Professor Dyan Elliott receives research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Dyan Elliott, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and professor of history, has been awarded a prestigious research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities promotes excellence in the humanities and works to spread lessons of history across the country. The Endowment achieves this goal by awarding grants to cultural institutions and individual scholars for their top-rated proposals.

Elliott received her grant for research and writing leading to her future book titled “The Medieval Church and the Exhumation of Christians.” By analyzing the church’s manipulation of cadavers, this book looks at how medieval Christians treated the dead to signify posthumous reward or punishment. Read more about her research project here.

Elliot’s project analyzes the church’s manipulation of cadavers to signify posthumous reward or punishment. Initially, the only credible motive for church authorities to disturb a Christian body was if s/he was a saint destined for a better resting place. A punitive exhumation was anathema because it implied posthumous judgment: Peter was given the power to bind and loose the living, not the dead. This ancient rationale was reversed ca. 1100 when Pope Paschal II exhumed his rival, the antipope Clement III. Soon exhumations were visited upon heretics and excommunicates posthumously condemned, usurers, and even debtors. Such disinterments represent the church’s growing hegemony over the dead; an inversion of the translation of saints; a ritual of forgetting; and an impetus for lay resistance. – NEH