Resurrection Of The Body In Western Christianity, 200-1336

This book began as a series of lectures under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies' Committee on the History of Religions. The idea was to treat several moments in the Western tradition in which the doctrine of bodily resurrection was debated, challenged, and redefined by Christian thinkers and to situate those debates in the context of changing attitudes toward bodies, living and dead.

Bynum examines several periods between the 3rd and 14th centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western eschatology, and suggests that Western attitudes toward the body that arose from these discussions still undergird our modern notions of the individual. He explores the "plethora of ideas about resurrection in patristic and medieval literature--the metaphors, tropes, and arguments in which the ideas were garbed, their context and their consequences," in order to understand human life after death.