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Second Life: The Social Agency of Dead Bodies in Medieval CommunitiesThe medieval dead often didn’t stay put. Moved from their place of death, venerated as relics, or feared for their potential to rise and threaten the living, dead bodies in many medieval communities often had a kind of second life. Drawing on theory used in the anthropology of death, including ideas on the agency of the dead, I’ll discuss how we can understand these mobile bodies through the social roles they played in life and after death. In the case of revenants, history and archaeology document an array of beliefs in the walking dead that continued into the modern era. Osteobiographical studies of ‘revenant burials’ let us approach these traditions on a personal level. Did something about the lives of these individuals make people worry that their bodies would rise to threaten the living, or were other factors at play?
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Strathcona County Museum & Archives, 913 Ash Street,Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada
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