Disembodied Souls in Early Medieval England

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My project examines how human souls were represented outside their bodies in England during the period 400 to 1200. There is a vast corpus of stories and visions of disembodied souls in the Lives of saints composed during this period. For reasons we are yet to fully understand, the writers of these saints' Lives described these disembodied souls in various ways. My project analyses these examples of disembodied souls in Latin and Old English texts to reveal how the disembodied soul was imagined, how the soul and the body were understood in relation to one another, and how the phenomenon of disembodiment was believed to work.