ABSTRACT
The regulation of funerary and mourning practices and attitudes toward death formed a significant part of the educational and pastoral agenda for generations of Christian community leaders and preachers from the religion’s earliest days.1 Tending to those in grief over their dead constituted an important part of Christian pastoral care. Like many other Christian practices and beliefs, it changed over the course of time, adapting to new circumstances or as a result of internal developments. As Antigone Samellas has demonstrated in her monograph on Christian attitudes toward death during late antiquity, the new religion employed a wide range of arguments and strategies to deal with this powerful emotion.2 Whereas some of them were inherited by Christianity from Classical culture or from Christianity’s Jewish matrix, Christians also developed new approaches to coping with loss. This chapter presents and examines hitherto unstudied literary evidence that throws a new light on how the Christians of early medieval Palestine practiced therapy for grief. The most important source is an anonymous hagiographical account called the Story of a Woman from Jerusalem, which is attested in the Syriac and Arabic languages.
