The Penguin Book of the Undead by Scott G. Bruce

Author:Scott G. Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-09T13:08:44+00:00

AN ARMY WHITE AS SNOW1

In the middle of the twelfth century, a story attributed to Abbot Maiolus of Cluny (d. 994) concerning the appearance of an army of dead souls during a war between two dukes illustrated vividly the benefits for elite laymen of offering suffrages for the dead. Eusebius of Sardinia was a pious nobleman who had given over the revenues of an entire city to offer continuous alms for the poor and masses for the faithful departed. When his rival, Ostorgius of Sicily, took control of this city by force, God sent a vanguard of souls, “an army white as snow,” who had been liberated from purgatorial suffering to win it back for Eusebius’s holy purpose. Around 1150, a Cluniac monk told the story of the two dukes in the form of a long poem suitable for monastic rumination, amplifying its themes to create a dramatized lesson on the duties and rewards of knightly piety, but the story circulated most widely in the decades around 1200 as an exemplum, a pithy moral tale intended for religious instruction that may have been redacted for use in sermons to laypeople.

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