Converse with the dead as a technology of the self: agreements to return from the other-world in Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines agreements to return from the afterlife made between friends, in the Liber revelationum (Book of Revelations) compiled by the Augustinian canon Peter of Cornwall around 1200. In the fulfilment of these agreements, dead friends remained present in the devotional lives of the living. They helped the living transform themselves, particularly through a type of epektasis, in which what began as a desire to see and speak with the dead out of curiosity and fascination with the spiritual world developed into a greater reverence and affection for God. These agreement stories illustrate how, in the context of twelfth-century religious communities, the affection – and even love – between two people could be seen to participate in and lead toward the love between human and God. This expansive role of human affection continued after death, illustrating some of the ways in which commemoration of the departed was an exercise in self-formation.