摘要: The dead are the silent majority in Church’s history – as they are, indeed, humanity’s. life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried tested certainty, predicated on soul which survives body. That raises issues about nature structure afterlife, its pains delights. For late medieval Church, afterlife raised particular concerns anxieties, complex division into heaven, hell, purgatory promising future had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were major force religious practice, with threshold something unknown until experienced.