Let me make it clear at the start: this post is not a gratuitous attempt at bumping up my page views. This is a serious question that needs researching and I have Latin texts to prove it. (Well, one Latin text at any rate).

Near the end of Hubert Mordek’s vast work on the transmission of Carolingian capitularies, Bibliotheca Capitularium Regum Francorum Manuscripta: Überlieferung und Traditionszusammenhang der fränkischen Herrschererlasse is a section where he gives the texts of additional capitularies not in the standard MGH edition. I was looking through these and found by chance (on p 1000) in the Capitulare monasticum I of 816 the following clause (c 15):

‘Ut nudi pro qualibet culpa coram fratrum obtutibus non flagellentur.’ (That naked men should not be whipped before the gaze of the brothers for any fault whatsoever)

In a text on monks, those who are getting whipped are probably the monks themselves, since the Benedictine Rule specifically decrees corporal punishment for them in some cases (chapters 23, 28, 30). Although I wouldn’t put it past monks to beat their familia (free and unfree dependents), I think they’d be less likely to be doing this publicly. The point that immediately occurred to me isn’t why the text talks about whipping monks publicly, it’s why it thinks it’s necessary to say they shouldn’t be naked. Or rather, why might some monasteries think it was reasonable to be beating their monks in the nude?

It was only when I came to think about the matter a bit that I realised my mental images of floggings are probably severely misleading on the crucial matter of clothing. When I think about them, I tend to be thinking either of eighteenth century sailors (probably via Hornblower novels) or Christ getting whipped before the crucifixion (via centuries of art). The ‘classic’ whipping is on the bare back. I presume this is firstly so the man with the whip can see what they’re doing, secondly so there’s less protection from the blows and thirdly so there’s less risk of infection in the wounds (which is what is most likely to kill you). By the eighteenth century trousers have been invented, so defiant heroes can show off their muscled torsos before being whipped, while remaining decently clad lower down. The gospels don’t actually tell us what Jesus was wearing when he was whipped (he has his clothes taken off when he has a purple robe put on him and again implicitly before he’s crucified). I don’t think there’s any evidence that the Romans left him his loincloth, that’s just polite artistic convention.

What about Benedictine monks? I am not an expert on early medieval underwear, but fortunately I don’t need to be, because St Benedict has a whole chapter on clothing in his rule (Latin version, English version). Benedict makes allowances for climate, but he thinks the standard clothing should be a tunic, a cowl, a scapular, stockings and shoes. Nothing underneath then, except on special occasions. For: ‘Those who are sent on a journey shall receive drawers (femoralia) from the wardrobe, which they shall wash and restore on their return.’ Property held in common includes underpants, therefore (femoralia literally means ‘thigh-coverings’). I suspect that one of the reasons monks were allowed these for journeys is that it otherwise it would be painful if they needed to ride.

If monks normally wore nothing under their tunic, then if they needed to have their backs bare everything had to be exposed. Which left only one option for the conscientious abbot who wanted both to provide an exhibition of exemplary punishment to his other monks and to obey Louis the Pious. The erring monk would have to be sent to the wardrobe to get himself some underwear before he was flogged. And I bet he was also expected to wash the bloodstains off them afterwards.

Modern Medieval has a blog forum going on that perennial question: why study medieval history? There is a good post up at the moment from Cybermedievalist, which makes a lot of pertinent points about the continued relevance of themes from medieval history (like me she’s particularly interested in ideas on gender). I’ve tried previously to show (in a slightly different way ) how early medieval history can relate to some of the ‘so what’ reasons for what we learn from history

But then I read the first comment on the Modern Medieval post which asked: ‘what got you, the Cybermedievalist, interested [in medieval history]?’ She answered this and there were several other commentators talking about it as well, but I realised that my journey to being a medievalist (admittedly a weird one) raises a vast disjunction between my official and unofficial reasons for why I study what I study.

Why I am a medievalist is substantially due to a man called Stuart Campbell. I presume you won’t have heard of him and I know nothing about him myself, except that in 1935 he published a book called ‘Stories of King Arthur’. And it was those stories that got me (via T.H. White) to reading Thomas Malory as a teenager. That isn’t the only factor, of course. I was also interested in Homeric warriors and Red Indians (they were not yet Native Americans) in my youth, but our holidays when I was a child were in rural Britain, which is very good for castles and medieval churches, but less so for Mycenean or Lakota material culture, so my interests weren’t reinforced in the same way.

At Oxford, among the many books on medieval history and literature I read in a haphazard way (I was studying mathematics), were Helen Waddell’s ‘The Wandering Scholars’ and ‘Medieval Latin Lyrics’. It was those two books that first really made me aware of the centuries of medieval culture long before knighthood, and with their vivid sense of the personality of these long-dead authors got me hooked by images of the scholar as hero and the towering figure of Charlemagne. And it was starting from there, by a long indirect path, that I came at last to my academic career and research into Carolingian history. Bizarre though it may seem, I had never met a medievalist before I went for my interview for a MPhil course at Cambridge.

So while I can now give rational and hopefully vaguely convincing answers as to the importance of early medieval history, they are really all in a sense after the fact justifications. I study medieval history because it fascinates me. I can try and explain why it does, but it is too intensely personal a matter to be neatly reproducible, like the fascination that other academic friends have for south-east Asian history or Japanese theatre.

This is why historians have such a problem with the concept of importance (or maybe it’s just me?).Jon Jarrett has recently quoted an article by a medievalist back in 1955 complaining about some humanists: ‘I shall bewail their preoccupation with the obscure and curse their avoidance of things that are important and therefore interesting.’ My problem is that the important in history isn’t necessarily interesting to me. It is difficult to find really convincing arguments about why sixth-century Frankish history is more important than twentieth-century US history (or indeed, for most people, why Canadian history is more important than US history, or Welsh than English, or African history than Chinese or why the history of Suffolk is important at all).

If you’re a historian of any particular period you can construct an argument as to why that’s the key century in world historical development, but it’s not in the end why we study that particular topic. We do it because that culture or those people speak to us in some special way. If they didn’t speak to us like that we would not have been able to sustain the slog of going through all the documents and reading the obscure journal literature and writing and re-writing our thesis and thinking obsessively about a problem that won’t make us rich or famous or thin or even possibly happy if we solve it. We are historians (and normally historians of a particular period) because there is nothing else we would rather be.

We cannot say this publicly, for this is not the rational language of markets and academic justifications, but that of indulgence and passion. Yet somewhere alongside all that we say on transferable critical thinking and an educated understanding of our historic roots, I think medievalists need somehow to pass on the other secret message to those we teach or talk to: this fascinates me, this haunts me, this absorbs me, try it, it might hook you too.

In a discussion over on Jon Jarrett’s site on early medieval masters having sex with their slaves (doesn’t everyone have those kind of conversations sometimes?), I said that probably not all the concubines that young noblemen had before marriage were of low social status. And I mentioned that I could talk more about virginity for Carolingian noblewomen if anyone was interested. Somebody was, so here is what evidence we have for how easily Carolingian women were ruined.

What I’m looking at is pre-marital sexual activity by women and its consequences. If a woman loses her virginity before her marriage what happens to her? Does she become unmarriageable or almost unmarriageable? Is she even liable to honour killing, for having brought shame on her family? (Note: in what follows when I refer to honour killing it is as a strategy within a society for dealing with family relationships, one that is visible in many different cultures, with different religious traditions. Considering it from a theoretical perspective in this way is not in any sense condoning what is an evil practise).

The evidence we have for the Carolingian period is (as usual) limited, but it does all point the same way: women who had pre-marital sex did not therefore become unmarriageable. The most specific comment is from the Council of Pavia 850 (MGH Conc. 3 no 23 p 224) c 9. This complains about fathers who keep their daughters unmarried for too long in order to obtain advantageous marriages, ‘whence it often happens that they are corrupted in the paternal home itself.’ If these daughters make a legitimate marriage afterwards, they are to be denied the nuptial blessing.

Other comments are more indirect, but hint at the same thing. Some of the bishops at the Council of Aachen 862 (MGH Conc. 4 no 9D) when discussing the case of Lothar II and Theutberga argued that the sexual history of a wife before marriage is irrelevant if she is chaste during the marriage, and her past could not be used to justify a divorce (as Lothar II tried to). As the bishops commented (p 86): ‘To say nothing about women (Ut de mulieribus taceamus) there are few or no men who meet with a wife as a virgin.’ Alcuin’s worries about the ‘crowned doves’ in Charlemagne’s palace being a sources of sexual temptation are well known (though it’s not clear whether he just means Charlemagne’s daughters or their wider entourage). So it’s revealing when he tells Gundrada (MGH Epp 4 no 241 p 386) that she should be an example to all the other virgins in the palace, so that they may learn from her how ‘to guard themselves, or falling, to rise up again (se ipsas custodire vel cadentes resurgere).’

The Carolingian legislation we have on raptus is also revealing. Raptus refers to a man taking away unmarried women in order to marry them, without the consent of the woman’s family. It can thus cover a range from consensual elopement, via abduction to abduction with rape. The Carolingian texts which discuss what should happen aren’t entirely consistent. Some argue that the abductor may subsequently marry the woman, some that he may not; an engaged woman is normally returned to her fiancé, (though it’s implied that he may not necessarily take her back). But what is never suggested is that the abductor *must* marry the woman (in contrast to Deuteronomy 22: 28 which demands this for a man who seizes and sleeps with a virgin who is not betrothed).

All this argues against the preservation of virginity as being essential for young Carolingian women. Nira Gradowicz-Pancer, ‘Honneur féminin et pureté sexuelle: équation ou paradoxe?’ In Mariage et sexualité au Moyen Age: accord ou crise? Colloque international de Conques, edited by M. Rouche. Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne (2000) has already argued this for Merovingian women, based on a comparison of Salic law with other barbarian laws. This isn’t to say that these societies were some paradise of free love: Gregory of Tours (Libri historiarum X 3-31) shows princess Amalasuntha beaten for running off with her slave. But even here, although her lover is killed, she isn’t. And there is only one case I know of in either Gregory or the Carolingian sources in which a woman is killed for (probably) pre-marital sex (Libri historiarum X 6-36). (This contrasts with killing of adulterous wives, which is mentioned quite frequently in narrative and normative sources for both periods.)

There’s also one curious story in Gregory's histories which I think may give traces of the strategy which could be used to deal with such cases. That’s 9-27, when he discusses Duke Amalo’s attempt to rape a girl. In the story, Amalo rather implausibly falls asleep in bed before raping her and the girl kills him with a sword. Gregory specifically states her virginity was protected by God. But there’s a curious detail when Gregory describes how she’s being dragged to the bed by Amalo’s helpers and bashed around. At one point she’s punched ‘until her nose bled, so that Duke Amalo’s bed was stained with her blood’. Now, in Gregory’s depictions of violence, a nose-bleed is surprisingly low down in the scale to be mentioned. I think what we have here is a deliberate mis-remembering of a story (whether by Gregory or at an earlier stage), in which a virgin is raped, bleeds as a result, and subsequently kills her sleeping attacker. And I think it’s at least possible that other less-extreme cases could be ‘remembered’ in the same way to turn young women back into social virgins again.

If Carolingian and Merovingian women aren’t ruined that easily, why is that? Why do some cultures take extreme measures against women involved in pre-marital sex and some not? I’ll exclude here modern Western liberal cultures, which are a special case. The best answer that I can come up with at the moment is that it depends on the value of young women to families within a particular culture (or more precisely, the value to the elite within that culture, since the dynamics may sometimes be different further down the social scale). Put crudely, the more valuable young women are, the more likely families are to want to preserve them as marriage assets even if ‘blemished’.

There are several factors which make young women more or less valuable to high status families. One is the dowry arrangements: who pays what? If it costs a lot to marry off a daughter (as in Indian culture) there is likely to be less concern about preserving daughters (as reflected in the prevalence of both honour killings and female infanticide/abortion). Similarly, there’s less need to preserve daughters if it’s relatively easy to procure some more via polygamy (as in ancient Judaism). And daughters are more valuable as assets for marriage alliances if divorce is relatively hard (e.g. medieval Europe) as opposed to very easy (classical Rome).

Merovingian and Carolingian Francia had husbands rather than fathers giving endowments, and a marriage system that was increasingly monogamous and unfavorable to divorce. In such a system, it makes very little practical sense to kill off erring daughters (aside from any possible moral qualms). It also makes little sense to have daughters vastly devalued if they lose their virginity: you don’t want your valuable assets ruined in this way. (The devaluing of non-virgins also encourages raptus/abduction, as any Victorian cad knows: there’s no point in the parents preventing a subsequent marriage to the socially inferior abductor if the girl is unmarriageable anyhow). A system in which, as Gradowicz-Pancer puts it, ‘class transcends sex’ may well have had its upper classes decide that when it came to a desirable marriage alliance they weren’t going to look too closely at any embarrassing problems standing in the way. Carolingian women had a rough time in many ways, but the evidence suggests that at least in this respect they may have had an edge on some more recent cultures.

This a follow-up to the comments on my previous post on the topic, which has become too long to post there. Thank you for all of them, they've got me thinking about some of the issues more (which is why it’s taken a while to respond). Maybe I need to separate out the historical continuity and change more clearly. On the level of physical experience, there has been a vast, real change in the last century in how risky life is, as reflected in life-expectancy. (The size of that change tends to be underestimated, even by historians, because we almost inevitably study only the past survivors, the people who lived at least to be adults. With a few exceptions, such as the epitaph of Charlemagne's infant daughter, the millions of dead medieval babies leave barely any historical trace).

What has also changed is that the average person in the West has far more economic stake in the present social order than before. Even for the poorest in society, to lose or abandon ‘everything’ is to lose more physical stuff and more economically valuable stuff than a century ago. To have nothing but the shirt on your back is a modern-day tragedy, but a relative commonplace for most of history.

What has probably changed far less is people's perception of risk. Many modern studies have shown that people are very bad at accurately assessing risks and probabilities: they tend to overestimate the likelihood of remote events, good or bad (winning the lottery, dying in a plane crash) and underestimate the likelihood of more common events (dying in a road accident). People also tend to have a very unhistorical sense of changing risk. I remember myself at times worrying about my daughter (born in 2002), growing up in a uniquely dangerous world with the threat of global warming and terrorism. And then I read extracts from the diary of a friend of my father’s, written when they were 16 or 17, worrying about the future of the world then (and justifiably so, since it was near the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis). There has never been a world without dangers.

Indeed, I suspect that perception biases about risks and dangers may be inherent to humans. The economic bubbles from the last 300 years certainly suggest that people are poor at assessing some kind of risks, as do the recurrence of ‘moral panics’. Erich Goode and Nachman BenYehuda, Moral Panics: Social Construction of Deviance have some good discussions of moral panics going back to the Renaissance witchcraft scares and argue that these can’t simply be put down to elite manipulation; grass-roots concerns are always one (although not the only) factor.

I also think you’re right, felix, in seeing fears and also hopes about death and ‘the end’, whether individual or collective, as existing throughout history (and prehistory). I think, however, there’s a lot of individual variability between people as to how significant and frequent these feelings are. The vast majority of people did not participate even in the great apocalyptic movements of the Middle Ages. (There is also variability within an individual. I recently heard an interesting paper by Peter Darby of Birmingham University on Bede’s eschatological thought. he was arguing that the intensity of his interest in the end times varied over his lifetime, and that you can sometimes see it increasing in moments of personal or political crisis). And there’s cultural variability on how widespread apocalyptic thought is: I’ve mentioned before how contemporary US/British cultural differences affect our historical judgements on the Year 1000 ‘crisis’.

Bill, thanks for bringing in conspiracy theories. Again, I think this may show a historically recurrent general phenomenon that is nevertheless very variable in its incidence both between individuals and historical societies. I’d see it as a byproduct of the ‘pattern-making tendency’ that has basic to human evolution (and that has inspired many historians and scientists). The world ought to make sense, be connected together, rather than important events happening by mistakes and chances and more-or-less random acts. See for early examples, Agobard’s account (c 16) of ninth century belief that Duke Grimoald was killing cattle in Frankia, or all the rumours of poisoning in imperial Rome.

Yet it’s hard to deny that some cultures make conspiracy theories more common. Distrust in the authorities (and authorities that give cause for this) is a frequent spur to conspiracy theories. (See ’Bush White House Gives Conspiracy Theories a Good Name’). So are cultural norms about what is a plausible explanation. I read once that in some Middle Eastern state (I think Egypt was mentioned, but I can’t remember any details) one of the reasons that Mossad was popularly believed to be behind the September 11th attacks was the belief that the Israelis were capable of such a well-planned attack but Arabs weren’t.

If there are inherent elements of human perception that make the species as a whole prone to apocalyptic thought and conspiracy theories, it’s not surprising that despite all the cultural variability of fears and beliefs, there are continuities in thought (and that’s excluding the continuing influence of texts like the Bible and Quran). What I think is significant is that the sharply changed material circumstances (better life expectancy, greater economic security) mean that apocalyptic/conspiracy theory ‘tourism’ has relatively recently become widespread. (I would put the start of it in the mid-19th century, with the development of Baconianism and Dispensationalism). Such ‘tourism’ is where people have an interest (sometimes passionate) in conspiracy theories and apocalyptic beliefs, yet this has no real impact on their actual lives or behaviour. People read the Protocols of Zion so they could know who to blame for their sufferings, and possibly take violent revenge; they do not read the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to know what religion they should really practice, or discuss the grassy knoll to know who to vote for. Instead, these ideas have become entertainment: conspiracy theory as alternative reality game, the Left Behind computer game (which would appall St Paul in more ways than I can easily count). Recent events have shown us that not all apocalyptic thought is harmless eccentricity (and the continuing influence of the Protocols of Zion suggests the same thing for conspiracy theories), but I think Ian McEwan is wrong to see most of the modern forms of such thought as dangerous.

Alexandra Shepard was the keynote early modern speaker at the Birkbeck conference on masculinity I've blogged about before and had some very interesting comments to make about the theme of ‘anxiety’ and ‘crisis’ in masculinity. She started from the point that there were far more ‘types’ of male identity than female identity (as reflected in early modern character books, compilations of stock types).These male identities coexisted with some tension, but she wanted to ask the question: how much hardship was there in the disparities between male ideals and male experience?

She argued that you can’t look at male anxiety without considering women’s experience of subordination, and that you shouldn’t ‘collude’ with patriarchal norms by doing so. Early modern society had a patriarchal form of manhood, in which full privileges were only available to a minority of men, but men who were excluded from this didn’t necessarily lose manhood. Instead, they drew on counter codes of fraternal ties, such as a male drinking culture (opposed to patriarchal ideals of sobriety).

Shepard also pointed out that part of patriarchal masculinity’s success was its malleability. There was a lot of condoning of official condemned practices, whether in elite libertarianism or the license given to violence and sexual misdemeanours by young men (regarded as ‘harmless play’). In particular, she argued that patriarchal dividends were not just available to elite men and that non-conforming men tended to be treated less harshly than non-conforming women.

Two interesting papers on the twentieth century from a session on masculinity and class confirmed and extended her ideas about the benefits of masculinity. One was Quinton Colville from the University of Kent on masculinity and class in the Royal Navy in 1900-1960. He was talking about how both naval officers (largely upper middle class) and ratings (working class) formed their self-images and group sense of masculinity, and how both groups regarded themselves as more manly than the other (the ratings by seeing the officers as starched/repressive and desk-bound, the officers by seeing the men as childish and unable to govern themselves). Both groups could also could see themselves (in different ways) as superior to civilian men.

The second was Alison Oram, who gave a fascinating paper based on part of her book, Her Husband was a Woman! Women's Gender-crossing in Modern British Popular Culture, (review at THES). Oram looked at stories from 1900-1930 about working-class women who posed successfully as men for many years and even married. Such stories were apparently relatively common in papers such as the News of the World, and were surprisingly positive towards such women, seeing them as enterprising and entertaining, rather than threatening. (In that, they slightly contradict Shepard, showing non-conforming women could sometimes be accepted). One of Oram’s points is that such cross-dressing women could be fully accepted in their male identity even if they didn’t completely conform to the male ideal. Physically, they tended to be seen as youthful or slightly frail men and they were also able to get into semi-skilled ‘male’ employment (one was a plumber’s mate), by picking up experience on the job.

These studies of subordinate masculinities and Shepard’s remarks are very useful, because they remind us that not all masculinity is extreme. This is significant because much study of masculinity inevitably looks at the competition of elite men for true masculinity (in the medieval and early modern period because those are largely the men we have the evidence for, and in the modern period because of the importance placed on hegemonic masculinity as a concept).

Similarly, work on subordinate masculinity has often focussed on those who are most marginalised (such as black or gay men) or how working class/subaltern masculinity has been a reaction to economic/colonial subordination. In other words, we’ve tended to look either from the top of the male pyramid down or from near the bottom of the male pyramid up.

Those who lost in competitions for elite masculinity could suffer fairly extreme consequences (e.g. death for failed Roman politicians or Scandinavian warriors, social ruin for some later elite men). Most men, however, either didn’t compete for recognition as ‘top man’ in that way (e.g. slaves and serfs) or were in ‘competitions’ that were for smaller rewards and stakes (e.g. aiming to achieve a good reputation within their town). Yet even such men, who might not be seen as fully masculine, could still benefit from the privileges given to all men. (From the early Middle Ages, even slave marriages and households were acknowledged and this gave at least moral authority to the slave paterfamilias). Before we talk too much of ‘anxious masculinity’ or ‘masculinity in crisis’ we need to remember that even being a rather weedy looking plumber’s mate was a step up in the gender hierarchy for some people.

This rather gloomy post title is inspired by an article by Ian McEwan in the Guardian on ideas of the end time, which is by no means as bad as one might expect from a non-historian and atheist. McEwan has a feel for the potency of apocalyptic writing and thought and he’s also alert enough to point out that the nearest we’ve come to the end is probably under John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is hardly an example of religiosity gone wrong. (Though it’s a shame that when he mentions the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s end-time beliefs, he doesn’t mention the fact that he isn’t in charge of Iran’s nuclear policy).

But I think he’s still too ready to stress the historical continuity of apocalyptic thought (partly inspired by reading Norman Cohn’s ‘The Pursuit of the Millennium’), and not the very different social contexts in which it appears. As a result he doesn’t follow up on one of his key insights:

Furthermore, the mind is capable of artful compartmentalisations; in one moment, a man might confidently believe in predictions of Armageddon in his lifetime, and in the next, he might pick up the phone to inquire about a savings fund for his grandchildren's college education or approve of long-term measures to slow global warming.

What McEwan misses is how historically specific such concern for the long-term is; today we in the West have far greater stakes and prospects in the future than we have ever had. The pension is largely a twentieth century development, as is the widespread use of the mortgage. To plan even for your children’s future, let alone your grandchildren’s, has until recently been an option only for the upper classes. It’s against this very different socio-economic background that we have to ask the key question: what is apocalyptic thought for nowadays?

As McEwan points out, Christian apocalyptic thought is most prevalent in the USA. This seems, on the face of it, surprising. Why not in the region where secularism has advanced furthest (Europe?) Why not in the countries where Christians are most likely to be persecuted (Middle East, China)? Why not in the countries where the poorest and most desperate Christians live (Africa)? Why should the end time so enthrall a country where Christians are relatively prosperous, respected and numerous? And why have the ideas proved so popular even during periods of relative international stability? (The first of the best selling Left behind end-time novels was published in 1995).

Fred Clarke in the midst of his painstaking dissection of the Left Behind novels, comes up with the concept of 'martyr envy' as one of the main reasons of the appeal of the books to American evangelicals. The prospect of the End Times provides a way of imaging the Christian life as an exciting adventure, the vicarious thrill of feeling that you too could be a hero if the chance arose. Such martyr envy isn’t new: as Robert Markus shows in ‘The End of Ancient Christianity’, there was a similar situation in the western Roman Empire in the late fourth century. The empire had been permanently Christianised, with no danger of persecution recurring, and with Christianity now becoming mainstream among all classes. The problem then became, how could Real True Christians distinguish themselves?

The solution in the 380s AD was monasticism and other forms of extreme asceticism; the fact that the solution today is often buying a DVD tells you just how seriously people really believe in the End Times. Serious apocalyptic believers, from the first disciples and the Montanists via Peter the Hermit’s followers down to the Jonestown mass suicides, have abandoned families and homes, rejected marriage and sex as an irrelevant distraction, sold what they have and given it to the poor. Those who remain in the settled life of the community almost always, deep-down, do not actually believe that the End Times are quite yet.

But there seems to me another reason why apocalyptic thought remains important in modern Christianity and that brings me onto death. One of the problems of those trying either to convert people to Christianity or to inspire the converted to a more committed life is how to overcome the tendency to procrastinate. Why should people commit and change now, when they could do so at a later date and still gain all the benefits of the next world?

The traditional answer to this for centuries is that people should remember the nearness of death. They may not have time for later repentance: this very night their soul may be required of them. Memento mori was a potent phrase for centuries, and it was potent because death could come so quickly and at such an early age.

One of the most striking articles I’ve read this year is Robin Fleming’s Bones for Historians: Putting the Body back in Biography,” in Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates (Woodbridge, 2006), 29-48. This provides a synthesis in graphic detail of just how awful early medieval life could be, based on osteoarchaeology from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. At times the grim details become overwhelming, but one passage still stands out:

Sick children and dead babies...were part of everyone’s life. A statistic from Raunds, a community of some forty souls, gives some idea...Between the ages of four or five and thirty-five, a villager would have probably witnessed the deaths of well over thirty children.

Even though life expectancy had increased greatly by the nineteenth century, the possibility of such sudden calamities was still there. A book I’m reading on the Industrial Revolution includes an account by a doctor in Manchester in 1832: he saw a family of five all die within a day of cholera. Into the twentieth century, sudden and premature death was no novelty. In Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’, for example, she shows three members of a family of ten dying within ten years (one in childbirth, one in the First World War, one from unnamed causes). My paternal grandfather was an orphan at sixteen; when I was thirty and both my parents died, I was an anomaly among my friends.

The last fifty years have brought us in the West the hitherto unimaginable prospect of death no longer being routine. Even when fatal illness strikes, the demise is often extended, giving time for conversion, should that be desired. The urgency that the preacher and missionary has often demanded, the need for a decision made now, can no longer be justified by a claim of a lack of time for the individual. Perhaps the supposed imminence of the end for humanity is also acting as a partial substitute. At a conference I once went to on medieval apocalypse, someone commented: ‘there is no end to end times’. But the modern apocalypse, despite its formal resemblance to the medieval one, is like many religious traditions, really almost entirely different from its roots.