous other churches had their own ‘dooms’. A dramatic but not untypical example from the twelfth century can be found above the entrance to the Church of Sainte-Foy at Conques. Christ is enthroned as an austere judge, dividing the saved from the damned. The procession to heaven is neat and orderly while hell is chaotic, being depicted as a hideous mouth devouring the damned, a common representation in medieval art. In ominous foreboding, this Romanesque Last Judgement rivals the thirteenth-century hymn, the Dies Irae, as a reminder of the coming ‘day of wrath and doom impending’.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries Augustine of Hippo preached a number of sermons at the annual celebrations of martyr festivals. These festivals commemorated the martyr’s ‘birthday’: the day of the martyr’s death on earth and entrance into the eternal life of heaven. They were popular occasions, drawing in larger and more diverse crowds than ordinary services, and attracting a certain air of festivity and merriment in North Africa. Martyr festivals provided the ideal location for the discussion of the afterlife: eschatological hopes had long given meaning to martyrdom, exposing the order permeating chaos, pointing towards beauty amid human suffering, and revealing death as the gateway to true life.

On 8 June 1438, the Council of Ferrara-Florence began proceedings aimed at the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches. One of the first issues discussed was the Latin doctrine of purgatory. This article examines a particular moment in the divergence of eschatological doctrine between the Latin, Greek and Syriac Churches – indeed, representatives of the West Syrian ‘Jacobites’ and East Syrian ‘Nestorians’ were at Ferrara too. It argues that a debate concerning the post mortem activity of the saints proved crucial for the formation of various Christian eschatological orthodoxies. The catalyst for this debate was the sixth-century revival of Aristotelian philosophy, especially Aristotelian psychology which emphasized the soul’s dependence on the body. This threatened the cult of the saints and the Church’s sacramental ‘care of the dead’. Defenders of the hagiological and cultic status quo rejected Aristotle’s claims and asserted the full post mortem activity of the soul after separation from the body by developing a novel doctrine of immediate post mortem judgement. This led to the formulation of eschatological opinions which, if not normative in their day, came to be considered so by later generations. One of these ideas was post mortem purgation.

Tensions between public and private forms of religiosity have been endemic to Christianity since its institutionalization during the first four centuries AD. That process was in part characterized by the clerical curtailment of alternative routes of divine access which bypassed the structures of the Church and the controls which it operated: most notably, Scripture and sacrament. Acts had imagined the last Christian days as a spiritual age of prophecy, visions and dreams, but the rapid association of such phenomena with rigorist, schismatic or heretical groups – particularly the Gnostics, Montanists and Manichaeans – rendered them suspect if scripturally unassailable. Dreaming – ‘the paradigm of the open frontier’, ‘epiphany’s most open level’ – became strictly delineated by episcopally defined typologies which restricted access to the divine and necessitated arbitration, thus protecting the centrality and authority of the Church. Those typologies not only emphasized the relative rarity of divinely inspired dreams (as opposed to the physiological or demonic), they also stressed the special status of the recipient. They thus partook of a late antique professionalization of the holy by which an emergent spiritual elite attempted to exercise an unprecedented monopoly on the supernatural.

In the seventh century Christians in the Latin West turned with a novel concern to the issues of death and the afterlife. This is a period that has been characterized as marking the ‘rise of the other world’, a development that was rooted in a belief in the imminence of Doomsday and an increasing preoccupation with sinfulness. This shift to a more metaphysical mentality can be noticed in a number of areas ranging from changes in burial and liturgical practices to literary works and the rise in power of the monasteries as intercessory places of prayer.

Bishop Julian of Toledo is remembered primarily as a key actor in the processes of king-making and -unmaking that went on in the Visigothic kingdom of the 670s. In the early part of the decade Julian’s Historia Wambae Regis legitimated King Wamba’s hold on the throne in opposition to a rebellion. The text also provides us with the first reference to unction in the early medieval West, while Julian’s actions in putting the same king through penance when he appeared to be on the brink of death in 680 and then insisting that the king could not resume his royal duties when he recovered have long attracted the attention of scholars of penance and conspiracy theorists alike. As the Bishop of Toledo, capital of the Visigothic kingdom, Julian was the main ecclesiastic in Visigothic Spain, presiding over four councils of Toledo (from the twelfth in 681 to the fifteenth in 687). Perhaps as a result of his historical significance in a poorly documented era, Julian’s plentiful writings about the end of time have been largely ignored; after all, they seem not to deal with ‘historical’ events. This is a shame, since Julian’s Liber prognosticum futuri saeculi was the most widely disseminated work of late seventh-century Spain: hundreds of manuscripts survive and there are well over one hundred references to the work in medieval library catalogues. The great success of the Prognosticum can be attributed to the contents of its three books, which deal with the origins of human death, the fate of the soul after death, and the fate of the body at the resurrection, and thus address a series of theoretical and practical issues connected to death and its aftermath.

Since a countless multitude of misshapen spirits, far and wide, was being tortured in this alternation of misery as far as I could see and without any interval of respite, I began to think that this might be Hell, of whose intolerable torments I had often heard tell. But my guide who went before me answered my thoughts, ‘Do not believe it,’ he said, ‘this is not Hell as you think.’ … As he led me on in open light … [we came to] a very broad and pleasant plain … [where] there were innumerable bands of men in white robes, and many companies of happy people sat around; as he led me through the midst of the troops of joyful inhabitants, I began to think that this might perhaps be the kingdom of Heaven of which I had often heard tell. But he answered my thoughts: ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not the kingdom of Heaven as you imagine.’

As is well known, western medieval apocalyptic literature owes a considerable debt to Byzantine apocalyptic literature, which itself built on Roman and Jewish sources. The classic studies are now Evelyne Patlagean’s ‘Byzance et son autre monde’, published in 1981; Paul Alexander’s The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition, published posthumously in 1985; and Jane Baun’s edition and commentary of three Middle Byzantine apocalyptic texts that appeared in 2007. In addition, Paul Magdalino has recently published several articles on the theme. On top of this, numerous studies connect specific Byzantine apocalypse traditions to particular political events, most notably the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Byzantine eschatology has been even more thoroughly studied, and, with the subtitle ‘Views on death and the last things’, was the subject of a recent (1999) Dumbarton Oaks symposium.

My brothers should not grieve that my life has come to an end, because never was I so useful to them in the past as I will be in the future, providing they are willing to keep the commandments of God. As a matter of fact I, and all my brothers whose life has ended as mine has, will stay with them, and I will appear and give them much better advice than hitherto.

From the range of sources on Byzantine religious life, and Byzantine views on the afterlife in particular, the correspondence of Michael Glykas stands out as precious but neglected evidence. Glykas’s correspondence with people from all walks of life and his engagement with their preoccupations and with other controversial issues of the day reflect a dense network of communication and links with monks, laymen, members of the imperial family and imperial bureaucrats, situating him at the heart of the moral universe of twelfth-century Byzantine culture. Glykas’s correspondence and, in particular, his collection of ‘Questions and Answers’ (Kephalaia) shed light on the kinds of religious issues that were being raised in twelfth-century Byzantium, and they also highlight the multifarious issues and pastoral challenges which Christian theologians had to be prepared to deal with in their pastoral, pedagogical work.

The dead are the silent majority in the Church’s history – as they are, indeed, in humanity’s. The life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried and tested certainty, predicated on a soul which survives the death of the body. That raises issues about the nature and structure of the afterlife, its pains and delights. For the late medieval Church, the afterlife raised particular concerns and anxieties, its complex division into heaven, hell, and purgatory promising a future which had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were a major force in religious practice, with death as the threshold to something unknown until experienced.

One of the ways in which medieval Christians thought about the links between this life and the afterlife was by telling ghost stories – a topic which has attracted the attention of several historians. In these stories, a dead person often appears to a living relative or friend and asks them to give alms or to perform other good works on their behalf, in order to speed up their passage to heaven. The dead person usually appears spontaneously, although sometimes this occurs after relatives have said prayers for them. This paper, however, will examine a group of stories about less spontaneous apparitions. These are stories in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife. They have sometimes been mentioned in studies of medieval ghost stories, but they have not been examined in their own right.

The Annals of Loch Cé, a native Irish chronicle compiled in north Roscommon in the years 1588–9, contains the following entry for the year 1568:

Investigations of the more routine expressions of pre-Reformation spirituality inevitably tend to dwell on the conventions employed by individuals to ease the progress of the soul. The pious attestations and exhortations that some men and women recorded may merit the closest attention for the insight they afford into beliefs and aspiration; but hardly less instructive, and much more common, are the services and good works that individuals commissioned both to express repentance and expedite deliverance. Focusing in this way on individuals poses problems, however. While a few had the means to establish a ‘freestanding’ institution – such as an almshouse the great majority channeled penitential activity into the arena, and to the benefit, of their parish. Individuals ordinarily acted as parishioners, contributing towards and depending upon the services of a well-defined, broader community, within which they did their best to enhance collective memory and experience to their own advantage by securing the benefit of others. If anything, ensuring the benefit of others was reckoned the essential, practical prerequisite for personal advantage. As a result, if we accept that the desire to be saved – and as expeditiously as possible – spurred on most contemporary Christians, the doctrinal emphases in the centuries before the Reformation predicated a series of distinctive consequences, two of which are of particular significance here. First, many parishioners assured themselves of long remembrance, amounting to an afterlife in the world and in the consciousness of those that came after.

In Italy, the years around 1500 were fraught for a number of reasons. There were renewed fears about the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to a sense of instability and impending doom. In this climate many people became increasingly concerned about their fate in the afterlife and the need to be prepared for death and judgement. Central to this was the doctrine of purgatory. Yet, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, ideas surrounding purgatory were highly contested as heretical ideas from northern Europe began to filter into northern Italy. This paper investigates Catholic beliefs about the alleviation of purgatorial suffering through a case study of one holy woman from the north of Italy, the Dominican tertiary, Stefana Quinzani, who, according to a letter of 4 March 1500 written by Duke Ercole d’Este, endured every Friday ‘the whole of the Passion in her body, stage by stage, from the Flagellation to the Deposition from the Cross’.