How successful were religious regulations in promoting specific treatment of the deceased and the care for the ancestors? The civil laws of Late Antiquity were aimed at preventing exhumation of bodies and theft of grave goods. As testified by archaeological remains, however, these attempts were rarely successful. How did the Christian Church intervene in these matters? What about the Jewish tradition? Which strategies were and are nowadays promoted to protect dead ancestors?
Irene Barbiera: Protecting Dead Bodies. The Care for the Dead Promoted by the Christian Church
Irene Barbiera is historian and archaeologist of the Early Middle Ages. She graduated from CEU in 2004, teaches at the University of Padova and was awarded the 20th years post-doctoral fellowship at CEU. Among her publications: Changing Lands in Changing Memories. Migration and Identity during the Lombard Invasions (Firenze: All’Insegna del Giglio, 2005), which was awarded the Otto von Hessen Prize and Materializing Memory: archaeological material culture and the semantics of the past, eds. Barbiera, Choyke, Rasson (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1977, 2009).
Carsten Wilke: Bones Awaiting Resurrection: the Protection of Human Remains in Jewish Tradition
Carsten Wilke is associate professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the Central European University. Having earned his PhD degree in 1994 at the University of Cologne, he was a research fellow at the Steinheim Institute for German Jewish History in Duisburg, Germany, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Among his books: Histoire des juifs portugais (Paris: Chandeigne, 2007), Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner (Munich: Saur, 2004), and Den Talmud und den Kant (Hildesheim: Olms 2003) on the origins of the modern rabbinate in the 19th century.