The Resurrection of the Body

In their studies of Christian visions of afterlife and apocalypse, religious historians have concentrated almost exclusively on the fate of the soul. But in the medieval period the fate of the body in resurrection posed troubling questions for Christians:

If my body is resurrected, which of the many possible bodies will return-the child, the young adult, or the old woman? Or if my body is dissolved in the grave, in what form will it come back?

In The Resurrection of the Body Caroline Bynum forges a new path of historical inquiry by studying the notion of bodily resurrection in the ancient and medieval West against the background of persecution and conversion, social hierarchy, burial practices, and the cult of saints. Examining those periods between the late second and fourteenth centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western conceptions of death and resurrection, she suggests that the attitudes toward the body emerging hom these discussions still undergird our modem conceptions of personal identity and the individual.

Bynum describes how Christian thinkers clung to a very literal notion of resurrection, despite repeated attempts by some theologians and philosophers to spirimalize the idea. Focusing on the metaphors and examples used in theological and philosophical discourse and on artistic depictions of saints, death, and resurrection, Bynum connects the Western obsession with bodily return to a deep-seated fear of biological process and a tendency to locate identity and individuality in body.