Writing and Re-writing Interactions with the Dead in (Late) Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
On the afternoon of Wednesday 26 November, the PresentDead project held what had originally been planned to be a small, local workshop on historical sources that address interactions with the dead. Good fortune - no doubt fuelled by the appeal of our subject matter! - allowed us to draw in a few more international speakers. In the end, we had ten speakers in person and online, most of whom were asked to present ten-minute papers that outlined sources and case studies, and identified potential research questions rather than proffering final analyses. In this way, the tone was kept open, the focus was on communication and speculation and the grounds were laid for a future conference in which we’ll hopefully return to these ideas in greater depth.
The workshop began with a co-presented presentation by myself and Edeltraud, first outlining the background and scope of the PresentDead project, and the role of the historian within it. This dove a little into my background at the intersection of the history of law and the history of the book, and how this has informed my starting steps in the project. I couldn’t help but sneak in a whistlestop tour through grave re-openings in historiographic and legal sources from the Langobardic kingdom!
The second session brought together three papers looking at burials and interactions with the dead from a Religious Perspective: Michaela Selway (Tübingen) on “Judging the Dead in Gregory of Tours”, Patrick Marschner (Vienna) on “The translation of Isidore in a Twelfth-Century Chronicle” and Till Stüber (Vienna) who returned to the Merovingians in particular with a survey of “Canon Law and Church Councils”.
After a quick break we turned to the Broader Contexts, beginning with a detailed introduction by Walter Pohl (Vienna) to the ERC Histogenes project, whose research area and timeframe overlaps excitingly with our own. From there we had four more papers: Marlene Peinhopf (Graz) offered us “Some remarks on the Violatio Sepulchri in Roman Law”, James Baillie (Vienna) spoke on “Tomb Openings in Medieval Persian and Caucasion Literature”, and May Petersen brought us back to the Merovingians once more from an Art Historical perspective, with “The Art of Burial: Reopened Graves and Craftes Bonds”, and Jake Stattel concluded by “Speaking for the Dead in the Law of the Danelaw”
In the final session, I offered a quick overview of the history of law elements in the article that Edeltraud and I are currently preparing, offering insights into “Despoiling the Dead in the Pactus Legis Salicae”. That led into a general discussion of the entire workshop, an outline of intentions for the planned conference in summer 2026, and a brisk walk down into the city centre for a meal and continued conversation.
Overall, it is clear to say that the early medieval Merovingian Franks turned out to be a recurring theme in the workshop, but the overall scope ended up covering from the early medieval kingdoms of Western Europe to Georgia and the Caucasus, and from Classical Antiquity through to the Late Middle Ages. In addition to contextualising the project, we wanted to dig up and bring into the light a whole range of ways that medieval people could imagine re-opening graves and interactions with the dead — and we weren’t disappointed!
Thom Gobbitt