#nancy caciola

Abstraction could be and was applied to a host of other ambiguous “bodily signs” or possessed behaviors. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that there were two kinds of spirit possession in the Middle Ages, one malign and one benign, that were outwardly indistinguishable from one another. Both were attended by spectacular abilities: “Though miraculous abilities can be gifts that God bestows upon the faithful for the confirmation of the faith the revelation of the future, or gift of prophecy; the understanding of supernatural things, or gift of wisdom; and the understanding of human things, or gift of knowledge—nevertheless, similar things also can be, and are, accomplished by evil spirits.” This juxtaposition led to an epistemological conundrum for the medieval Church on both the local community level and the translocal, institutional level. How could one tell the difference between divine and demonic possession? The Adversary could so easily deceive the unwary. The demonic character delighted in deception: leading human beings into falsehood was understood to be a basic goal of the demonic hosts. Thus fears about hypocrisy and false sanctity were important currents in later medieval thought, and the ecclesiastical leadership of the time sought to disseminate these concerns among the broader population. One should not reflexively venerate anyone who appears to be saintly, but exercise caution.

Death remains elusive. For the living it must always be an imagined experience, albeit one regarded with terror. Human cultures ever and always have strived to pierce through mortality’s shroud, unearth death’s secrets, and see into the shadowy world that is imagined to exist postmortem. How does a living person become an inanimate object? Where does the personality or self go, and what rites are owed to the corpse?

Yet cultural transmission need not be conceived in unconscious, passive terms. We might challenge ourselves instead to think of long-term cultural survivals as both selective and specific, thus foregrounding the agency of the communities that preserved them. What persists is significant and repeated; what withers is deprioritized and neglected. Cultural survivals, then, are consciously and actively chosen. From this perspective, we are able to discern the perpetual renewal, relevance, and specificity of those cultural formations that persist fixedly over many centuries and their continued vitality within the communities that sustained them. We can take continuities across time seriously as dynamic expressions of continuously relevant local knowledge—knowledge that is selectively rather than reflexively upheld.