ABSTRACT
From the Mediterranean to the Northern regions of Latin Christendom, whether they lived in urban or rural communities, countless thousands of medieval testators have left their traces in the historical record.6 European archival repositories are replete with last disposition acts in various forms that were either enrolled at secular or ecclesiastical courts, or recorded by the hand of a public notary. While the academic interest in medieval wills and testaments is more than a century old,7 their systematic treatment with regards to a cultural analysis of the afterlife in history owes itself to cultural historians over the last four decades.8 The voluminous historiography
4 Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, IX, XI, 27, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1992), 215.
